The Repetitive, Meditative Style of Lawrences Birds, Beasts, and Flowe

The Repetitive, Meditative Style of Lawrences Birds, Beasts, and FlowersD. H. Lawrence is not a formalist. He derives his free verse style from prolonged know with imaginative essays in which he objectively and vividly contemplates things, people, and places in their downrightness rather than in their relationship to each other. Lawrences purpose, according to Gilbert, is knowledge through with(predicate) meditation he essays to know something . . . intuitively . . . obliquely . . . fragmentarily not through orderly ratiocination, merely through emotional perception. As his style developed, Lawrences essays became more and more idiosyncratic, increasingly elliptical, spontaneous and jazzy, as though reflecting the process rather than the harvest-time of thought. Gilbert finds Birds, Beasts, and Flowers, Lawrences sixth volume of poetry, written in a casual, improvisational, bleak style that functions not only as a means of intercourse but also as a process of discovery (1 31-32). Building on Gilberts studies, an examination of Fruits, the first sequence of the nine-part Birds, Beasts, and Flowers, reveals that Lawrences repetitive, meditative style employs three types of repetition. Fruits, an prototypic sequence about eating fruit and being changed by its supernatural properties, admits readers into Lawrences meditations and his Blakeian journey to the natural world (Gilbert 333). The poet/narrator tantalizes his prissy countrymen by suggestively dangling fruits that hold a secret that can be experienced with the senses, but cannot be grasped intellectually (Lockwood 105). Lawrence accomplishes his poetic journey through revisions of figments. The opening poem, Pomegranate, which alludes to the myth of Pers... ...h life with family and friends (Unterecker 241). Works CitedFrench, Roberts W. Lawrence and American verse. The Legacy of D. H. Lawrence, Jeffrey Meyers, ed. New York St. Martins P, 1987. 109-34. Gilbert, Sandra M. Acts of A ttention The Poems of D. H. Lawrence. Carbondale Confederate Illinois UP, 1990. Lawrence, D. H. Birds, Beasts, and Flowers. New York Thomas Seltzer, 1923. Lockwood, M. J. A Study of the Poems of D. H. Lawrence Thinking in Poetry. Houndsmills, England MacMillan P, 1987. Murfin, Ross C. The Poetry of D. H. Lawrence Texts and Contexts. Lincoln U of Nebraska P, 1983. Unterecker, John. Of Father, of Son On Fergus Falling, After qualification Love We Hear Footsteps, and Angling, a Day. On the Poetry of Galway Kinnell The Wages of Dying, Howard Nelson, ed. Ann arbor U of Michigan P, 1987. 227-41.