On Lawrence’s fine poem about all things green
Was D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) an imagist? He’s well-known as a novelist, slightly less celebrated as a poet and a writer of some truly wonderful short stories. But how should we categorise his poetry? Can he be labelled, and analysed as, ‘imagist’? Here is his fine short poem ‘Green’, which was published in the first anthology of imagist poetry, Des Imagistes, in 1914:
Green
The dawn was apple-green,
The sky was green wine held up in the sun,
The moon was a golden petal between.
She opened her eyes, and green
They shone, clear like flowers undone
For the first time, now for the first time seen.