D. H. Lawrence was born on September 11, 1885; his thoughts about his early life and the conditions of his upbringing are well known from the fictionalized account he gave in
Sons and Lovers (1913) and other autobiographical works that he penned, including a number of essays that he wrote in the mid-1920s, "Return to Bestwood," "Getting On," and "Which Class I Belong To," in which he reevaluates the image of his childhood that he had developed in Sons and Lovers.
More interesting than Lawrence's childhood memories, at least from the perspective of an article that doesn't want to bore you with what you already know, are perhaps the images of birth that Lawrence developed in the first two poems of a nine poem sequence called "A Life History in Harmonies and Discords" that was drafted in 1909 and copied into a poetry notebook at the beginning of the following year. Discussing this sequence of poems in 1928, Lawrence said that he believed he had destroyed most of it, recalling only that the "Discord in Early Childhood" was a revision of one of the poems. His memory had deceived him: the poem "Twenty Years Ago" was also a revision of a piece taken from the sequence. The rest also remained, though not in a perfect state. Lawrence had deleted parts of it, making complete lines and one poem unreadable.
The birth images in "First Harmony" and "[First] Discord"[1] are legible, though not entirely so. The first stanza of each poem is missing words. What remains is fascinating, nonetheless, for while the two poems are meant to contrast Harmony and Discord, which John Worthen observes calls to mind Blake's
Songs of Innocence and Experience, each one also seems to contain elements of both, something that is perhaps most apparent in the first poem.
The image of what is happening in a womb seems to transform the act of gestation into a sexual one. It contains, in the first poem, a speck in the darkness that draws to itself "luminous blood"; is drowned in the blood, which is simultaneously "scalding" and "passionate" in the second stanza; and becomes, by the last stanza, a "Grey-Star," absorbing what it needs and returning the residue to its provider,. The vision here may be of harmony, with its give and take, or take and give I suppose, but it certainly isn't peaceful with its image of drowning in scalding blood, the fire of life perhaps.
In the second poem, which is much more violent than the first, the speck is Matter, a "stunned strange Elf" who is trammeled into a waking state and wildly nets "the Life/ and with the life some of the scalded death, and in the threads kindled agony and hate," hence the discord at the heart of the event, and of existence. Yet the image with which the poem concludes--the strange Elf laying "Ruddy joy and death, and black anger with Love for mate" down in their bed of tissue--suggests a certain concord, perhaps like that felt after love making, for the moment, as if the opposites entwined within life exist in some harmony despite themselves. It is as if the Life, the one with the capital "L" in the poem, is the harmonious combination of opposites that from our imperfect perspective seem discordant.
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Notes
[1] I will refrain, regretfully, from reproducing the two poems completely because I'm not certain about the copyright issues involved. Lawrence's work has, of course, entered the public domain, but public domain is a trickier issue than one might think. Less than ten years ago, and perhaps today, Elizabeth Dickinson's poems were still not public domain, though permission fees for printing them were very small, because they were edited after Dickinson's death and the edited versions were still under copyright. Those interested in reading what remains of "A Life History in Harmonies and Discords" can check out John Worthen's The Cambridge Biography of D. H. Lawrence: the Early Years 1885-1912.
Melissa_W
on
I swear Albert, you keep reading my mind! I was thinking about reading Lawrence's poetry because I watched Coming Through (the biopic with Branagh and Mirren) yesterday and it focused more on his early life and the framing story centered around his early poems. Crazy!
(or great minds think alike 
)
