Love, Nature And Death--A Wish To Be "A Whole Man"

This paper is a discussion on different themes of David Herbert Lawrence's poems in his different periods with an introduction at the beginning and a conclusion at the end. The themes of Lawrence's poems are generally divided into three stages by his different views on life, religion, love, nature, and death. The introduction talks about Lawrence's life experiences and gives a survey of his development of his poetic creation. The three chapters deal respectively with his different subjects in his poetry. According to his personal experiences, Lawrence in his early period basically describes his beloved mother and his women with a bioautographic colour. The reader may feel Lawrence's conflict of love through the poems which he wrote at that time. In Lawrence's middle stage, he gradually puts his eyes from love to nature, a divine non-human world. The poems at that time offer vivid and poigant description of the natural world. Lawrence explores the essence of natural creatures and transmutes energy of animals and plants into poetic feeling. That is his way of apprehending the world, the nature. As for his political view, he hates the rotten upper class and has sympathy for the lower class. This kind of feeling also reflects in his poems at that time. At the end of Lawrence's life, his poems are about the problem of death, and life after death. Lawrence expresses his calm, majestic vision of God and Death. Images of darkness and oblivion and the silence of waters convey the theme in his last period. The conclusion asserts that it is in his poetry that Lawrence realizes his wish to be "the whole man"and in so doing successfully transcends his own limitation.