Consequences of the Human Mind: The Function of Humans, Animals, and Sexuality in D.H. Lawrence’s Poetry

Because of his upbringing in a time of industrialization, D.H. Lawrence’s poetry is heavily concerned with the interactions between humans and non-human nature. In Hugh Stevens’s essay “D.H. Lawrence: Organicism and the Modernist Novel,” Stevens describes Lawrence as an “ecological antimodernist, continuing a tradition of Romantic organicism which modernism often appears to leave behind” (Stevens 137). He poses the question, “can fiction be modernist when it aims to help us to recapture a premodern, or even ‘primitive’, relationship with nature and with our bodies, and dissolve boundaries between the self and the world?” (137). Lawrence does indeed attempt to dissolve the boundaries between the human self and nature; however, he simultaneously emphasizes the struggle that humans face when attempting to break this barrier. By portraying human interactions with non-human animals and using sexual diction to fuse human and non-human animal existence, Lawrence voices a deep sadness for the human condition in his poetry. In his poem “Snake,” Lawrence demonstrates the problematic relationship that humans have with non-human animals. The speaker in the poem attempts to show the snake equality: “I came down the steps with my pitcher / and must wait... for there he was at the trough / before me” (5-7). However, in the first line the speaker labels the trough as “[their] water trough,” but to the snake, the trough has no owner. This ownership undermines the snake’s existence, which nullifies any attempt at equality (1). Throughout the poem the speaker perceives his existence as higher than the snake’s, consequently placing himself as the center of everything, a point from which the speaker’s reality revolves, and the snake had “come like a guest” (27). 

In addition to this subtle placement of the human self above the snake’s existence, the speaker directly refers to the challenges that humans pose on themselves as a result of knowledge: “The voice of my education said to me / He must be killed” (22-23). His education refers to the knowledge that “black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous” (24). The juxtaposition of “innocent” and “venomous” encapsulates the flaw of human knowledge. The human capacity to commit action beyond instinct complicates many aspects of our lives. Just because an animal is venomous does not mean that it is not innocent; the complexity of the human mind allows the speaker to contemplate its innocence or guilt. When the snake is at its most vulnerable, “his back... turned,” the speaker —tempted by the echoing words, “If you were a man / You would take a stick and break him now”—attempts to murder it (54, 25-26). Lawrence portrays the speaker’s concern with the abstract rules that come with being human. Stevens notes that “self-consciousness... is an awareness of self as separated from the natural world” and deems it as “a mental condition arising from the influence of modern, rational, scientific thought, with its dualisms and harsh delineation of subject and object” (137). We are so conscious that we struggle to interact with and place ourselves in the natural world. 

Brault-Deux—who is concerned with the “Lawrentian ‘I’” and its relationship with otherness—claims that human language, “whose purpose is to make sense,” makes it “hardly possible for the human poet not to humanize non-human otherness at least a little” (32). In this section of “Snake,” the speaker humanizes non-human otherness just by applying their human knowledge to the observation: “He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do, / And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do” (Lawrence 16-17). Jeff Wallace similarly comments on this idea in his book D.H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman, stating, “if the questions we ask of the non-human are anthropomorphic, so too will be the answers we elicit” (121). This idea deems Lawrence’s poems that attempt to connect humans and non-humans as ironic; how can Lawrence experiment with how humans interact with the non-human other in his poetry if the non-human other is a derivative of his knowledge? Lawrence uses this irony to say that we are condemned to apply ourselves to the world through human knowledge, and that is our greatest flaw.

It is through this knowledge that our distinction between self and the natural world becomes contrasted. In “The Wild Common,” Lawrence accentuates the differences between humans and animals while the speaker attempts to merge the purpose of his existence with non-human existence. The speaker is surrounded by nature, and yet he sticks out like a sore thumb. His interaction with nature causes tension: “Rabbits, handfuls of brown earth, lie... / / Are they asleep?—are they living?—Now see, when I / Lift my arms, the hill bursts and heaves under their spurting kick!” (5, 6-7). The speaker wants to immerse himself in nature, but he imposes his thoughts and voice onto it, further displacing himself. He claims that the water “loves [him] and folds [him]” and assumes that the seven larks are saying “You are here! We have found you! Everywhere / We sought you substantial” (34, 31-32). Like in “Snake,” the speaker places himself at the center of everything because that is all he can do; our understanding of existence relies on our knowledge. Wallace comments on this consequential aspect of human knowledge: “it would be good to be free like larks, but we can’t, because we ‘have to consider things’; trees ‘know how to die’, humans don’t” (125). 

Although his poems broaden the barrier between humans and non-human animals Lawrence unites the two with sex. For the sake of my argument, sexuality in Lawrence’s poems must be considered overt references to common bodily sensations rather than the act of sexual intercourse. Although sexual imagery does not directly refer to the human and non-human animal connection, the presence of the element itself strengthens Lawrence’s theme of the human condition; sex in Lawrence’s poetry is not meant to be bestial-erotic but rather is used to bring the human speaker back to their animal instincts and connect them with non-human animals. 

Sexual desire is the one thing that humans readily identify as an animal instinct, and Lawrence was aware of this. He uses this widely accepted idea to persuade readers that humans and animals are not truly separate; materially we are animals all the same, but our minds have skewed our perception of reality. Wallace suggests that “if what we share with animals is body materiality,” as Lawrence suggests with bodily sensations, then “analogy can work both ways: if we are like them, they are like us; to the extent that we are animal, and they are human” (135). The issue with this idea is that it applies human knowledge to the analogy, and thus the idea is critiqued by Wallace’s earlier arguments. Humans are animals but animals are not human. Comparing one animal, a human, to other animals is much less problematic than comparing all animals to one ani- mal. Lawrence’s anthropomorphism simply points out the epistemological issue of human self-consciousness; it frames the difference between humans and non-human otherness, while the sexuality in his poems points out their connectedness. 

The conflict between the speaker and the snake in “Snake” emphasizes the struggle of intellect versus instinct: “As he put his head into that dreadful hole,... / And as he slowly drew up,... and entered farther, / A sort 33 of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid / Black hole,... / / Overcame me now his back was turned” (50-52, 54). When he chooses mind over pleasure, the speaker separates himself as human from animal: “I looked around, I put down my pitcher, / I picked up a clumsy log / And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter... / / immediately I regretted it” (54-56). One critic, Jacqueline Eachus, suggests that Lawrence “mistrusts the intellect because he feels that the mind distorts reality. The bodily sensations are more concrete, and there-fore more real.” When the speaker recoils at the snake—a moment of profound sexual description—he betrays bodily sensations and submits to intellect. Lawrence critiques the human mind in this interaction. Every species’ goal is to survive and make their species thrive through reproduction. The sexualization of the snake emphasizes this instinct and connects the human speaker to the non-human animal; but the speaker’s knowledge ultimately severs him from the natural world. 

There is no better medium than poetry for Lawrence to express the struggle for humans to place themselves in the natural world. Poetry belongs to humans: it embodies the complexity of our minds; it sets us apart from non-humans, yet it simultaneously connects us. Lawrence used a medium that separates humans from non-human life to demonstrate the problematic nature of our knowledge. Through sexuality, Lawrence suggests that just because of our complexities does not mean that we are not animals; he warns us that we should not stray from nature. Lawrence mourns the connection between humans and nature. His poetry highlights this struggle, and rather than trying to reconcile with it, he presents it as a “provocation to think against the evolutionary grain” (Wallace 135). When his admiration for non-human nature and his passion against human complexity is acknowledged, Lawrence’s poems transform into headstones of grief, the human mind the grave.

I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without
ever having felt sorry for itself.
—D.H. Lawrence, “Self-pity”