The Escaped Cock? Male Homoeroticism in D.H.

Lawrences Poetry

I composed this essay for the Queering Lawrence panel at the 2011 Modern Language Association Convention in L.A., but the plane ticket from Berlin, Germany proved unaffordable. Eventually, when other, more pressing projects are completed (a novel, a book of poems, a translation, a critical study of naked dancing and photomontage in Weimar Berlin), I will expand it into a critical article. The Escaped Cock was the working title of Lawrences last work of fiction, which he finally titled The Man Who Died. In the narrative is a feisty young rooster who breaks free, and the escaped cock is Lawrences double-entendre.

In D. H. Lawrences Bavarian Gentians, the putatively male speaker identifies himself with the mythological Persephone. This conflation of gender identity reaches its climax in the poems final lines: Persephone herself is but a voice or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom, among the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on the lost bride and her groom. Ironically, perhaps, Persephone, who lost her flowersindeed, was defloweredwhen abducted into the underworld, here retires into an underworld that is itself a flower. Not only is the Classical myth revised in the sense of the passion of the dense gloom, so that it recounts more a sad lovers rendezvous than a rape, but the speaker himself, to follow Helen Sword, becomes Persephone, pierced, meeting his male groom. The brides gender complicates the poems theme of deathly phallic dominance, just as the speakers autonomy disappears: He loses individual identity, personal integrity, and even his visibility to himself (it is, after all, a poem about death). This complicated gesture at once represents yet another male artists appropriation of the feminine, a pretty poeticization of violence against women, and a peculiar queering of the masculine voice.

2 The substitution of the speaker for Persephone in Bavarian Gentians may exemplify what Gregory Woods terms, in his 1987 Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-Eroticism and Modern Poetry, the figure of the male bride: the man made fertile by the phallus of another. Woods, however, does not consider the extent to which Lawrence renders such masculine figures as conflicted, neither homosexual nor heterosexual, but oddly embracing both sexualities, while transgressing the boundaries of both. Such ambivalence makes the male bride something other than what Woods considers a shying away from the full articulation of homosexual identity, or the poets hesitation to depict graphically what the critic calls fellatio and anal intercourse between men. This short essay seeks to complicate his groundbreaking critical work by bringing into consideration Lawrences pugnacious stance toward all that has to do with sexuality, a belligerence also directed toward his readers. The queerness of Lawrences poetry consists of more than sexual images we can grade according to a scale of homoerotic openness, for the poet entangles us in willful contrariness, a twisting of rhetoric and ideology away from their usual straight purposes that is often, at the same time, an erotic confrontation. Many of Lawrences poems follow the impetus of his essays, Fantasia of the Unconscious and Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, to naturalize heterosexual desire. Or at least, we can say that to integrate heterosexuality into the continuum of nature appears initially to be Lawrences ideological move. In his address to my lass, the speaker of Come Spring, Come Sorrow enlists the entirety of the natural world, animate and inanimate, in a plea for sexual relations: Do you not hear each morsel thrill With joy at travelling to plant itself within The expectant one, and therein to instill Newness, new shape to win, From that drowse of life wake up another will? Surely, ah not in words alone Id spill The vivid, ah, fiery surplus of life From off my measure, to touch you deep, and fill You flush and rife With this years newness!And is that evil? In a predictable phallocentric move, penis joins pen and ink spurts semen: not in words alone Id spill. In these lines, he makes what is known in advertising as a bandwagon appeal: the lass should agree to be inseminated because it happens throughout nature, including wild anemones, [w]hite ducks, toads, and stars. In other words, everyone is doing it, so should she. Yet one stanza in the middle of the poem complicates the otherwise rather conventional bombast:

3 Yes, say it! For, sure from the golden sun A quickening, masculine gleam floats in to all Us creatures, people and flowers undone And opened under his thrall As he plants his new germ in us. What is there to shun? In the order of nature here reconstructed, both men and women get filled with semen[a] quickening, masculine gleamso that the naturalizing figurative language would seem to validate male homosexuality toothough not, unfortunately, lesbianism. If Woods is correct to assert that for Lawrence, everything centers on the male organ and its inseminating force, he neglects to consider how in poems such as this, the sheer excess of the phallusits full-sappy overflow, to use one of Lawrences more queasy-making terms, allows it a little to wiggle free. Passages like this sun stanza not only deconstruct the rhetoric of male mastery over the female by including the male within the category of the mastered, but also suggest, if never managing fully to embody, a different masculinity for which phallic control is only one erotic possibility. In regard to such other erotic possibilities, the overlooked lyric, Twilight, deserves special consideration. Neither the phallus, nor any gender designation, appears in the poem. Instead, all eroticism centers on the anus, what Lawrence terms in Women in Love, the source of the deepest life-force, the darkest, deepest, strangest life-source of the human body, at the back and base of the loins. With only six short lines, the poem rather resembles haiku, in that uses a description of nature to convey intense human emotion: Twig light thick underdusk and a hidden voice like water clucking callously continuous. While darkness submerges the stones and splashes warm between the buttocks. The poem evokes analingus with a hidden voice whose clucking is reinforced with the alliteration of k, w, and m consonants. The poem also suggests an abandonment, or submersion, of the selfsimilar to that in Bavarian Gentians, if less somber. The human subject of the poem, referenced only by the buttocks, receives warmth or pleasure passively, even as the poem hints at penetration. Rarely is Lawrence so gentle; and although the word, callously, sounds a rougher note, the poems overall tone is smooth. There is no straight path between you and me, dear reader, Lawrence warns in Fantasia of the Unconscious, so dont blame me if my words fly like dust into your eyes and grit between your teeth, instead of like music to your ears. What he expresses here is more than a matter of a difference of opinion, of [y]ou are not me, dear reader, because he desires to be disagreeable: I want to shout all kinds of improper things, to see what effect they will

4 have on the stupid dear face at the end of the coil of wire. Such a motive is clearly visible in Come Spring, Come Sorrow, where Lawrence calculates even the heterosexual imagery to shock. This poem is not just a provocation for some putative lass, but a sexual overture toward us. Arguing in favor of free verse in Poetry of the Present, Lawrence metaphorizes poetic utterance as ejaculation: we look for the insurgent naked throb of the instant moment. Free verse, he writes, is the instant; the quick; the very jetting source of all will-be and hasbeen. The utterance is like a spasm, naked contact with all influences at once. So, are we to share in Lawrences spasm, swallow it, or wipe it from our eyes? In Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani? a poem in which Lawrence directly addresses mortal combat, rebarbative style again carries an erotic charge. Woods, using this poem to introduce his concept of the male bride, particularly focuses on the eighth stanza: So when I run at length thither across To the trenches, I see again a face with blue eyes, A blanched face, fixed and agonized, Waiting. And I knew he wanted it. Like a bride he took my bayonet, wanting it And it sank to rest from me in him, And I, the lover, am consummate, And he is the bride, and I have sown him with the seed And planted and fertilized him. Woods states that the stanza presents a vagina carved in male flesh: The enemys wound is [the] orifice that must overflow with the manly foison of the aggressor, commingled with blood. Contrary to Woods, I would argue that this poem does not really concern a phallic imperative. First of all, Lawrence relies on the felicitous connotations of marriage to counterpoint the misery of wartime death. Only when taken alone can this stanza be interpreted to present a triumphant gesture. The speaker agonizes, What I beget, I must beget of blood? And in the poems penultimate stanza, he asks, But shall I touch hands with death in killing that other, The enemy, my brother? Shall I offer to him my brotherly body to kill, Be bridegroom or best man, as the case turns out? It becomes rather unclear exactly who the killer is, and who, the slain. Earlier in the poem, the speaker describes the other soldier as that shadows shadow of me: when the boundary between the opponents turns out to be a reflection, the separation of male self and male other can only be a trick of mirrors. In this stanza, even the nature of killing changes, for rather than

5 the phallicism of a bayonet thrust, we have hands that might touch and also something intimate the speaker might offer. The overcharged ambivalence between homoerotic tenderness and violent aggressivity in Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani? aims to disarm us. Although the poem adds an interesting spin to the Christian concept of the brotherhood of man, at the same time, it unfortunately addresses women in misogynistic terms. Absent from the scene of combat, women nonetheless enjoy it like vampires. And why do the women follow us satisfied the speaker asks, [f]eed on our wounds like bread, receive our blood / Like glittering seed upon them for fulfillment? Speaking in a Christ-like register allows the speaker to condescend to his feminine audience: But what are you, woman, peering through the rents / In the purple veil? With the purple veil alluding to flesh wounds, woman is at once parasite and voyeuse. If elsewhere in the poem, the speaker dreams of an ideal union between man and woman, passages like this one mitigate against such a possibility. The only attainable union in this poem is with another man; and it would appear that such a marriage is tantamount to death. Lest we imagine, though, that for Lawrence, male homosexuality ultimately consists of a doomed narcissism tending inevitably to death, a theme familiar from such modernist works as Thomas Manns Der Tod in Venedig, I would like to conclude in an upbeat way with Lawrences The Best of School. The poems setting is a classroom; and considering Lawrences experience teaching at Davidson Road School, we can reasonably assume that the speaker, a teacher himself, is something of a double for the poet, perhaps Lawrences shadows shadow. Dealing with an all-male environment, the poem foregoes the opportunity to cast aspersions on women. Pedagogy, as Leo Bersani has argued, can come very close to pederasty. In The Best of School, the speaker celebrates pedagogys homoeroticism without consummating any recognizable sexual act. If todays sensationalist journalism prompts us to seek out the predator in the classroom, Lawrences speaker assumes a decidedly passive relation to his pupils, whose stance in the third stanza is also passive: And very sweet it is, while the sunlight waves In the ripening morning, to sit alone with the class And feel the stream of awakening ripple and pass From me to the boys, whose brightening souls it laves For this little hour. The stanzas water imagery, congruent with that of the poem, Twilight, insinuates no mastery; and it would be rather heavy-handed to cast the stream of awakening in terms of phallic domination. In the concluding stanzas, the boys assume a more active role, just as the imagery shifts from sunlight and waves to tongue and touch:

6 Touch after touch I feel on me As their eyes glance at me for the grain Of rigour they taste delightedly. As tendrils reach out yearningly, Slowly rotate till they touch the tree That they cleave unto, so they to me. I feel them cling and cleave to me As vines going eagerly up; they twine My life with other leaves, my time Is hidden in theirs, their thrills are mine. Yes, of course, tendrils that reach out yearningly and vines going eagerly up are phallic symbols. His loud objections to psychoanalysis notwithstanding, Lawrence depends upon the readers familiarity with simple Freudian symbolism; and he is unafraid to make homoeroticism obvious when it suits his purposes. Delicate masculine intimacy, hardly here a hidden theme, adds a definite frisson to the scene of growth and change. In The Best of School, it serves to affirm life. In his most interesting poems, even those that concern darker subject-material, Lawrence welcomes life, encouraging us to grow and to change. Bavarian Gentians, though concerning Lawrences own demise, would lead us to an experience that, by definition, we cannot experience: death. The poem does so not with utter gloom, but with the passion of dense gloom, an erotic splendour. Easy to visualize at first, the title flowers receive careful description: they are ribbed and torch-like, flattening into points. But because they also serve as figurative deviceseach is a torch-flower, the speaker saysto guide him, as well as us, to the apprehension of unperceivable deathhe complicates the visual metaphors with paradoxes difficult or impossible to see. In the fourth line, the flowers darken the daytime, so that darkening reveals itself an active force, rather than the mere deprivation of light. The flowers become a blaze of darkness, black lamps, and darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark. Finally, the poem leads to the phallic upsurge of torches of darkness. Pointing out that such figures of language are Miltonic, Neil Forsyth sees Lawrences play on the canonical poet as unfortunate, not nearly so striking as the original. Paradise Lost describes the underworld as darkness visible, a paradox that beyond the realm of perception, serves to arrest us, presenting but withholding unimaginable trauma. Lawrences darkness invisible might seem not a paradox at all, or even a redundancy, for is not darkness by definition invisible? Yet Lawrences entire phrase takes Miltons figure one step further: a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark asks us to make an extraordinarily fine distinction, to apprehend the contrast of the unseeable with something even more obscure. In Bavarian Gentians, such paradox serves not to scare the reader into religious submission, but

7 rather to elicit, through unfigurable intensity, an elsewhere that is not hell at all. That elsewhere is here and now: the thrill of being alive. Part of the thrill has to do with escaping the boundaries of gender and sexuality, as well as those of life and death. The real concern is not Persephone but the first poet. Death thus defamiliarized, drawing us down so close to its impossibility, raises us, as if Orpheus, upwards. So the cock escapes. The cock rises. But then the question: has someone been left behind?

Works Cited The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence. Volumes One & Two. Ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts. New York: Viking, 1964. Forsyth, Neil. D. H. Lawrences Bavarian Gentians: A Miltonic Turn Toward Death. tudes de Lettres 4 (October-December 1992): 83-100. Lawrence, D.H. Fantasia of the Unconscious and Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious. 1921. New York: Penguin, 1977. Sword, Helen. Lawrences Poetry. The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence. Ed. Anne Fernihough. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001: 119-35. Woods, Gregory. D.H. Lawrence. Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-Eroticism and Modern Poetry. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987: 125-39.