Lawrence's Sense-Words

Abstract

IN HIS BEST-KNOWN POEM, written in Sicily in 1920, Lawrence's lord of life – his ‘Snake’ – softly slips into our view: We read again, to be freshly startled. The strangeness of this single sentence lies only partly in the celebrated kinaesthetic shiver it sends across its own slack long body, with the free verse rhythms lengthening and tightening over the seven lines. More intimate, almost prehensile, is the way individual words are felt round, slightly shifted. ‘Slack’ is not just introduced as a noun (‘slackness’), but syntactically couched in such a way that an attribute becomes a visual shape and an object, lending body to the burst of colour and touch in the second line. Aurally, the word palpitates with its linguistic neighbours as Lawrence delves into the organic heart of prosody, the relation between sound and sense. Equally delicate is his handling of the word ‘soft’. In a narrative drama between reptilian softness and stony hardness, ‘soft’ in its passage from adjective to adverb moves within the field of haptic vision, from body texture (‘soft-bellied’) to physical action (‘Softly drank’). Lawrence uses repetition to play on both sameness and difference. ‘Soft’ is a word that he, like Keats, would turn to and turn round repeatedly, from the opening word of ‘Piano’ to describe his mother singing, to its incantatory use to evoke touch in the short story ‘The Blind Man’, to the ‘softness of deep shadows’ (‘Shadows’, p. 727) that he feels envelop him as he lies dying in 1929. The word does not just cut across the five senses in Lawrence. It reveals his peculiar talent for articulating the submerged world of emotion that clings around colour, shape, and movement. ‘Softly drank’: is ‘softly’ the imagined sound of the snake drinking or a glimpsed movement of its forked tongue or the tenderness of the observer's mood? ‘It is the hidden emotional pattern’, he wrote in a letter to Edward Marsh, ‘that makes poetry, not the obvious form’.2 The word also vibrates internally. ‘Softly’ is the opening trochee but it weaves itself with the labials and sibilants: it lingers on our tongue between the hard, monosyllabic spondees (‘straight mouth’, ‘straight gums’) before we understand its meanings in the world.