D. H. Lawrence

Snake

A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before
me.
He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of
the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
i o And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.
Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second comer, waiting.
He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.
The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.
And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.
But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?
Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him? Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.
And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!
And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.
He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.
And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.
I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.
I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste.
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.
And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.
And I thought of the albatross
And I wished he would come back, my snake.
For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.
And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.
Taormina, 1923



D.H. LAWRENCE’S CRITICAL VIEWS IN HIS POETRY

D.H. Lawrence began his career of writing in his mid-twenties and the 

first form of literature he wrote was poetry indeed. The first collection of his 

poetry entitled Love Poems and Others appeared in 1913. Then two more 

volumes of poetry were published in 1929. It is observed that there are the

accent and sweep of poetry in his novels especially in The Rainbow and 

Woman in Love. Like his novels, his poetry is also personal and 

autobiographical. Louis Untermeyer comments on the poetry of D.H. Lawrence 

thus: “his poems are concerned with little else than the dark fir, the broken

body, the struggle, death and resurrection of crucified flesh, the recurring cycle 

of fulfillment and frustration. This is D.H. Lawrence’s theme, a theme which 

he varied with great skill, but one which he could neither leave nor fully 

control. It is not merely his passion, it is his obsession.”1 (Modern British 

Poetry,(New York, Harcourt, Brace and company, 1936, 360). His poems also 

exhibit criticism of man, life and writing in a very subtle and personal way. 

Since the elements of criticism in his poems form an adequate size, there is s 

need to explore and it is undertaken in this chapter.

Many poets wear a mask. They are not so honest in their poetic 

production, for they suffer from duality. Samuel Palmer thinks but D.H. 

Lawrence wears no mask. Even poets like Milton and Tennyson wore a mask. 

But poets like Blake did not wear a mask. So is D.H. Lawrence’s case.

D.H. Lawrence in his Foreword to Fantasia of the Unconscious speaks of poetry as ‘pure passionate experience.’ This he calls as ‘demon.’ This demon is timeless. Blake calls this the fourfold vision the poet needs to write down In an early letter (dated 18th August 1913) to Edward Marsh, who had objected to the rhythms of some of his poems, D.H. Lawrence wrote,“‘…. I think, didn’t know, that my rhythms fit my mood
pretty well, in the verse. And if the mood is out of joint, the
rhythm often is. I have always tried to get an emotion out in
its own course, without altering it. It needs the finest instinct
imaginable, much finer than the skill of craftsmen. That
Japanese Yone Noguchi tried it. He doesn’t quite bring it in.
Often I don’t –sometimes I do. Remember skilled verse is
dead in fifty years…’”