Here is D.H. Lawrence’s poem, “Bavarian Gentians.” I think I know why it came to mind as I talked last time about Dylan Thomas and “The Force that through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower," but I'm not sure. Ideas? Which of the two poems do you prefer, and
of course, why? 
My posting twice about the same poem has never elicited much visitor interest, but sometimes I just can’t help myself. Here are some further questions and thoughts about Dylan Thomas’ “The Force That through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower.”
One word that might confuse or alienate readers is “the
green fuse,” which I take to mean the flower’s stem. Does Thomas get enough
bang for his buck with “fuse” as a metaphor? In exchange for potential
confusion in some readers, what, if anything, does he gain by using “fuse”?
Same question for “dumb”?
Why is the poem so full of violence? About a hundred and
fifty years before Dylan Thomas came along in Wales, the English Romantics,
especially Wordsworth, had conceived of a dynamism in Nature—its potential for
destructive activity along with its beauty and spirituality. But isn’t Thomas going further than
the Romantics in seeing and insisting upon Nature’s fearsome extremes and thus complicating
its beauty with its violence? Thomas’ Nature wreaks such havoc that he cannot
express its extremes; he can only give examples and
ask us to perceive natural presences as he does.
Do you think a single force governs the life and death of
humans, plants, and animals? Are we that much a part of nature?
Where in the human being would you locate that force? The heart? The brain? The mouth? The hand? The genitals? Or the mind or soul or spirit?—none of which can be located on an anatomical chart.
Where in the human being would you locate that force? The heart? The brain? The mouth? The hand? The genitals? Or the mind or soul or spirit?—none of which can be located on an anatomical chart.
English teachers are sex-crazed nerds; that’s old news. Therefore,
I ask if the poem has anything to do with sex—potency and lack of it, or Freud’s
“libido” versus “thanatos.” I’m pretty sure I recall accurately that Freud
expanded his concept of the libido from a specifically erotic drive to a
broader meaning of life force, a quest for survival, which of course was in continuous
conflict with “thanatos,” or death drive.
Thus, Freud, like the Romantics, saw the essential condition
of humans as one of tumult, inner turmoil, conflict, unlike Buddhism’s sense of a calm inner place,
nirvana, which we should try to reach. Do you favor one of these views of human nature over the other? If the human is an onion and you keep
peeling off layers, what’s at the center—a roiling ocean or a still pond?
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