David Herbert Lawrence（1885-1930） 

    David Herbert Lawrence, novelist, short-story writer, poet and essayist, was born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England, in 1885. Though better known as a novelist, Lawrence's first-published works (in 1909) were poems, and his poetry, especially his evocations of the natural world, have since had a significant influence on many poets on both sides of the Atlantic. His early poems reflect the influence of Ezra Pound and Imagist movement, which reached its peak in the early teens of the twentieth century. When Pound attempted to draw Lawrence into his circle of writer-followers, however, Lawrence decided to pursue a more independent path. 

    He believed in writing poetry that was stark, immediate and true to the mysterious inner force which motivated it. Many of his best-loved poems treat the physical and inner life of plants and animals; others are bitterly satiric and express his outrage at the puritanism and hypocrisy of conventional Anglo-Saxon society. Lawrence was a rebellious and profoundly polemical writer with radical views, who regarded sex, the primitive subconscious, and nature as cures to what he considered the evils of modern industrialized society. Tremendously prolific, his work was often uneven in quality, and he was a continual source of controversy, often involved in widely-publicized censorship cases, most famously for his novel Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). His collections of poetry include Look! We Have Come Through (1917), a collection of poems about his wife; Birds, Beasts, and Flowers (1923); and Pansies (1929), which was banned on publication in England. 

    Besides his troubles with the censors, Lawrence was persecuted as well during World War I, for the supposed pro-German sympathies of his wife, Frieda. As a consequence, the Lawrences left England and traveled restlessly to Italy, Germany, Ceylon, Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, the French Riviera, Mexico and the United States, unsuccessfully searching for a new homeland. In Taos, New Mexico, he became the center of a group of female admirers who considered themselves his disciples, and whose quarrels for his attention became a literary legend. A lifelong sufferer from tuberculosis, Lawrence died in 1930 in France, at the age of 44. 

Views 

    Critic and admirer Terry Eagleton situates Lawrence on the radical right wing, as hostile to democracy, liberalism, socialism, and egalitarianism, though never actually embracing fascism. Some of Lawrence's beliefs can be seen in his letters to Bertrand Russell around the year 1915, where he voices his opposition to enfranchising the working class, his hostility to the burgeoning labour movements, and disparages the French Revolution, referring to "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity" as the "three-fanged serpent." Rather than a republic, Lawrence called for an absolute Dictator and equivalent Dictatrix to lord over the lower peoples. 

    Lawrence continued throughout his life to develop his highly personal philosophy. His unpublished introduction to Sons and Lovers established the duality central to much of his fiction. This is done with reference to the Holy Trinity. As his philosophy develops, Lawrence moves away from more direct Christian analogies and instead touches upon Mysticism, Buddhism, and Pagan theologies. In some respects, Lawrence was a forerunner of the growing interest in the occult that occurred in the 20th century. 

Poetry 

    Although best known for his novels, Lawrence wrote almost 800 poems, most of them relatively short. His first poems were written in 1904 and two of his poems, Dreams Old and Dreams Nascent, were among his earliest published works in The English Review. His early works clearly place him in the school of Georgian poets, a group not only named after the reigning monarch but also to the romantic poets of the previous Georgian period whose work they were trying to emulate. What typified the entire movement, and Lawrence's poems of the time, were well-worn poetic tropes and deliberately archaic language. Many of these poems displayed what John Ruskin referred to as the pathetic fallacy, the tendency to ascribe human emotions to animals and even inanimate objects. 

    Just as the First World War dramatically changed the work of many of the poets who saw service in the trenches, Lawrence's own work saw a dramatic change, during his years in Cornwall. During this time, he wrote free verse influenced by Walt Whitman. He set forth his manifesto for much of his later verse in the introduction to New Poems. "We can get rid of the stereotyped movements and the old hackneyed associations of sound or sense. We can break down those artificial conduits and canals through which we do so love to force our utterance. We can break the stiff neck of habit...But we cannot positively prescribe any motion, any rhythm." 

    Lawrence rewrote many of his novels several times to perfect them and similarly he returned to some of his early poems when they were collected in 1928. This was in part to fictionalise them, but also to remove some of the artifice of his first works. As he put in himself: "A young man is afraid of his demon and puts his hand over the demon's mouth sometimes and speaks for him." His best known poems are probably those dealing with nature such as those in Birds Beasts and Flowers and Tortoises. Snake, one of his most frequently anthologised, displays some of his most frequent concerns; those of man's modern distance from nature and subtle hints at religious themes. 

   戴维·赫伯特·劳伦斯（通称D·H·劳伦斯），20世纪英国小说家、批评家、诗人、画家。代表作品有《儿子与情人》、《虹》、《恋爱中的女人》和《查泰莱夫人的情人》等。 

   劳伦斯出生于矿工家庭，当过屠户会计、厂商雇员和小学教师，曾在国内外漂泊十多年，对现实抱批判否定态度。劳伦斯写过诗，但主要写长篇小说。   他一生创作了10部长篇小说、11部短篇小说集、4部戏剧、10部诗集、4部散文集、5部理论论著、3部游记和大量的书信。

  劳伦斯1885年9月11日生于英国中部诺丁汉郡的采煤区伊舍伍德镇。在后来的文学创作中，他常常以他的家乡为故事发生和发展的地点，他称之为“我心爱的地方”。劳伦斯在诺丁汉高中毕业。之后，他曾在布莱克伍德镇一家外科医疗器械工厂做工，后来因患肺炎离开。在养病期间，他常到钱伯斯家的海格斯农庄去走访，认识了杰西·钱伯斯以及其他一些青年人。他们的共同兴趣是读书。 [1]  

  1902年至1906年，劳伦斯在伊舍伍德一家小学做教师。在这些年里，劳伦斯开始写诗，同时创作小说。1907年，他在《诺丁汉卫报》举行的短篇小说竞赛中获奖。1908年，他获诺丁汉大学的教师合格证。同年秋季，他离家去伦敦，在教学的同时，继续写作。他的诗歌通过杰西·钱伯斯呈递给当时很有影响的《英国评论》的主编福特·麦道克斯。 [1]  

  1909年，福特在《英国评论》上将这些诗作发表，同年福特还出版了劳伦斯的短篇小说《菊馨》，这引起出版商海涅曼的注意，海涅曼和他联系进一步出版事宜。他母亲1910年过世。他和母亲的关系非常紧密，母亲的去世成为他一生的转折点。母亲死后，劳伦斯曾患过的肺炎又犯，后来发展成导致他早逝的肺病。 [1]  

  1911年，劳伦斯停止教学，决心以写作为生。这一年，他的小说《白孔雀》面世，劳伦斯正式开始写作生涯。劳伦斯同时在撰写和修订《儿子与情人》。

  1912年，劳伦斯在意大利完成了《儿子与情人》，此书1913年出版，他的朋友爱德华在编辑时砍掉了100多页，劳伦斯对此很不满意。小说出版后得到评论界的认可。同年，他们回到英国做短期停留，结识了出版家约翰·米德尔顿·莫里和在新西兰出生的短篇小说家凯瑟琳·曼斯菲尔德。他们很快回到意大利，劳伦斯开始写《虹》与《恋爱中的女人》。这两部作品探讨的是影响婚姻、个人成就以及人与人之间关系的一些可能的潜在因素。

  第一次世界大战期间，劳伦斯因主张和平、夫人因为是德国人，夫妇二人都无法取得护照，不断受到官方的骚扰。他们被指责为德国做间谍，1917年被官方赶出康沃尔，直到1919年他们才被允许移民国外。这一年是他们流浪生活的开始。这一段遭受迫害的经历后来在他1923年出版的小说《袋鼠》的自传性一章里做了描述。这之后一直到劳伦斯过世，他们一起度过了长达十几年的流浪生活；这段经历劳伦斯称之为“野蛮的朝圣”。 

  1915年，《虹》问世。这是一部关于两姐妹在英国北部成长的故事，它问世后就被政府以淫秽的罪名查禁了。这时劳伦斯开始写作《迷途的女孩》，未能完成，1920年又重新改写和修订。 

  第一次世界大战后，劳伦斯离开英国，此后只回去过两次，做短期逗留。他与妻子到处流浪，先后到几个国家和地区游历，包括澳大利亚、意大利、斯里兰卡、北非、墨西哥、法国以及西西里，在每个地方都只做短住。  

  1922年，们到美国，欲在美国长住，但身体不允许。劳伦斯在墨西哥的陶斯农庄上住的时间最长，前后有几年之久，在这里他曾梦想建立一个乌托邦社团，但他的肺病曰益严重，1925年只得返回意大利的佛罗伦萨。在这期间，他不断修订《查泰莱夫人的情人》，此书1928年在巴黎以私人版本形式出版。

  1930年，劳伦斯在法国南部的旺斯死于肺病，享年44岁。她妻子的第3任丈夫后来把他的骨灰放置在新墨西哥山里一个小教堂里。

    

Snake

A snake came to my water-trough

On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat, 

To drink there. 

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree

I came down the steps with my pitcher

And must wait, must stand and wait; for there he was at the trough 

before me. 

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom

And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, 

over the edge of the stone trough, 

And rested his throat upon the stone bottom, 

And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness, 

He sipped with his straight mouth, 

Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body, 

Silently. 

Someone was before me at my water-trough, 

And I, like a second comer, waiting. 

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do, 

And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do, 

And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a

moment, 

And stooped and drank a little more, 

Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the

earth, 

On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking. 

The voice of my education said to me: 

He must be killed, 

For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are

venomous. 

And voices in me said: If you were a man

You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off. 

But must I confess how I liked him, 

How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my

water-trough

And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless, 

Into the burning bowels of this earth? 

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? 

Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him? 

Was it humility, to feel so honoured? 

I felt so honoured. 

And yet those voices: 

If you were not afraid, you would kill him. 

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid; 

But even so, honoured still more

That he should seek my hospitality

From out the dark door of the secret earth. 

He drank enough

And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken, 

And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so

black, 

Seeming to lick his lips, 

And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air, 

And slowly turned his head, 

And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream, 

Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round

And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face. 

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole, 

And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and

entered farther, 

A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing

into that horrid black hole, 

Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing

himself after, 

Overcame me now his back was turned. 

I looked round, I put down my pitcher, 

I picked up a clumsy log

And threw it at the water trough with a clatter. 

I think it did not hit him, 

But suddenly that part of him that was left behind

convulsed in undignified haste, 

Writhed like lightning, and was gone

Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front, 

At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination. 

And immediately I regretted it. 

I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act! 

I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education. 

And I thought of the albatross, 

And I wished he would come back, my snake. 

For he seemed to me again like a king, 

Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld, 

Now due to be crowned again. 

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords

Of life. 

And I have something to expiate; 

A pettiness.