Birds, Beasts and Flowers!: Poems

by D.H. Lawrence

D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) made a contribution to poetry that, in the words of Lousie Bogan, "can now be recognized as one of the most important, in any language, of our time." Birds, Beasts, and Flowers!, his first great experiment in free verse, was published when he was thirty-eight. This Black Sparrow edition re-sets the text in the format of the first edition (New Thomas Seltzer, 1923) and restores several "indecent" lines suppressed by the original publisher. Lawrence's original jacket artwork is reproduced on the jacket in full color.Many of these individual poems are popuar in anthologies - they are best read, however, in the context and continuum of the whole book. In preparing the original collection for publication, Lawrence grouped the poems in a purposeful sequence and prefaced many of the subsections with brief quotations from the third edition of John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy, which particularly interested him at the time.He believed in writing poetry that was stark, immediate and true to the mysterious inner force which motivated it. Many of his best-loved poems treat the physical and inner life of plants and animals; others are bitterly satiric and express his outrage at the puritanism and hypocrisy of conventional Anglo-Saxon society. -- Academy of American PoetsBirds, Beasts and Flowers is the peak of Lawrence's achievement as a poet...Like the romantics [his] starting point in these poems is a personal encounter between himself and some animal or flower, but, unlike the romantics, he never confuses the feelings they arouse in him with what he sees and hears and knows about them. The lucidity of his language matches the intensityof his vision; he can make the reader see what he is saying as very few writers can. -- W.H. Auden

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, Classics, Animals, Nature, British Literature

213 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1923

About the author

David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English writer of the 20th century, whose prolific and diverse output included novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, literary criticism, and personal letters. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, human sexuality and instinct.

Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage." At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." Later, the influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the canonical "great tradition" of the English novel. He is now generally valued as a visionary thinker and a significant representative of modernism in English literature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.H._Law...

Reviews

[♑︎♑︎♑︎ ♑︎♑︎♑︎ · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Snake" remains one of my favorite poems since I first read it as a child, and is the reason I wanted to read the whole anthology. I discovered that not many of the poems are similar to "Snake," though, which is a narrative rather than a description of sensual pleasure, which many of these other poems are. I can imagine some readers will find Lawrence's lack of restraint in these poems--in particular the fruit poems--a little over-indulgent. But what's over-indulgent? What does that mean, anyway, that we are only allowed so much ecstatic reverie per poem? Once I let go of my formal ideas of where a poem should go I loved this collection from start to finish. I found many of the poems shatteringly beautiful.

It's a wonderful experience to read the original collection where a favorite poem was first published. It's a very different reading experience than reading a poem plucked out of context and put into an anthology with other poets.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Why so velvety, why so voluptuous heavy?
Why hanging with such inordinate weight?
Why so indented?

Why the groove?
Why the lovely, bivalve roundnesses?
Why the ripple down the sphere?
Why the suggestion of incision?

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."

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a towering achievement, actually. A collection of reveries on the natural world, a swirl of admiration, adoration, and aversion. It's a tangled and confusing collection, with leitmotif laced throughout. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes painful, but interesting most of the time.

But I have trouble. I find it so hard to accept Lawrence's sexuality, which at the end of the day, feels more like misogyny than freedom. And the laced undertone of egotism. I'm just not really embracing it.

[Lewis Woolston · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm a bit on/off when it comes to DH Lawrence. I loved "The Rainbow" and "Lady Chatterly's Lover" and i thought "Sons and Lovers" was okay but i haven't been impressed by anything else of his i've read. Some of it i downright loathed.
This book unfortunately continues the negative run.
None of these poems did much for me. They felt like a 19 year old student who imagines himself the great poet of his age but is actually just an inept nerd whose ambitions overtook his abilities.
Maybe it's just me but honestly i think i'm done with DH Lawrence, i've read his three good books and been dissapointed by everything else. Time to call it quits.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some great poems reflecting on the natural world. Fruits, trees, animals, birds, reptiles and more. My favorite was Kangaroo followed by Snake.

[Pelagia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I agree with Jane Hirshfield: "And my knowledge of life and of what it means to live fully and well a human life would be narrowed had I never read 'Snake'."

[Cecily]

Some tasters:

Baby Tortoise

Bat

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s silly on the face of it to call D.H. Lawrence a neglected writer. Penguin’s kept all his books in print since the ‘60s, and he’s one of the few genuinely popular modernists, with his work available in cheap paperback editions the world over. Hollywood’s been kind, too; even Kangaroo got made into a movie.

Still, Lawrence the poet often disappears in the shadow of Lawrence the sex(ist) guru, Lawrence the proto-fascist, or Lawrence of the Chatterley scandal. The loose free verse line he adapted from Whitman is too familiar now to seem as fresh as it did in 1923, closer in form and spirit to today’s MFA workshop verse than to the more radical experiments of his Modernist peers.

So despite his fame, the poems in Birds, Beasts, and Flowers (which Black Sparrow restores here in its earlier edition, complete with Lawrence’s own 1930 cover design) were a discovery. If Lawrence isn’t already an important poet for the growing “Eco-Poetics” school, he should be—the intensity with which he tests human consciousness against the rival claims of plants and animals seems in tune with that constellation of contemporary interests. While the embarrassing sex-ridden stuff, though not intentionally funny, reads proto-flarfy.

I don’t know many (really, any) poets talking seriously about Lawrence today; maybe he’s the neglected growth in bloom right under our nose.

[Evelyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although a few poems in this collection deal with nature and lament humans destruction of the natural world, the majority do not. They may bear the title of a creature, but the creature acts as a metaphor or symbol to convey the poet’s passions, or political views. A few act as analogues for humans with respect to romance and sexual desire. Many are mean spirited, and some include veiled innuendos that are politically incorrect and offensive.

Unfortunately the symbolism in the poems is often obtuse, and I lacked a Rosetta Stone to decipher their meaning. Therefore, aside from a few poems that were clear in their meaning, and actually dealt with nature, I did not enjoy reading this collection.

This collection rates 1.5+ stars which I have rounded up to 2 stars.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Since I discovered it, this has been and remains one of my favorite books of poems, alongside Lawrence's other non-rhyming poetry book, "Look, We Have Come Through." There is a kind of incantatory quality to Lawrence, which he mysteriously acheives despite having some of the most seemingly free-flowing and organic lines in the English language. The poems do, as the title suggest, take the natural world as their subject, but this is not a book of nature poems. Rather, it reveals that everything, including the most evangelical, urbane, industrial elements of our lives, are encompassed by that concept, "The Natural World," to say nothing of our own humanity - our desires, anxieties, revelations. Though I am not a great fan of Lawrence's fiction, I can only describe his poems as having a kind of "lyric ferocity" about them. This is truly exceptional stuff.

[Jeffrey St. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Lawrence's Birds, Beasts and Flowers is a unique poetic achievement, where new forms are invented without sacrificing a coherent and hypnotic voice or the vitality and sharpness of its imagery. It surely ranks alongside Pound's Cantos, Eliot's Four Quartets and William Carlos Williams' Paterson as one of the most important poetic cycles in the 20th century.

[Jgilon41 · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you think you're a hippy, wait till you read these poems. DH Lawrence knows, loves, and fears the natural life. Surprising and acute details about such awesome forms as figs and fish.

[Emily Kestrel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some good poems, esp "Humming-Bird." Overall, a bit too over-wrought and sexist. Still, there are some interesting images and ideas buried in here, so I would recommend it for poetry buffs.

[Dolors · Rating 5 out of 5]

Let me sit down beneath the many-branching candelabrum
That lives upon this rock
And laugh at Time, and laugh at dull Eternity,
And make a joke of stale Infinity,
Within the flesh-scent of this wicked tree,
That has kept so many secrets up its sleeve,
And has been laughing through so many ages
At man and his uncomfortablenesses,
And his attempt to assure himself that what is so is not so,
Up its sleeve.
Bare Fig-Trees

Lawrence regarded nature as a source of reality not of morality. He wants the reader to feel emotion, to provoke his preconceived ideas about what poetry should look like. He feels at ease in the chaos of free verse, in the non-human world of birds, beats and flowers where he finds the creative mystery that leads him to capture the present, the moment, the unconquerable sense of being.
It was a pleasure to immerse myself in these lyrical, sensuous extravaganzas. D.H. Lawrence's life-affirming vision is at its purest expression in this collection. Simply delightful.

[W.S. Luk · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Evil, what is evil?/There is only one evil, to deny life..."

An intense, almost vertiginous sensuality fills Lawrence's poems, exulting in the beauty of fruit-trees and the eerie presence of a snake. This overwhelming sensory universe, conveyed in verse that has something of Pater's prose poetry, takes many forms: the final sequence of New Mexico poems, as rugged and brusque as an Ansel Adams print; an intense curiosity into the animal world in "Snake" and his poems about bats and tortoises; the extraordinary sequence of poems about plants and flowers.

But at the same time Lawrence evokes an equally intense anxiety about the sexuality that suffuses his work. Whether in his animal poems or works like "Purple Anemone", there's practically a paranoia about the unequal dynamics and loss of self that eroticism implies, while "Hibiscus and Salvia Flowers" transmutes that sensation into an ode to aristocratic aestheticism that (and this may be an unjust comparison) evokes some of Yeats' and Pound's works.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

I write these reviews for myself, not others, to remind me what I've read. Curiously, I only marked two poems in this book of primary interest. That would normally seem a poor showing. However, along the side I have tagged dozens of phrases and images of particular rumination or beauty or portent.

And the style, so different. How much is that Lawrence and how much 1923? Mostly Lawrence, of course. The repetition is particularly striking and effective. I eschew repetition. Its error is drilled into poets. Subjects are announced and wandered away from freely.

Prior to this book, I was but vaguely aware of Lawrence the poet. Anthologies and loose poems erase so much of what a person writes. I suppose liking, enjoying is not all there is to reading poetry. It comes down to what you are left with. What part comes away with you tucked into your soul. There are parts I now carry that I did not before.

[Bailey Tolentino · Rating 3 out of 5]

more like 3.5 stars. my favs: ‘fig’ , ‘man and bat’ , ‘bibbles’… those three really struck a chord. the rest don’t quite hit the spot for me. that said, the concept is very clever and makes for a beautiful, observational work. each section is titled by a different aspect of nature (fruits, animals, beasts, etc.) and each shows really unique perspectives on the world. an overall easy read and very quintessentially d.h. lawrence. I just think his writing style lends itself more to prose, hence the 3.5 rating.

[Cec Szad · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love these semi-erotic poems. Happy to have gotten a copy of this from a library sale

[Julia Deptuła · Rating 4 out of 5]

*modernisms*

[Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Evening Land should be projected onto the White House. It is how the rest of the world feel.

The Evening Land

OH America
The sun sets in you.
Are you the grave of our day?

Shall I come to you, the open tomb of my race?

I would come, if I felt my hour had struck.
I would rather you came to me.

For that matter
Mahomet never went to any mountain
Save it had first approached him and cajoled his soul.

You have cajoled the souls of millions of us
America,
Why won't you cajole my soul?
I wish you would.

I confess I am afraid of you.

The catastrophe of your exaggerate love,
You who never find yourself in love
But only lose yourself further, decomposing.

You who never recover from out of the orgasm of loving
Your pristine, isolate integrity, lost aeons ago.
Your singleness within the universe.

You who in loving break down
And break further and further down
Your bounds of isolation,
But who never rise, resurrected, from this grave of mingling,
In a new proud singleness, America.

Your more-than-European idealism,
Like a be-aureoled bleached skeleton hovering
Its cage-ribs in the social heaven, beneficent.

And then your single resurrection
Into machine-uprisen perfect man.

Even the winged skeleton of your bleached ideal
Is not so frightening as that clean smooth
Automaton of your uprisen self,
Machine American.

Do you wonder that I am afraid to come
And answer the first machine-cut question from the lips of
your iron men?
Put the first cents into metallic fingers of your officers
And sit beside the steel-straight arms of your fair women
American?

This may be a withering tree, this Europe,
But here, even a customs-official is still vulnerable.

I am so terrified, America,
Of the iron click of your human contact.
And after this
The winding-sheet of your self-less ideal love.
Boundless love
Like a poison gas.

Does no one realise that love should be intense, individual,
Not boundless.
This boundless love is like the bad smell
Of something gone wrong in the middle.
All this philanthropy and benevolence on other people's
behalf
Just a bad smell.

Yet, America,
Your elvishness.
Your New England uncanniness,
Your western brutal faery quality.

My soul is half-cajoled, half-cajoled.

Something in you which carries me beyond
Yankee, Yankee,
What we call human.
Carries me where I want to be carried . . .
Or don't I?

What does it matter
What we call human, and what we don't call human?
The rose would smell as sweet.
And to be limited by a mere word is to be less than a
hopping flea, which hops over such an obstruction at
first jump.

Your horrible, skeleton, aureoled ideal.
Your weird bright motor-productive mechanism,
Two spectres.

But moreover
A dark, unfathomed will, that is not un-Jewish;
A set, stoic endurance, non-European;
An ultimate desperateness, un-African;
A deliberate generosity, non-Oriental.

The strange, unaccustomed geste of your demonish
New World nature
Glimpsed now and then.

Nobody knows you.
You don't know yourself.
And I, who am half in love with you,
What am I in love with?
My own imaginings?

Say it is not so.

Say, through the branches
America, America
Of all your machines,
Say, in the deep sockets of your idealistic skull,
Dark, aboriginal eyes
Stoic, able to wait through ages
Glancing.

Say, in the sound of all your machines
And white words, white-wash American,
Deep pulsing of a strange heart
New throb, like a stirring under the false dawn that
precedes the real.

Nascent American
Demonish, lurking among the undergrowth
Of many-stemmed machines and chimneys that smoke
like pine-trees.

Dark, elvish,
Modern, unissued, uncanny America,
Your nascent demon people
Lurking among the deeps of your industrial thicket
Allure me till I am beside myself,
A nympholepht.

"These States!" as Whitman said,
Whatever he meant.

[Godine Publisher & Black Sparrow Press]

He believed in writing poetry that was stark, immediate and true to the mysterious inner force which motivated it. Many of his best-loved poems treat the physical and inner life of plants and animals; others are bitterly satiric and express his outrage at the puritanism and hypocrisy of conventional Anglo-Saxon Society
—Academy of American Poets

Birds, Beasts, and Flowers is the peak of Lawrence’s achievement as a poet…like the romantics [his] starting point in these poems is a personal encounter between himself and some animals or flowers, but, unlike romantics, he never confuses the feelings they arouse in him with what he sees and hears and knows about them. The lucidity of his language matches the intensity of his vision; he can make the reader see what he is saying as very few writers can.
—W.H. Auden

[Annie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lawrence is one of my favourite prose authors, but I was pleasantly surprised by his potry. I didn’t see his style translating well from prose to poetry, as the prose is already so poetic and abstract that to increase that element would make it overdone and purpley, but no, his poetry’s actually written in a totally different style. I’d compare it to Eliot if he decided wrote about— well, about birds, beasts, and flowers. Or maybe Baudelaire? It’s good.

While I can’t say I like his poetry better than many of his novels, there’s something very satisfying and curious about it. Something languid and distinctly modernist, though with a hint of something that reminds me of the later Beatnik era.

[Caesaree · Rating 5 out of 5]

I keep re-reading certain poems and passages in this book and I haven't even finished it yet. It makes me feel so in love with life. Waking up each day I already know how much I joy I feel, but when I read certain details he writes, I realize how delicate and precious some of the most intricate details are of tangibles I never even really notice or possibly even find mundane.

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a lot to say about this one, unfortunately. Most of his poems didn't really capture my imagination. But the poems I did enjoy lift it from being a sad 'meh' of two stars. Also I loved that his longest poem was about his own pet dog, Bibbles. That was pretty sweet.
Favourite poems: Snake, Fish, and Kangaroo.

[Marren]

I am not sure what to think of the poems because I felt lost at times, amused the other minute, taken back the next hour and just fascinated at some point. Some poems did not leave a mark but others stood out to me, for example: Mosquito, the poem about the goat/mare, the poem about the snake, the poem about his dog Bibbles, the poem about Mexico and the poem about women in his life.

[Marshall A. Lewis · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wouldn't say I loved all of Lawrence's poetry, but I enjoyed most of it. His poetry about animals, I felt were the most easily accessible, but where I truly felt he thrived was in his poems on trees and flowers. In particular my favorite section of poems was those on trees, and my favourite poems from this collection were 'Bare Almond Trees' and 'Almond Blossom'.

[LOVEROFBOOKS · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not my kind of poetry at all. I think he was better at prose than poetry. This was not an enjoyable read at all.

I got into poetry because of Palbo Neruda and to me, it's so hard to beat him and his style.

[Katherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love poems which deal with the natural world, and Lawrence describes the interaction between wilderness and civilisation. Highlights are 'Mosquito' and 'Snake'.

[Martina · Rating 5 out of 5]

a lawrencian style of writing in poems. Love it.