“How Beastly the Bourgeois Is”

Content

• Bourgeois Englishmen are soggy and rotten and need to be kicked over
• “Presentable, eminently presentable – / shall I make you a present of him?”
  • “Nicely groomed, like a mushroom”
• They bourgeois man is “well off” and “quite the thing,” but gets “soggy, like a wet meringue” when trouble comes

Form

• One of his chatty, vernacular poems
• Lots of metaphors that do in fact make the subject the object: a mushroom, a meringue, a fungus

“The Wild Common”

Content

• A Georgian poem: love of nature; where the stripped narrator is about to plunge into a pond
  • Cf naked Rupert in W in L
• Compares with Housman’s “The Chestnut Casts His Flambeaux” b/c Lawrence compares the gorse blooming to flames too, “jets of sunlight texture imitating flame”
  • Has taken Wilde’s Nature is artifice to heart?
  • Nature has fire and passion
• The fact that it’s a COMMON, not a private garden, is cool
• “but I, I am royally here!” he says as he contemplates his shadow (“a white dog”) on the surface of the pond
  • Seeing himself in the mirror makes him realize who he is
  • Is this some kind of commentary on Platonic idealism? For him, the shadow leads directly to some reality, not to a lie
• “How splendid it is to be substance, here!”
  • Then he says the rabbits, the gorse, the birds, and the insects similarly screech out, “I am here!” just like the narrator does
  • In this poem, Lawrence shows how a person can EXALT in being a thing, or thing-like. He compares himself to nature b/c it is a halfway house: it is a thing, and it has spirit, energy.
• Then the “seven larks” sing to him, “You are here! You are here!”
  • There’s a reciprocity possible in this middle area between subject or object, or in the subjectivity realizing its own object-hood
• It leads to positive interaction
  • “the water loves me and folds me / Plays with me, sways with me, lifts me, and sinks me, murmurs: / Oh marvellous stuff! / No longer shadow! – and it holds me”
    • b/c he has jumped in the water: he has RUINED the Narcissus moment of subject/object, where the subject is exalted via the object.
    • and he says it’s touching him “As it could never touch me enough”
      • perhaps the ideal relationship isn’t quite with human to human as we know it
• Subject/object rabbits: he says they’re mounds of earth, but when he prompts them, they run: interaction leads to realization of full subjecthood
• Substance: “Sun, but in substance, yellow water blobs” and “All that is right, all that is good; all that is God takes substance! a rabbit lobs.”
• Last line: the seven larks sing him a song: art, just like his experience made him a poem

Form

• Poems apparently make his nature worship clearer than the examples you find in his novels. They seem to need this supplement to pop out at you. The sinister aspect of the mountains in “The Captain’s Doll” thus becomes a problem of two people using nature as a quest, something to conquer.

Other Poems

• “Cherry Robbers:” lots of liquid: tears, blood, everything glistens. The birds are the robbers and get killed; the girl has them on her ears but will get a different reward. Blatant sexual metaphor, cherry robbing?
• “Twilight:” sunset he takes rather personally: “All that the worldly day has meant / Wastes like a lie.” b/c no one’s playing now.
• “Love on the Farm:” unconventional couples: shadows of leaves are the narrator’s lover coming; the woodbine (creeper, plant, honeysuckle) and the bees and moths getting pollen from it; swallow making advances to a farmer (“making warm display / Of red upon the throat”)
  • then the anti-romance of farmer killing rabbit caught in a trap: when he comes to her, the narrator now says she’s caught in the trap
    • “I know not what fine wire is wrapped around my throat” when they embrace
    • love becomes him drinking her blood, metaphorically, and then she does die, and of course here he means ecstasy
  • narrator cries: echoes “Cherry Robbers” where the male narr wonders if the peasant girl is crying too after deaths of the three birds
  • female narrator waiting for lover sees lovers everywhere in nature, but in includes the killing of the rabbit
  • love is death. love is vampirism (the bees and moths sucking honey out of woodbine flowers). “sweet fire” and sword.
    • This Is The Danger of finding relation: you do lose your subjecthood by getting into relation. For Lawrence, pleasure doesn’t mean pure selfhood (this would be Gerald and Gudrun: and she kills him). You have a kind of spiritual death so you don’t have an actual death.
• “Wedding Morn,” the woman looking forward to waking up after marriage, relishing the thought of seeing him sleep, knowing she satiated him, that she’s responsible for the deepness of his calm sleep. She thinks she will know if the marriage will be a happy one when she sees him sleep (“this fate of mine;” “I shall weep… / For joy or for misery.”)
  • Seeing someone sleep will show you his worth: “And I shall count the stamp and worth / Of the man I’ve accepted as mine / Shall see an image of heaven or of earth / On his minted metal shine.”
  • “My love, that spinning coin, laid still / And plain at the side of me / For me to reckon—for surely he will / Be wealth of life to me”
    • When you make the bargain, you don’t know what’s going to happen—it’s a spinning coin so you can’t READ the worth or its price or its country, it’s blank—it’s the Lawrentian gamble of love that reminds me of Sorel’s myth of the general strike… unguessable
      • Modernists also want to harness the power of the unforeseen! They aren’t all control freaks.
• “A Young Wife”
  • “The pain of loving you / Is almost more than I can bear” is the last couplet.
  • Mystery for Lawrence is the twinning of opposites: “At the foot of each glowing thing / A night lies looking up.”