Christopher Pollnitz
University of Newcastle, Australia
Annotating the 'Weird Rigging' of Lawrence's Poems: Did His 'Ship' Return to Eastwood?
The paper discusses annotations for the Cambridge edition of Lawrence's Poems. When Tom Marshall shaped The Psychic Mariner around Lawrence's ship symbolism, he left one answer only to the question: does the Lawrence's verse return to Eastwood? The poems voyaged away from the birthplace, into the cosmic deeps of 'The Ship of Death'. In Rhyming Poems, the paradoxically stationary 'ship' of 'Discord in Childhood' is rooted in Eastwood, and the ballads are embedded in regional dialect, but other poems reflect the shift to south London. In Look! We Have Come Through!, revised in 1917, Lawrence evolved a style of anthropological allusion. In Birds, Beasts and Flowers, the chosen focus is iconography in 'St Luke' and the armorial seal in 'The American Eagle'. While a return to Eastwood roots is discernible in the diction of Pansies, the volume also evidences Lawrence's interest in contemporary science and ancient Mediterranean myth. In Last Poems, the use of ancient history and myth reveals Lawrence voyaging to Egypt, Crete and Delphi. Establishing the coordinates of the allusions redraws Marshall's map for this last and 'longest journey', which has cosmic and historical bearings.