Lawrence’s yearning to be a tree, one of Earth’s first inhabitants

IT’S said our ancestors were “bush-apes”, who foraged beyond their forest habitat. Therefore, what woodland colonnades and canopies remain rouse fervent, reverent memories in our blood, while children climb, nimbly, from branch to branch.

Young DH Lawrence – our son of Sherwood – eagerly passed beneath “splendid” oak, ash, elm, beech, alder, to reach “Robin Hood’s Well and Maid Marion’s dancing green,” May Chambers recalls.

Lawrence’s poem, Trees In The Garden, evokes the lime tree’s “breath of perfume”, the elder’s “grace of foam”, balsam pines with “blueness of things from the sea”, “red-rosy” copper beech leaves, and larches “too tall to see”.

Empedokles called trees “the first living creatures” to rise up from the Earth’s heat, male and female, parts of earth “as embryos are parts of the uterus”, Lawrence observes.

Lawrence’s poem Cypresses, lamenting the lost “delicate magic of life”, leads “the soul through a crack in the hard shell” of modern existence to a vanished world, Keith Sagar suggests.

Their “dark, mindful silence” refreshes and heals Lawrence’s Aaron Sisson. He bears new knowledge as a gift for the race, which Lawrence communicates, shamanic-ally, “through his art”

Almond Blossom describes trees as “life divine/fearing nothing, life blissful at the core”.

In Fantasia Of The Unconscious, written seated, feeling tiny as “a pea-bug”, beneath large fir trees of Bavaria’s Black Forest, Lawrence imagines the wilful, wild, fullblooded treebeings both crowding round, staring, secretly nudging each other, cussedly inhibiting him, AND helping him, like “a harem of wonderful silent wives”.

He wishes to be a tree, for a while, with a mindless “rootlust”, a “vast, lissome life in air” and deep “indifference” to the “rattling” of people’s personalities.

A “mad restlessness” overcomes Connie in Lawrence’s Lady C. She rushes to lie “prone in the bracken”. Wragby wood – “remnant” of Robin Hood’s great forest – is “her one refuge, her sanctuary.” Mellors, her man of the woods.

■■ 100 Years ago, on April 18, 1924, (“Good Friday”), Lawrence asks Thomas Seltzer to send a photo and copy of DH Lawrence: An American Interpretation to Swedish professor Sten Liljegren, who’s writing a students’ handbook of modern English literature. Lawrence seems to Liljegren “to be one of the most remarkable living English novelists”. He also requests Lawrence’s next novel to review in Sweden, where Lawrence is “totally unknown...which is a pity”. The Lawrences are going to Frieda’s ranch next week “with a workman, to build up the log houses”. They’ll “get bits of furniture and spend the summer there.” All’s well,” except “a bit more solitude one wants”.

Lawrence imagines the wilful, wild, full-blooded tree-beings crowding round, staring, secretly nudging each other