"Green," by D.H. Lawrence

A reading + video of a short poem by D.H. Lawrence. Link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjKiY2tFRrM

October Figs

Finally they've changed
from hard green knobs to small
soft purple pouches, veined.
Inside they're vegetative
geodes. As filtered through
O'Keefe and Lawrence, they
may amuse you with vaginal
likeness. That's fun, but anyway:
harvest. Their deep brown stems
are so soft now, the figs
fall into your palm almost
before the pick. The taste
is outside sweet or savory.
It's creamy, calmly robust.
If you must, think of lust.


hans ostrom 2018

The Mother of All Poems

When I think about writing the mother
of all poems that is to say a big serious
poem about my mother, I think about
the poem I wrote, in Karl Shapiro's class,
about how a piano contains all notes,
all potential melodies, etc., in some kind
of ideal way. And after I read it, Shapiro
said to the class, "D.H. Lawrence wrote
a poem about a piano, but it was really
about his mother; he was in love with
her." I found the comment unhelpful,

plus suggestive of incest. Oh, well:
workshops. I also think of my mother
and her low tolerance for nonsense,
such as puppets and murderers.  She
sat on the jury that convicted serial
killer Larry Lord Motherwell (ahem),
which was the name he, Frank
Eugene Caventer, gave himself,
a nom de meurtrier.

Ma wanted to make sure Motherwell
got the gas chamber, and she never forgave
the one juror who prevented that.
Anyway, I really don't feel like writing
an ambitious poem about my mother.
It seems like too much work for too
little gain, and I don't know--
Freud, Shapiro, and millions of
other people have kind of ruined
the subject for me.  My mother liked
to drink Hamm's beer out of the can.


hans ostrom 2017

"Twilight," by D.H. Lawrence

"On the Balcony," by D.H. Lawrence

"A White Blossom," by D.H. Lawrence

One By D.H. Lawrence

A student recently asked me what I thought of D.H. Lawrence's writing. She had been reading some of his short stories, including "The Horse-Dealer's Daughter," in another class, and she didn't like them much. I told her I thought Lawrence, especially as a fiction-writer, may be the kind of writer who, as the years pass, seems more tied to (in this case) his era than was the case earlier. I told her that, to some extent, he had used writing to attack behavior he didn't like, especially repression and the deadening forces of modernity. Put more simply, his stories and novels now may seem a little clumsy and/or over-the-top, especially with regard to sex.

I also told her I preferred his poetry to his fiction (although I do still like some of the fiction), partly because I found it more subtle. I encouraged her to read the poem, "Snake," for example.

Here's another poem by Lawrence, not as famous or as good as "Snake," but still interesting:

People

by D.H. Lawrence

THE great gold apples of light

Hang from the street's long bough

Dripping their light

On the faces that drift below,

On the faces that drift and blow

Down the night-time, out of sight

In the wind's sad sough.

The ripeness of these apples of night

Distilling over me

Makes sickening the white

Ghost-flux of faces that hie

Them endlessly, endlessly by

Without meaning or reason why

They ever should be. The scene reminds me of the London-Bridge scenes in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. For me, one intriguing surprise in the poem is that Lawrence praises the beauty of streetlights. I assume that at the time they were gaslights, which probably did project a light that might have haunting beauty. Certainly, Lawrence is riding his hobby-horse: modern people are dead inside. But it's a short ride, at least, and the imagery succeeds, in my opinion. By the way, I still rather like the little known "bio-pic" about Lawrence, Priest of Love, in which Ava Gardner has a small role.

An Image Almost Too Good For Its Own Poem

I ran across a poem by D.H. Lawrence I hadn't read before: "People." When I saw the title, I thought of the song that Streisand made famous, but Lawrence's poem goes in a different direction, to put it mildly.

People

by D.H. Lawrence

THE great gold apples of light
Hang from the street's long bough
Dripping their light
On the faces that drift below,
On the faces that drift and blow
Down the night-time, out of sight
In the wind's sad sough.

The ripeness of these apples of night
Distilling over me
Makes sickening the white
Ghost-flux of faces that hie
Them endlessly, endlessly by
Without meaning or reason why
They ever should be.

(Some of the lines are supposed to be indented, but alas, the blog-machinery is single-minded when it comes to the left margin.)

I think of this lyric as Lawrence's counterpart to Eliot's The Waste Land, and especially to one of Eliot's recurring images: the crowd flowing over London Bridge. Although the intensity of Lawrence's and Eliot's dissatisfaction with modern civilization was about the same, their reasons differed. Lawrence believed people had become worn down, domesticated, and enervated by modern existence. He wanted people to be more earthy and spontaneous, and although he hated how lethal labor could be (he grew up in coal-mining country), he never thought himself above the working class into which he was born. Eliot, on the other hand, believed modern society had cut itself off from nourishing roots of faith, tradition, and order. Working-class folk seemed to repulse him, and middle-class folk were a target of his satire. Eventually, he'd proclaim himself a royalist, an Anglican, and a literary conservative.

The image of the streetlight-as-apple is so surprisingly good, however, that it almost displaces the rest of the poem. I almost don't want to hear about those people on the street who don't know why they're alive and whose faces are made ghastly and ghostly by the gaslight. It's a sly image, too, because it likely induces many readers to think of the Edenic apple.

When I think of this poem later, I'll think of that apple-image, and--taking nothing away from Eliot's masterpiece--I'll smile at how efficiently Lawrence's lyric evokes its own kind of waste land. And I may even remember the title (which has nothing to do with that captivating image), and thus hear Barbra's voice.

D.H. Lawrence and Thinking Too Much

Here's a poem by D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930):

Conceit

It is conceit that kills us
and makes us cowards instead of gods.

Under the great Command: Know thy self, and that
thou art mortal! we have become fatally self-conscious, fatally self-
important, fatally entangled in the cocoon coils of
our conceit.

Now we have to admit we
can't know ourselves, we can only know about ourselves.
And I am not interested to know about myself any
more, I only entangle myself in the knowing.

Now let me be myself,
now let me be myself, and flicker forth,
now let me be myself, in the being, one of the gods.

D. H. Lawrence

Lawrence was an extraordinary writer, truly as accomplished in poetry as he was in novels and short fiction. His most famous poem might well be "Snake," and his novels include Sons and Lovers and Lady Chatterly's Lover and Women in Love. "The Horse Dealer's Daughter" is an oft-anthologized story. He was "counter-Modernist" insofar as he believed that 20th century humans thought themselves to death and that they should be more spontaneous, earthy, and instinctive. He found middle-class British bourgeois, "Victorian" values especially stifling. A professor of mine once pointed out the irony that Lawrence, who celebrated the body and earthly life and opposed "over-thinking" things, wrote poems and novels that were actually full of ideas--even if they were anti-idea ideas.

Obviously, "Conceit" is written in opposition, so to speak, to psychology and to the classical adage, "know thyself." The poem implicitly advises, "Be thyself" or, even more simply, "Be. Live." Nowadays, of course, our culture seems obsessed with our knowing ourselves; this is the age of self-help books and programs, of thinking about oneself almost constantly. I guess Lawrence saw it coming, back there in the teens and the 1920s; he died in 1930.

I love Lawrence's poetry. His free-verse has a hint of Whitman's about it, though much less oratorical, and with regard to style, he and Robinson Jeffers are certainly first cousins. His novels, once scandalous (Lady Chatterly's Lover was banned for a time in the U.S., partly because of the f-word), now seem a bit old-fashioned, mannered--partly, I think, because we look at them from the other side of the sexual revolution and the influence of feminist criticism. To me, his poetry remains fresh, but even with "Conceit," I will certainly acknowledge that Lawrence may seem naive. Is it possible now simply to be oneself in the manner he desires? And what if "oneself" is a self-absorbed self? Good for him or her, I suppose, bad for the ones who have to deal with that person. Nonetheless, the poem does seem refreshingly to suggest "get on with it": you may not be perfect, but you're all you've got!

(Incidentally, there's an interesting "bio-pic" about Lawrence, a film made some 20 years ago called Priest of Love. It is not well known and may not have made it to DVD. I believe it may be Ava Gardner's last film. There is a better known film that dramatizes Women in Love, with Glenda Jackson, Oliver Reed, and Alan Bates. The nude wrestling in front of the fireplace is an especially famous scene from the novel/film. I think there was also a film made of the short story, "The Fox.")

I'm not sure whether Lawrence would have liked the following poem. I'm going to go with the odds and guess "No." To some extent, the poem may concern "just" being oneself, although there is a bit of a paradox in being oneself because if you change yourself, are you still yourself? Naturally (pun intended), Lawrence would accuse me of over-thinking, but then I like to read books and write poetry, and these activities can call for (but need not necessarily include) thinking. Put more broadly, maybe some people are being themselves when they think, even if they're over-thinking or not thinking very well. The poem:

You and You

You must be you for you to be.
I know to be the only you
is difficult. You must repeat
the same old strengths and flaws, ensure
quirks and habits stay organized,
a regiment of personhood.
You cannot disappear from you.
When you’re asleep, you’re sleeping you;
you’re altered consciousness is al-
tered you, but you-never-the-less.
It could be worse. I know you can
supply examples of just how.
But still—how strange to have just one
attempt at consciousness in all
of Time, to have to spend it on
one incarnationality—
the only I you’ll ever be.

from The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006, by Hans Ostrom.