The Rim, the Edge, the End, the Level: When Poetry Breaks the Sea “to bits” in Last Poems

Abstract

I want to analyse how Lawrence, in Last Poems – that is when his poetic oeuvre reaches its ultimate limit, its edge – proposes a very visual approach to the sea. If scholars have shown interest in the depths of the ocean, in Lawrence’s idea of the sea as a place of origins, as a mysterious profound berth, I will show how he also poeticizes its angles, its “level,” “rim,” “edge,” “lip,” and lines. Lawrence’s phenomenological approach to the sea is poeticized in such a way that the latter repeatedly appears as solid block, almost sharply geometrical, eventually “breaking itself to bits” (which calls to mind the “kaleidoscope tossed at random” of “Moony” in Women in Love). The movements to and out of the sea further poeticize this idea of a clear-cut zone – “sea-ward” vs. “out of the sea” – of a fiercely eternal, sustaining block whose “distance never changes” (“Middle of the World”). And this irreducible distance, Lawrence seems to say, is just as irreducibly cognitive. How does the sea therefore fit itself within the limits of the poems whose genre is by nature constrained? How is this constrain oddly transgressed in “The Ship of Death” – where the sea is this time metaphorical – and Lawrence refers to “the endless ocean of the end” - an intriguing and self-contradictory mise en abyme of this (im)possible “end?”