D.H.Lawrence As A Poet Poem by Bijay Kant Dubey

D.H.Lawrece as a poet, how to assess him,
Primarily a novelist,
A writer of novels, novellas,
Whose even short stories are just overflows from his pen,
But the poems fragmentary and casual
As he had not been so serious
In taking to poems?

A novelist, short story writer, letter-sender,
A prose writer of essays, sketches, reviews and opinions,
A travel-book writer, a critic and a historian,
He has also one-act plays,
Though started his literary career
With poetry-writing
A novelist poetical.


A Georgian, he is a poet of
Birds, beasts and flowers,
A poet Coleridgean,
Though loose, fragmentary and occasional,
Circumstantial, broken,
Casual and incomplete
Taking to poetry not seriously.


A poet he followed the tradition of the age,
Wrote as they wrote,
Walter de la Mare, John Masefield, W.H.Davies,
Edward Marsh and son on,
Preceding the war years
Or in the midst of
The start.


The thematic stuffs of Lawrence generally overlap
His writings and jot-ups
Be that fiction, verses, plays,
Essays, letters, anecdotes, reflections,
Opinions or prefaces
Or the after-thought,
A writer versatile.

He has written poetry no less than
Any writer,
But is moody,
A poet going with his own
Versificaion,
A poet pure.

Poetry to Lawrence is versification,
Poetic tidbits, chit-chats,
Talks and gossips,
Mody and sentimental,
Occasional and eventual,
Poetry is a personal and private.

In his poems speaks he about
Over intellectuaization, over mechanization,
Away from the world tottering and fallen,
Civilizational circuit
To a remoter place of private reflection
In cognizance with Nature,
The cosmos.

A sun-lover he is primitive, psychological
And one of dark consciousness,
A novelist he is the writer of Sons and Lovers
And Lady Chatterley’s Lover,
A traveller he is of
Etruscan Places, Sea and Sardinia
And Mornings in Mexico.

The son of a coal-miner emotionally
Close to his mother,
A lover of Freida,
The wife of his language teacher,
He is the gipsy, the virgin’s gipsy,
The gipsy lover,
One under illicit love and relationship.

This is what constitute his personality,
This is what it composes
His poetic self,
A writer of dark relationship,
A lover of the body
Psychic and psychological,
Who has set out on a savage pilgrimage.

As a writer of verse, he is one birds, beasts and flowers,
The pansy, salvia and the hibiscus,
Of the elephant, kangaroo,
The humming-bird, bat,
The sea, fish, tortoise and snake,
He is dark and psychological
And sociological.

Many of the selves of his part speak in here,
Many shelves of his personality,
That of his novels, stories, reviews, pinions,
Letters, essays, sketches and reflections,
A poet Georgian,
Building The Ship of Death to drift
As for Crossing The Bar of Tenyson.


A labourer’s son with labourly consciousness
That too of a miner,
From the mother’s side one of more sophistication
And standard,
A schoolteacher he was
Under the impact of love,
But the pull of the mother stronger
And he could not resist that.

A novelist autobiographical,
His was a poetical writing in lucid prose
And magical,
Which but came from poetry
Which but later on he switched over to
A writer controversial and disturbing
Just as the dark blossom.

A Wordsworth he appeared to be
In being close to Nature and natural surroundings,
A Keats
Sensitive and sensuous to the environs around,
But Coleridge took the leaves out of
And he sang of the best prayer in the form
Of the love for the birds, beasts and flowers.

A student of Thomas Hardy and his A Pair of Blue Eyes
And The Mayor of Casterbridge,
He found the blue eyes in Freida Weekly,
Drunken resentment at home
As for father coming home drunken,
His words of love and sympathy in that state
As well as brawls.

The poet talks to the pansies, to the salvias,
To the hibiscus,
Bavarian gentians
And says the things of life,


A poet of darker love and relationship,
He can even talk of Ajanta-Ellorah,
Shiva-lingams of Benares
In his prose-work Apocalypse,
But the things of Sea and Sardinia
In his poetry,
What he wrote in The Plumed Serpent.


Love Poems and others (1913) , Amores (1916) ,
Look! We have come through! , Bay: a book of poems (1919) ,
Tortoises (1921) , Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923) ,
Pansies (1929) , Nettles (1930) , Last Poems (1932) ,
Fire and other poems (1940) ,
The books of his verse,
A dark horse indeed,
The dark black rose of poetry.