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Love Poems and Others
DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Love Poems and Others" by D. H. Lawrence. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.
- GenresPoetry
Library Binding
First published January 1, 1913
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About the author
D.H. Lawrence
2,272 books4,259 followersDavid 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...
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...
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
November 7, 2019
D.H. Lawrence is either adored or mocked, he is the kind of writer that seems to provoke extreme reactions from readers, even in his days. Quite a controversial figure and known by his intense, some might claim overdone style, D.H. Lawrence remains to this day one of my favorite authors.
His poems haven’t disappointed, and I don’t know why I have waited so long to read his verses. They have brought back the power of Lawrence’s voice with renewed impetus and shed new light into his elaborate prose, so full of pathos and voluptuous imagery.
What has most struck me is his ability to portray the insurmountable gap between people who care for each other, the way individual frontiers, self-doubt and fear collide with the almost violent need to connect with another, both in a physical and emotional level. Boundaries that he considers a natural result of the way gender delineates the expectations of love, or the artificial construct of what is socially accepted for males and females.
As it happens in his novels, Lawrence doesn’t shy away from the sexual desire that consumes the nameless man of his poems, although he is eaten raw by guilt and shame for feeling that way. Whether that guilt is the result from external judgment or self-imposed punishment remains a mystery that is overshadowed by the passionate force of the man’s feelings.
“With the swiftest fire of my love, you are destroyed.
‘Tis a degradation deep to me, that my best
Soul’s whitest lighting which should bright attest
God stepping down to earth in one white stride,
Means only to you a clogged, numb burden of flesh
Heavy to bear, even heavy to uprear
Again from earth, like lilies wilted and sere
Flagged on the floor, that before stood up so fresh.”
Lilies in the Fire
This collection also includes a selection of his country poems that exhibits a fair and often amusing representation of dialect and local culture, although in my opinion he shines with blinding brilliance when his inconsistent and deeply humane odes to love and its impending consummation that extinguishes all fire leave an empty space where inescapable loneliness fuses in perfect harmony with the calm silence of the landscape.
“Ah listen, for Silence is not lonely:
Imitate the magnificent trees
That speak no word of their rapture, but only
Breathe largely the luminous breeze.”
Corot
His poems haven’t disappointed, and I don’t know why I have waited so long to read his verses. They have brought back the power of Lawrence’s voice with renewed impetus and shed new light into his elaborate prose, so full of pathos and voluptuous imagery.
What has most struck me is his ability to portray the insurmountable gap between people who care for each other, the way individual frontiers, self-doubt and fear collide with the almost violent need to connect with another, both in a physical and emotional level. Boundaries that he considers a natural result of the way gender delineates the expectations of love, or the artificial construct of what is socially accepted for males and females.
As it happens in his novels, Lawrence doesn’t shy away from the sexual desire that consumes the nameless man of his poems, although he is eaten raw by guilt and shame for feeling that way. Whether that guilt is the result from external judgment or self-imposed punishment remains a mystery that is overshadowed by the passionate force of the man’s feelings.
“With the swiftest fire of my love, you are destroyed.
‘Tis a degradation deep to me, that my best
Soul’s whitest lighting which should bright attest
God stepping down to earth in one white stride,
Means only to you a clogged, numb burden of flesh
Heavy to bear, even heavy to uprear
Again from earth, like lilies wilted and sere
Flagged on the floor, that before stood up so fresh.”
Lilies in the Fire
This collection also includes a selection of his country poems that exhibits a fair and often amusing representation of dialect and local culture, although in my opinion he shines with blinding brilliance when his inconsistent and deeply humane odes to love and its impending consummation that extinguishes all fire leave an empty space where inescapable loneliness fuses in perfect harmony with the calm silence of the landscape.
“Ah listen, for Silence is not lonely:
Imitate the magnificent trees
That speak no word of their rapture, but only
Breathe largely the luminous breeze.”
Corot
December 3, 2021
Some of the most passionate love poems I have ever read; the vein of desire pounds strong through this selection. The nature and effect of love (and loving) are examined - the intensity and longing to desire and be desired is explored from many different perspectives. Kisses that 'taste' the pulse of the loved one are almost vampiric in description - Lawrence is truly a masterful poet.
April 13, 2017
Then I longed for you with your mantle of love to fold
Me over, and drive from out of my body the deep
Cold that had sunk to my soul, and there kept hold.
Me over, and drive from out of my body the deep
Cold that had sunk to my soul, and there kept hold.
May 27, 2024
At the end of Love Poems and Others a transcriber’s note says “The author’s representation of dialect exhibits some inconsistencies, which have been retained as printed”. David Herbert Lawrence was born into a working-class community in the English midlands. It is a feature of these communities, notably in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, equally in Yorkshire and Lancashire - especially in those working-class areas where coal mining was the principal employer -that the otherwise largely defunct second person singular survives. And it survives to this day, even though the coal mining has long since ceased. I grew up in such an area.
Thee, thy, thou, thine all exist. The first three or tend to sound like “tha”, but the last is always long and clear. Also, people in these areas often drop their h’s, as they do the ng sound at the end of gerunds and participles. “What are you doing?” thus becomes “What’s tha doin’” if these rules are replied. Using words to mimic experienced sound is a very non-English thing to do, but if the sound is important, there is no other relevant tactic. People is such areas also shorten the definite article to a glottal stop, usually transcribed as t’. “As tha bin t’ t’market” could tus be a way of writing, “Have you been to the market?” The t representing to is part-pronounced, but the one representing the is silently but still noticeably glottal stopped. It’s there, but it doesn’t sound. It's a private theory of mine that the real cause of the short life expectancy among working-class communities is not the arduous and dangerous nature of earning a living by toil, but an exhaustion brought on by having to pronounce all those apostrophes.
All this is relevant to Love Poems and Others because DH Lawrence chose to write a few of them in dialect. And as soon as the writer frees himself of the necessity to create literary effects, the style becomes more direct, the expression more credible, and the whole experience more powerful. Someone not used to the dialect, it is true, might find these poems unintelligible, but for this reader, they shone far brighter than any others in the set.
Lawrence was forever obsessed with the relations between the sexes, both platonic and physical. In some ways, though never explicitly, he seems to be examining the nature of original sin. We are all born in the union of man and woman, the union involving both passion and gratification as well as a desire to procreate, though this may be the last thought at the time. As individuals, we have no say in our origins, but we at least potentially control the origins of others, while simultaneously pursuing our own, perhaps selfish ends. We are all, thus, selfishly given.
This idea is at the core of many of these wonderful poems. When, however, real people speaking real language grapple with these same conundrum, the whole becomes amplified into a complete experience.
Thee, thy, thou, thine all exist. The first three or tend to sound like “tha”, but the last is always long and clear. Also, people in these areas often drop their h’s, as they do the ng sound at the end of gerunds and participles. “What are you doing?” thus becomes “What’s tha doin’” if these rules are replied. Using words to mimic experienced sound is a very non-English thing to do, but if the sound is important, there is no other relevant tactic. People is such areas also shorten the definite article to a glottal stop, usually transcribed as t’. “As tha bin t’ t’market” could tus be a way of writing, “Have you been to the market?” The t representing to is part-pronounced, but the one representing the is silently but still noticeably glottal stopped. It’s there, but it doesn’t sound. It's a private theory of mine that the real cause of the short life expectancy among working-class communities is not the arduous and dangerous nature of earning a living by toil, but an exhaustion brought on by having to pronounce all those apostrophes.
All this is relevant to Love Poems and Others because DH Lawrence chose to write a few of them in dialect. And as soon as the writer frees himself of the necessity to create literary effects, the style becomes more direct, the expression more credible, and the whole experience more powerful. Someone not used to the dialect, it is true, might find these poems unintelligible, but for this reader, they shone far brighter than any others in the set.
Lawrence was forever obsessed with the relations between the sexes, both platonic and physical. In some ways, though never explicitly, he seems to be examining the nature of original sin. We are all born in the union of man and woman, the union involving both passion and gratification as well as a desire to procreate, though this may be the last thought at the time. As individuals, we have no say in our origins, but we at least potentially control the origins of others, while simultaneously pursuing our own, perhaps selfish ends. We are all, thus, selfishly given.
This idea is at the core of many of these wonderful poems. When, however, real people speaking real language grapple with these same conundrum, the whole becomes amplified into a complete experience.
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June 1, 2021I'll rate it later.
January 11, 2026
I loved these poems. I am on a bit of a poetry kick at the moment and had read one of his in another book, so to read this was amazing. D H Lawrence's poems are very romantic yet dare I say a bit raunchy. He was definitely one of the original 'spicy' writers. But on a serious note, he has a beautiful way with words and the level of description he uses his fabulous. I would highly recommend this.
February 6, 2022
The book is about poem and collection of works by DH Lawrence from the 1913 and it is quite interesting to read how the world of poem evolved since then. To read some poem like Wedding Morn, the poem is very rhythm based and has a lot of melody to it. Definitely a good pastime read.
October 10, 2021
I really love DH Lawrence. ‘Ship of Death’ is just superb
November 18, 2021
I don't think I've ever read work by DH Lawrence before. It was lovely.
September 4, 2022
"The moon walks her lonely way without anguish, / because no-one grieves over her departure."
April 11, 2017
Think I'm done with poetry.
July 24, 2017
It's just so wonderful.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews