The Face of the Other: Reading a Selection of Animal Poems by D.H. Lawrence

Abstract

In the present paper I would like to show that the animal, as represented in D.H. Lawrence’s Birds, Beasts and Flowers, has often a face. Sometimes it is the “sensitive, long, pure-bred face” of a Kangaroo or the “pale-face” of a red wolf that arrests the attention of a reader who, though recognizing otherness and difference in the animal, realizes that man is “not the measure of creation.” But nowhere does the portrayal of the animal face touch the reader as much as it does in the poem “Mountain Lion” where the face of the Other reveals the infinite cruelty perpetrated on animals by humans, and brings up a series of questions (often disturbingly ethical) about man’s responsibility towards the animal world.