An Analysis Of Dh Lawrence's Shadows By D. H. Lawrence

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To be honest, I would have never discovered D. H. Lawrence’s poem, “Shadows,” had I not been moaning and groaning about a poetry assignment given to me by my professor. It was an accepted fact that poetry was not my forte. With great trepidation, I pulled out my behemoth of a poetry book, randomly flipped to an open page and immediately decided that this was the poem I would viciously dissect. Except, instead of painfully dragging my eyes from one word to another, I found myself pulled into Lawrence’s world of grief and of acceptance. Each word, line, and stanza merged so flawlessly that by the end, my mind was blank. I had to ask myself if I had actually found pure enjoyment and awe in something I swore I never would. Granted, I had to reread …show more content…

That did not stop me, however, from pulling apart each line for my eager exploration. At first, his religious adherence gave me pause. Not being religious myself, I was disappointed that I wouldn’t be able to read the poem as Lawrence had meant it to be. But I did understand pain and death. Death of a friendship, of a home, of one moment that wrecked my fairly average life. What have you. For some people, it could be something as simple as the loss of a job or pet. At the core, it is pain all same. I understood the struggle, mentally and physically, to not let despair invade and permanently taint my life. I don’t want to have to be socked with anguish at random moments during my life. I had thought with Lawrence’s words, “My spirit darkens and goes out, and soft strange gloom / pervades my movements and my thoughts and words,” he was ready to join me in my pity party. My own sympathetic poet. Little did I know that this was the poem he wrote when he accepted his declining health due to Tuberculosis. …show more content…

Here he was, knowing he was going to die, probably resented the heck out of karma, but he believed that, despite his death, there is still life struggling. That the silence and distress he felt proved he was alive. To him, his “wintry flowers upon withered stems” and “snatches of renewal” was evidence that all around him there was life in death. Lawrence was resting his faith in this unknown God, believing that he would be resurrected into new life. As I continued my perusal, I noticed that each stanza was one continuous sentence. He was drawing out the lament of death. “And if, as autumn deepens and darkens / I feel the pain of falling leaves, and stems that break in storms / and trouble and dissolution and distress…”
Highlighting the slow, agonizing process of decay that the speaker felt as he falls into sickness and misery of an old man. The first two stanzas—which contained the focus on the loss of life—ended with a period, but when I reached the third stanza and the fourth, both encouraged the continuation of the sentences with a colon and dash. But this was a continuation that transitioned from loss to new life. His tone switched focus the moment the speaker admitted to dying. The first two stanzas seemed to finalize death, but with the tone switch, Lawrence implies that there

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