Healing words for the heart

LATE in life, DH Lawrence’s creativity blossomed into prolific urgent flowerings of thought the poems he called Pansies. Their name is from the French for thoughts, pensees.

In a typically eloquent, outspoken Introduction, Lawrence offers another derivation, “from panser, to dress or soothe a wound”. They are his “tender administrations to the mental and emotional wounds we suffer from.” Pansies are also called Heartsease. The “modern heart”, and our locked-down hearts, certainly need that, too!

What Tb-sufferer Lawrence doesn’t mention is that Pansies were a Victorian herbal treatment for inflammation of the lungs. Or, that these violets were reputedly potent in lovecharms. The wild Pansy had Lawrentian names such as Heart’s delight, Tickle my fancy and Jack-jump-up-and-kiss-me.

With their “streaked faces” Lawrence’s Pansies have a demonic “running vein of fire” in them. They are Pan’s Eyes, as Daisies are Day’s Eyes!

Lawrence and Frieda called them “rag-poems” and “doggerel”, but being not “too much cooked in the artistic consciousness” they are accessible, encapsulating concisely his important ideas.

The same is true of the poetry of present-day author and influential spiritual teacher, Steve Taylor.

Steve recited a beautiful Lawrence Pansy, Fidelity, to his wife Pam during their wedding ceremony. He’s given great talks on Lawrence as Pagan, and Mystic, in Eastwood, and his latest volume of free verse poems, The Clear Light, with Foreword by Eckhart Tolle, has an uncanny affinity with Pansies, both stylistically and in being “Art for my sake”, “Art for life’s sake”.

With the same stimulating, ego-bubble-bursting effect, they awaken, liberate and exercise our consciousness, shedding scales from our eyes, and showing us the wonder of the world anew.

We may “live in interesting times”, but our souls can atrophy without spirit-stirring strategies. The antidote to debilitating materialism, Steve’s words lift us on wings of imagination, taking our hearts to unknown regions of delight.

■■100 years ago, Feb 5, 1921, Lawrence responds from Sicily to Thomas Seltzer, who’s told him his novel The Lost Girl has sold its first printing of 3,000 copies, “chiefly in New York City.” Lawrence hopes sales will “go really well.”

Feb 7 - Lawrence replies to Compton Mackenzie’s “three postcards from Herm” saying he “should like awfully to” visit “for a week or two in the early summer”, asking about “lodging”. His sister Ada might “come and stay” too. She’s insistent he visits her, but “I loathe the thought of going to England, so it might be great fun to meet in Herm”.”