Poetry and the Censor

On D. H. Lawrence's Birds, Beasts, and Flowers

Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), D. H. Lawrence’s most monumental yet also strangest collection of poems, is a book of the postwar years—more precisely, of what its earliest written poem already senses will be an interregnum between wars. “Peace” begins by remarking upon the architecture of Taormina, like many Sicilian towns built from volcanic rock; it ends by asking: “Call it peace?” Lawrence had earlier asked the same question in private, writing to his friend Nancy Henry two days after the armistice in 1918: “You will have your husband very soon. How strange peace is. Is it peace?” As transformed in the poem, the question is magnetized by Lawrence’s wish to see a suppressed violence realized in the world—via the inhuman, deific action of the volcano:

Peace, black peace congealed.
My heart will know no peace
Till the hill bursts.
Brilliant, intolerable lava
Brilliant as a powerful burning-glass
Walking like a royal snake down the mountain towards the sea.

Yet the collection that began to take shape in the fall of 1920 also had other imaginative incitements. It was then that Lawrence, temporarily estranged from Frieda, had a brief affair with the young married Englishwoman Rosalind Baynes, staying as her guest in a villa outside Florence that she had temporarily vacated after its windows were blown out by the explosion of a nearby munitions factory. This time, though Lawrence referred to the explosion sardonically in his letters (“Powder factories always explode in Italy”) it did not make its way directly into the poems, which were (on the surface at least) about love and sex, not war. Yet here too could be seen a translation of the personal into larger terms. Taking its title from an old hymn, a lullaby telling how “birds, beasts and flowers: / Soon will be asleep,” the burgeoning collection praised a new life in the body, accessible through a reawakening of consciousness that was itself a kind of “sleep.” Keats’s old question—“Do I wake or sleep?”—would haunt a collection that imagined the somnolence of the Chrisitan era yielding to the wakeful slumbrousness of the senses.

The Lawrence who turned 35 on September 11, 1920, had already completed The Rainbow and Women in Love and the first version of Studies in Classic American Literature, sections of which had appeared in the English Review during the war.¹ When The Rainbow’s suppression for obscenity prompted Lawrence’s publishers to hold back Women in Love, he expressed equanimity, but his lack of a receptive audience still posed problems. Then, too, there were other sources of agitation. Having spent the years 1914–1918 in a kind of “inner exile” in England, Lawrence and Frieda set out in the spring of 1919 on a trip that would take them from Italy and Germany to Ceylon, Australia, New Mexico, Mexico, and back again. Never before had a single pair of travelers circled the globe to find each society they visited gripped in a single political crisis: a worldwide convulsion pitting rival movements, “Bolshevismus und Fascismus und Revolutionen und alles was” (‘Bolshevism and Fascism and Revolutions and so forth,’ as Lawrence sourly observed to his mother-in-law from Mexico), in a single knot twisting from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere. No experience could have more vividly confirmed Lawrence’s sense that he stood at a turning-point in history. What kind of writing would be equal to it?

“What is it?”—the question driving critics obsessed with Birds, Beasts and Flowers’ “Expressive Form” (Blackmur) or its classification as “lyric” or “lyric theater” or a “fantasia,” “potpourri,” or “harlequinade” (Perloff) —is also a central one in Lawrence’s poems. There, however, it means something totally different. “Tuscan cypresses, / what is it?” Lawrence asks in “Cypresses,” and, again, in “Medlars and Sorb Apples”:

What is it?
What is it, in the grape turning raisin,
In the medlar, in the sorb-apple,
Wineskins of brown morbidity,
Autumnal excrementa;
What is it that reminds us of white gods?

In “Cypresses,” the question means something like “What is the matter?” In “Medlars,” the repeated question functions more like the magician’s patter that distracts the audience while something is smuggled into the performance. Before we get the assertion of the final relative clause here (“What is it that reminds us of white gods?”), the insistent questions and sensory evocation of preceding lines have already insisted upon a presence, the presence of some quality, albeit one that has not yet been defined. In both poems there is a sense of something outside the language wanting to get in, without losing its strangeness. The same is true of the book’s exhortations to “Look” at something (“Look at them standing there in authority / The pale-faces”) or its insistent address to a variety of abstract or inhuman addressees, from the “Tuscan” or “Etruscan” “Cypresses” to the various birds and beasts, to “America” itself in “The Evening Land.” For Lawrence addresses himself to his topics in a characteristically double sense. He is not simply discussing them. In each, we find summoned some presence or entity, just beyond the edge of the speaker’s awareness.

What I wish to consider here, though, is a somewhat different dimension of the poems—their interest in poetry’s relationship to the censor and mimetic violence. For sometimes, their summoning involves an antagonist as foil. The “Fruits” section of the book opens with two poems that share a situation and a theme. “Pomegranate” sets a pugnacious tone from its memorable opening lines: “You tell me I am wrong. / Who are you, who is anybody to tell me I am wrong?/ I am not wrong.” That “wrong” here means morally wrong (albeit with the same equivocation among morality, accuracy, and protocol that we find in such contemporary equivalents as “appropriate” and “correct”) becomes clear when the poem takes up the word again at its close:

Do you mean to tell me there should be no fissure?
No glittering, compact drops of dawn?
Do you mean it is wrong, the gold-filmed skin, integument, shown ruptured?
For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken.
It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.

Strictly speaking, both “Pomegranate” and “Peach” deal in the pseudo-explicitness of innuendo. As representations whose obscenity must be inferred, they are precisely calibrated to indict whoever charges them: we can’t do so without conceding the “guilt” of our own perceptions, our own “dirty minds.” It is perhaps this risk of self-accusation that tends to impel accusers to invent third parties on behalf of whom their own battles are waged. In “Pomegranate,” we see this tendency reflected in “wrongness” being imputed not merely to what is experienced, but to what is “shown”—that is, to others.

Granted, the poem’s final turn, suggests a deeper motive in its imagined interlocutor, when the speaker asserts not his greater indifference, but his greater vulnerability: to prefer not to look upon the “fissure,” to insist on the decorum of discreet covering, means not allowing one’s own “heart to be broken.” At this point “wrong” regains a meaning of inaccurate, or rather inadequate, to experience. To insist on discreet covering, the speaker implies, is to reveal a deficient capacity to experience the “glittering, compact drops of dawn.”

This implied boast (I am more vulnerable than you are), finds its complement in “Peach,” which invents additional techniques for shifting the ground beneath the imagined interlocutor. Decades before the invention of the emoji, Lawrence’s “Peach” blends erotic descriptions and ironic questions about the fleshy fruit (“that shallow-silvery wine-glass on a short stem”; “Why so velvety, why so voluptuous heavy? / Why hanging with such inordinate weight?”), are repeatedly interrupted by the witty asides: “I am thinking, of course, of the peach before I ate it.” Here, the distinction is between representation and act. The poem has begun with a challenge, in which Lawrence’s speaker, imputing to the addressee a desire to punish, invites him to stone him: “Would you like to throw a stone at me? / Here, take all that’s left of my peach.” It is an instruction that returns, perhaps with a wry recall of Keats and Whitman’s poetic fictions of the proffered hand, at the poem’s close:

Why was not my peach round and finished like a billiard ball.
It would have been if man had made it.
Though I’ve eaten it now.
But it wasn’t round and finished like a billiard ball;
And because I say so, you would like to throw something at me.
Here, you can have my peach stone.

Lawrence’s maneuver here engages the interlocutor in a particularly suggestive way. The poet assumes the posture of the libertine: that is, the one who speaks with the authority of the already accomplished transgression: the persecutor is simply too late. As such, the poem also implies a new motive, envy, in the persecutor, whose weapon is the leavings of the act. Fortunately for the speaker, the demystification that cuts down the size of his trespass likewise disarms his adversary, whose “stone” is one in name only: denser to the speaker conscious of its “secrets” than to the adversary who would take it as a weapon.

There is, to be sure, a defensiveness in this swagger. As the philosophically inclined critic Michael Bell has noted, of Lawrence’s attitude a few years earlier, “by the time he was working on the separated project of Women in Love, Lawrence had good reason to be aware that his problems of expression were intimately bound up with those of reception.” For Bell, this experience’s reflex within the novels does not lie in representations of censorship per se, but in scenes in which characters are mocked—by Lawrence, the author—for articulating Lawrence’s own ideas. More than the fact of censorship, however threatening it was to Lawrence’s livelihood, what concerns the writing is censorship’s meaning: that it ridicules and renders vile what the writing cherishes. We have already seen one response to this threat: a compensatory jauntiness that adopts some of the qualities that threaten it. Wild raillery, though it resists persecution, can also be seen as withdrawing serious meanings preemptively from public scrutiny: lacerating or degrading what is cherished, to prevent its degradation by others.

Yet other responses include a shyness and self-protection that can manifest itself in what I call a distinctive linguistic “splitting.” Instead of literal division into separate vocabularies, such as the withdrawal of the word “love” from public circulation jestingly proposed by Rupert Birkin in Women in Love (“The point about love […] is that we hate the word because we have vulgarised it. It ought to be proscribed, tabooed from utterance, for many years, till we get a new, better idea”), Lawrence’s splitting tends toward the division of a single word into an authentic and debased meaning. This device is one that Lawrence employs extensively in his fiction and essays, where it enables dizzying combinations of persuasion and evasion. What Lawrence seeks through his representations could be characterized as an explicitness that will be obscene in neither of the stigmatized senses, yet will not degenerate into an etiolated explicitness. He aims to be outward, assertive, prophetic, while at the same time being guarded, modest, inexplicit.

But this is a story for another time.

—Paul Franz

1. Lawrence had at this point not yet visited the United States. Now given the opportunity, he reported that it was “the only country in the world I shrink from and feel shy of.” Letters, vol. 4 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 268.