It is in the chapter “The Bitterness of Ecstasy” that Mr. Lawrence takes off the brakes. In London, whither she has gone with Skrebensky, Ursula decides to solve the riddle of the Sphinx. She goes about it in the conventional Brangwen way by biting him, clawing him, and generally tearing him to pieces. It seems good to him and he likes her and wants to marry her. One day, after they have had some tall bouts of love at Richmond, she tells him that she won't marry him and he has a grand crisis of hysteria. She is sorry she has hurt him. She hails a cab and takes the sobbing wooer home, and the lecherous cabby is moved nearly to violence by the radiation of passion from Ursula. She senses danger and persuades Tony to walk. She knows then that he is but a simulacrum of man, and when she has gone home she decides that she will not marry. Finally, however, she gives in and the date is more or less arranged. Then comes the grande finale with the scene wonderfully set in the moonlight by the seashore. There she makes an onslaught on him that is tigress-like to the last degree, throws him on the sand, devours him, wrings him like a dirty rag, shows him that he is no good, and hurls him from her, a sucked lemon. He sneaks away and offers himself to his Colonel's daughter, is accepted, and is off to India, leaving “the need of a world of men for her.”
Then comes “The Rainbow,” a parody of Freud's exposition of the dream of being trampled upon by horses. Ursula finds after a time that the customary result has followed her experiences, so she writes a letter to Skrebensky saying she'll be good and go out and marry him. She goes for a walk in the mist and the rain, into the wood where the trees are all phallic symbols “thrust like stanchions upright between the roaring overhead and the sweeping of the circle underfoot.” She begins to hallucinate, to feel her subconsciousness take possession of her, and the sight of a group of horses fills her bestial soul with a hope that she might finally be possessed in such a way as would give her satisfaction, that she might get “some fantastic fulfilment in her life.” She goes into a state of delirium and several weeks later, when it has passed, she finds that she has miscarried. This is followed by a mild dementia; she thinks she is moral and will be good, but as she gets strong she sees the rainbow, which is Eros kindling the flames again.
“And she saw in the rainbow the earth's new architecture, the old brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fragment of Truth, fitting to the overarching heaven.”
Mr. Lawrence, exhausted with the perpetration of these sensual delights and disappointed with the distrusts of the flesh, turned for a short time to nature to refresh his spirit and bathe his soul. He sensed frustration despite the unleashment of passion; he realised that sublimation had eluded him, and so he turned to primitive life and primitive people, the peasants of Italy. Soon his torments began to creep up again in “Twilight in Italy.” The roused physical sensations will not subside. They penetrate pastoral scenes and emanate from sylvan scenery.
After having refreshed himself, he gave the world “The Lost Girl,” whose genesic aberrations are comparatively mild, and whose antics with the half-gipsy, half-circus folk are rather amusing. Some of Mr. Lawrence's early admirers were encouraged to look for his reformation, especially after the appearance of a thin book of poems entitled “Bay.” Even in this, here and there, the inhibited and mother-sapped spirit crops out, as in the poem called “The Little Town in the Evening,” but for the most part the verses are founded on sane ideas, even ideals, truths, and morality. Most of them are poems of the war, wonderful pen pictures and silhouettes, such as “Town,” a London transformed by the war as no picture or prose description could render it, ending,
“It is well,
That London, lair of sudden
Male and female darknesses
Has broken her spell.”
In previous volumes of poems, particularly in “Amores” and in “Look, We Have Come Through,” he had published verse which was highly appraised by competent critics, and hailed by a small group steeped in preciosity, as epoch-making. However, if most of his poems have any central or dominant idea, he is unable to express it. They are the verbal manifestations of moods expressed symbolically, allegorically; of sensuous desires, satisfactions, and satieties “seeking polarity,” to borrow his favourite expression. Nearly everything is passion with Mr. Lawrence, or suggestive of passion. The pure lily is a phallic symbol, the bee sucking honey from a flower is a ravisher of innocence, the earth itself bursts asunder periodically in the throes of secret sensuality. Only the sea is free from the trammels of lust, and it is
“Sworn to a high and splendid purposelessness
Of brooding and delighting in the secret of life's going.”
“New Poems,” published in this country in 1920, did not fame or defame him, although “Piano,” “Intime,” “Sickness,” and “Twenty Years Ago” might well have done the former, and “Seven Seals” the latter.
The lull did not last long, and it was only a lull before a storm, a hurricane, a tornado which spent its force and destruction upon the author and made him the outlaw, if not the outcast, of English literature. “Women in Love” is the adventure of two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, the Brangwens whose frightful passions we have now known for three generations, and two men of breeding, wealth, and culture, Gerald Crich, a Sadist by inheritance and natural inclination, and Rupert Birkin, an intellectual, apparently male, but contradicted in this by his instinct and by his conduct, whose purpose and ambition is to fall into the long African process of purely sensual understanding.