Quote:
Originally Posted by
Paulclem
Man is accountable unto himself and accountable for his own soul, so he must construct his own ship of death, and line it those things that matter to him, as it speaks of the domestics which will come with him on this journey of the unknown.
Yet he clearly refers to a soul, which implies a deity, and he is remade or resurrected from oblivion. His vagueness about this may imply the peace that passes understanding.
with the richness of the imagery, I would say it is a spiritual poem, but Lawrence was a writer that faced up to his problems with life. I thnk he believed in an ineffable something from this poem, but he was too honest to go with a concpt he had struggled with. Otherwise he would believe in annihilation, which he clearly implies he does not. There is the peace at the end of the poem. It's like a death poem forthe nominal believers in a God idea - leaving the possibilities open, or refusing to label.
I agree with this, because Lawrence was a highly religious thinking man; don't get me wrong, not in anyway conventionally speaking. He was not an athetist or agnostic; his writings do indicate that he did believe in something beyond this world or the hope of it. If I knew the exact date of this poem, it would be helpful. I just looked it up in his
Quote:
Most of the poems, of course, are just as Lawrence judged them in "Chaos in Poetry": suffused fragments, visions "passing into touch and sound, then again touch and the bursting of a bubble of an image." But the finest poems achieve triumphs of both content and form, and bear comparison with the greatest poems in our language. "The Ship of Death" is a "deepening black darkening" work of art that combines an intense, painful subjectivity and a mastery of objective form, the absolute conclusion of Lawrence's autobiographical work—one has only to imagine the Collected Poems without it to realize how terrible loss this would be. (More so than the loss of 'Under Ben Bulben," perhaps.) Here, at the end of his life, the very consciously dying poet composes a poem to get him through his death, just as, years before, he composed "New Heaven and Earth" in an attempt to express his mystical experience. Like the beautiful "Bavarian Gentians," "The Ship of Death" is a construction by way of the artistic imagination of the attitude one must take toward death—that is, toward dying, the active, existential process of dying. And here Lawrence is equal to the challenge, as he has been equal to the challenge of expressing the mysteries of life throughout his career. "The Ship of Death" is about a symbolic ship, but a small one; the images of death are terrible, final, but they are familiar and small as well:
Now it is autumn and the falling fruit
and the long journey towards oblivion.
The apples falling like great drops of dew
to bruise themselves an exit from themselves.
And it is time to go, to bid farewell
to one's own self, and find an exit
from the fallen self.
The "fallen self" builds its ship, its poem, to take it upon this journey into the unknown, into oblivion; it rejects once again the self-willed act of suicide: "for how could murder, even self-murder/ever a quietus make?" The symbol of the small ship is exactly right, it is exactly true to Lawrence's personality, for it is stocked with small, unpretentious items, a very human, humble vehicle:
Now launch the small ship, now as the body dies
and life departs, launch out, the fragile soul
in the fragile ship of courage, the ark of faith
with its store of food and little cooking pans
and change of clothes,
upon the flood's black waste. . . .
(Just as Yeats declares as an accomplished fact his own death, and commands that his tombstone be made not of marble but of limestone quarried nearby.) But Lawrence's death journey ends at dawn, a "cruel dawn," out of which glows a mystical flush of rose, and there is some kind of renewal, "the whole thing starts again" as the frail soul abandons itself utterly to the Infinite: Lawrence's way of affirming again, and at a time in his life when he might be tempted to deny it, the absolute mystery of the Other, which cannot be guessed and cannot be absorbed into the human soul. It is a kind of sensuous stoicism, an intelligent paganism—if the "pagan" were to be joined with the artistic soul in having the consciousness required for the exertion of this will, this building of the individual's way into oblivion.
I know that later in his life he visited the Etruscan tombs, which greatly impressed him, playing into his own belief system. The tomb drawing are explicitly and beautifully described in his book on the subject; you might want to check that book out; it's a great and fascinating read. He saw the experience, not as a mere observer or anthropologist, but in a very spiritual sense. Lawrence was always looking for some form of God, a reinvented god or often his own mention of the Holy Spirit. He was very altering in his views about this from novel to novel. At the time he wrote 