Blog Archives
A Short Analysis of D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Autumn Rain’
‘Autumn Rain’ is not one of D. H. Lawrence’s most famous poems. He wrote a great deal of poetry, and whilst some of it falls short of the greatness we associate with his novels and short stories, ‘Autumn Rain’ shows his delicate control of poetic syntax and his inventiveness with imagery. Here is ‘Autumn Rain’ and a few words of analysis.
Autumn Rain
The plane leaves
fall black and wet
on the lawn;
the cloud sheaves
in heaven’s fields set
droop and are drawn
in falling seeds of rain;
the seed of heaven
on my face Read the rest of this entry
‘The Walls Do Not Fall’: H. D.’s Trilogy, Modernism, and War
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reads a wide-ranging poem about the Second World War
When H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) and her then-husband Richard Aldington walked into a bomb-damaged house during the First World War, Aldington found an abandoned volume of Robert Browning’s poetry and kicked it across the room. What use was poetry in the face of such destruction? But poetry tends to endure in wartime: T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets would largely be written during the next world war, while H. D.’s own poetry would have a curious and poignant afterlife: sections of her poem ‘The Walls Do Not Fall’ (from her long poem Trilogy) were inscribed by an anonymous graffitist among the ruins of the World Trade Center after 9/11.
As Norman Holmes Pearson notes in his introduction to the Carcanet edition of Trilogy
The Best Poems by H. D. (Hilda Doolittle)
Are these H. D.’s greatest poems?
Hilda Doolittle, or H. D. as she chose to publish, was labelled ‘the perfect imagist’ by various critics and reviewers. The following five poems show why H. D. was the leading light of the short-lived imagist movement, as her poetry offers concise and vivid images behind which lurk whole storms of restrained emotion. Here’s a selection of H. D.’s finest poems, both from her imagist period and from her later work.
‘Oread’. This six-line poem, perhaps H. D.’s best-known poem, was published in the 1915 anthology Some Imagist Poets, which also featured poems by Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, and F. S. Flint – the main poets who published under the imagist banner. The Oread or mountain-nymph addresses the sea, asking for it to come up to the land and smother it – but the imagery H. D. uses enacts this very desire, by describing the sea using land-based imagery (seeing the green waves as pine trees, for instance). Is this also a poem about sexuality, and perhaps even same-sex desire? It might be read as such, as well as an innovative nature poem. Read the rest of this entry
