More of Autumn - Lawrence's 'Autumn Rain'

As a teenager I got obsessed with D. H. Lawrence, largely thanks to my A-level English teacher Mr 'Laddie' Laing, who remains the best teacher I ever had. He made everything passionately interesting, and we read together the very great novels The Rainbow and Women in Love. We began with Women in Love, although chronologically it comes later, and I think it is the better introduction to Lawrence, if not the earlier Sons and Lovers. Later, I came to appreciate Lawrence the modernist poet. In his writings he wanted to break through the constraints of Victorian morality still prevalent at the beginning of the twentieth century with a fresh expression of sexuality. This brought him condemnation as a 'pornographer', and Britain only allowed publication of his more explicit novel Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) in 1960 after the trial of Penguin publishers.
He saw mankind as having taken a wrong turn in excessive industrialisation, wanting to dominate and control others and the natural world, trapped in a mechanistic way of seeing the world. This links with thoughts on Shakespeare's more animated nature of Sonnet 97 below.

Autumn Rain was first published in The Egoist under the editorship of Dora Marsden and Harriet Shaw Weaver, in February 1917. It is written in free verse, a sign of modernist poetry at the outset of the twentieth century. Lawrence captures the vitality of the natural world as a dynamic creation, and here he interestingly inverts the world, placing in the 'heaven' what you would see below, fields, sheaves of corn, a 'muffled floor', seeds dropped down in a transformative process as rain on the face. The 'dead men that are slain' might be a reference to the industrial slaughter going on in the trenches at the time, or not. In any case, the image embodies the pain we feel, 'the grain of tears', 'the sheaves of pain', which are gently transformed by the workings of the sky as the pain is "winnowed soft". The last lines remain ambiguous, as does the whole poem, but I feel a sense of the gentle rain falling as a balm to our individual and collective hurt, the manna of autumn's healing power.

Autumn Rain

The plane leaves
fall black and wet
on the lawn;

the cloud sheaves
in heaven’s fields set
droop and are drawn

in falling seeds of rain;
the seed of heaven
on my face

falling — I hear again
like echoes even
that softly pace

heaven’s muffled floor,
the winds that tread
out all the grain

of tears, the store
harvested
in the sheaves of pain

caught up aloft:
the sheaves of dead
men that are slain

now winnowed soft
on the floor of heaven;
manna invisible

of all the pain
here to us given;
finely divisible
falling as rain.
 
 

D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930)