The front garden was a small square with a privet hedge. There she stood, trying to soothe herself with the scent of flowers and the fading, beautiful evening. Opposite her small gate was the stile that led uphill, under the tall hedge between the burning glow of the cut pastures. The sky overhead throbbed and pulsed with light. The glow sank quickly off the field; the earth and the hedges smoked dusk. As it grew dark, a ruddy glare came out on the hilltop, and out of the glare the diminished commotion of the fair.
This is Gertrude Morel (née Coppard), outside her home in the “Bottoms” in Nottinghamshire, a double row of miners’ homes to which she has “descended” from Bestwood. She’s from a “good burgher family”, though one bankrupted two generations previous. The miner she’s married is Walter Morel, from the Erewash Valley, and here, eight years in, they have two children named William and Annie. She is pregnant with the third, Paul, who will become the main character.
That passage is the first full view of the natural surroundings. Gertrude feels suffocated inside waiting for her husband, so she steps outside. The landscape in Lawrence is never a painting; there’s a lot of painterly glowing, here the “burning glow” of the pastures, but the sky, never still, “throbbed and pulsed”, while the earth and hedges “smoked dusk.” The throbbing and pulsing may correspond to or represent Gertrude’s fear of “the struggle with poverty and ugliness and meanness”, which could be manifested as an animation in her mind of what should be static, but one finishes the novel and feels less confident in that link. The phrase “smoked dusk” is both intelligible and consonant, yet strangely connotative of smoking a cigarette. Usually smoke billows, or dusk falls; a house on fire doesn’t “smoke”, nor is dusk produced from the earth. The villagers approach and Lawrence seems to shrink into convention, writing as many would that it “grew dark” as the fair ended.
Seven months into Gertrude’s pregnancy with Paul, Walter comes home drunk. He’s been spending too much of his meager wages on beer, this time enough to kick and break open the garden gate. Gertrude and he argue, then he pushes her out into the garden, to prove that it really is his house. While she walks trembling with anger, the “child boiled within her.” After Paul is born, there is to be a blatant infant baptism scene, when Walter throws a table drawer at Gertrude and “he [sees] a drop of blood fall from the averted wound into the baby’s fragile, glistening hair.” But for Lawrence, life begins no later than conception, and psychodrama begins in the womb, the home within the home. First Paul is given an amniotic baptism, not as a believer, but into some kind of communion with mother and moonlight:
She became aware of something about her. With an effort she roused herself to see what it was that penetrated her consciousness. The tall white lilies were reeling in the moonlight, and the air was charged with their perfume, as with a presence. Mrs. Morel gasped slightly in fear. She touched the big, pallid flowers on their petals, then shivered. They seemed to be stretching in the moonlight. She put her hand into one white bin: the gold scarcely showed on her fingers by moonlight. She bent down to look at the binful of yellow pollen; but it only appeared dusky. Then she drank a deep draught of the scent. It almost made her dizzy.
Mrs. Morel leaned on the garden gate, looking out, and she lost herself awhile. She did not know what she thought. Except for a slight feeling of sickness, and her consciousness in the child, herself melted out like scent into the shiny, pale air. After a time the child, too, melted with her in the mixing-pot of moonlight, and she rested with the hills and lilies and houses, all swum together in a kind of swoon.
Lawrence once called the prose of Sons and Lovers “that hard, violent style full of sensation and presentation.” There’s plenteous sensation here, and the named though mysterious presence of something that charges the air with perfume. Violence is subtler. There’s a hint of it in the penetration of Mrs. Morel’s consciousness which causes her to gasp, shiver, and become dizzy, and in the effect and pairing of hard “p” and “b” sounds. But the tone produced by the inelegant three repetitions of “moonlight” is rather more insistent than violent. As a rhetorical matter, that repetitive emphasis insists that the “moonlight” is the key feature of the scene. It anticipates the forceful enunciation and hoisted eyebrow of the English teacher guiding students through the passage. The moon lights every element to make it look like melting wax; there are white lilies, the gold which “scarcely showed”, and the yellow pollen that “only appeared dusky.” Moonlit Mrs. Morel in repose against the garden gate, maybe, but with motion: her residual sickness, and the run-on (unless “swum” is taken as a transitive verb) “all swum together in a kind of swoon.”
In his introduction to the American edition of New Poems (1920), Lawrence wrote that the “The perfect rose is only a running flame, emerging and flowing off, and never in any sense at rest, static, finished.” To his eye, there is as much motion in stillness as in movement proper. When he does set things moving, there is a risk that the reader might read into him the pathetic fallacy as when “White clouds went their way” or “An enormous orange moon was staring at them from the rim of the sandhills.” The human to nature continuum in Lawrence has nothing to do with a correspondence between emotional states and weather, but rather that between the “running flame” and running blood, which had been displaced in Lawrence’s formulation by the rose with its bloody associations. In anticipation of Paul’s startling staring moon vision, “The whole of his blood seemed to burst into flame, and he could scarcely breath.” Lawrence, too wary to use the color red figuratively to reiterate this point, nonetheless trusts that the chromatic link between the two elements will sustain this moment as a principle rather than as a melodramatic fancy.
Paul is born, and Walter remains unreformed, still beering and bawling. Mrs. Morel takes Annie and Paul out for a stroll and sight-see. Lawrence reproduces the “perfect rose”/”running flame” effect, and there’s conventional movement for him to register, too:
She went over the sheep-bridge and across a corner of the meadow to the cricket-ground. The meadows seemed one space of ripe, evening light, whispering with the distant mill-race. She sat on a seat under the alders in the cricket-ground, and fronted the evening. Before her, level and solid, spread the big green cricket-field, like the bed of a seat of light. Children played in the bluish shadow of the pavilion. Many rooks, high up, came cawing home across the softly-woven sky. They stooped in a long curve down into the golden glow, concentrating, cawing, wheeling, like black flakes on a slow vortex, over a tree clump that made a dark boss among the pasture.
The meadows are subtly, invisibly animated by the gentle water on the mill wheel. How else can a space of light be ripe? It is the word “cricket” which is to be repeated twice in rather odd fashion. The cricket-field “is” not; it spreads like “the bed of a seat of light”, and there is some of the same melting effect in its association with Mrs. Morel’s seat. The evening light, however, shows green, “bluish”, black, and “golden glow”. The rooks are too well sketched to be taken simply as omens. Their signature “cawing” refers not just to their heraldic sound, but also their movement “across the softly-woven sky”. The spiral begins with the “long curve”, is drawn back towards itself with “concentrating” (in the sense of concentricity), then lined more clearly by “wheeling”, then completed as a “slow vortex”. All the swirling and swimming is brought into contrast with the stubborn tree clump, the “dark boss” somehow “among” the singular pasture, as if the one pasture is a multiplicity of blades subordinate to the trunks and branches. “Boss” may be an Americanism which replaced “master”, but it’s hard to see what else Lawrence is getting at with that usage.
Lawrence’s skill with the rooks is the intelligence of the creator, and design is also suggested by the hierarchy between tree and grass, but this is to be understood as the imposition by the author to give the scene enough novelistic comprehensibility. There’s nothing rational in the alternation between the appearances of a cricket field and a bed of light, or later, on Paul’s walk home from Keston, between the distant villages and the “swarms of glittering living things, almost a heaven against his feet.” These realities transformed into visions are rendered as similes, and may pass as such if the deliquescent effect of the moonlight is forgotten (see also Mrs. Morel, with Paul in arms, who “felt the marrow melt in her bones.”) The cricket field and villages alike have been replaced with these shifts between ostensible and fantastical, not just given an imaginative gloss. When Paul’s blood “seemed to burst into flame”, we find the “violent style” Lawrence identified when remembering the novel, in the metaphorical rather than simulative maneuver; qualifying “seemed” notwithstanding, the blood becomes rather than resembles flame, and the abruptness of that change is the most “violent” moment of the novel. So Lawrence’s concern is not the violence of nature against vulnerable man, nor human violence against vulnerable nature (that emerges later in Lawrence’s work), but the flamboyant inner violence in Paul; a rose is the blood is a running flame.