Where Death and Life Embrace

D. H. Lawrence

I've already devoted at least two entries to Persephone and Demeter.  Cynthia from "Sorting the Pieces" has also written of Persephone.  Vicky  (My Incentive) and I  have been exploring the Thumbelina fairytale and discussing its similarities to the Persephone Myth.  Yesterday in my reading, I ran across a beautiful poem by D. H. Lawrence called "Bavarian Gentians" (a gentian is a kind of herb).  The poem was written close to Lawrence's death.  It is a poem that relates the gentian to the Persephone myth:

BAVARIAN GENTIANS

Not every man has gentians in his house
in soft September, at slow, sad Michaelmas.

Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark
darkening the daytime, torch-like, with the smoking blueness of Pluto's
gloom,
ribbed and torch-like, with their blaze of darkness spread blue
down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day
torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto's dark-blue daze,
black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue,
giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter's pale lamps give off
light,
lead me then, lead the way.

Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!
let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower
down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness
even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September
to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark
and Persephone herself is but a voice
or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom,
among the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on
the lost bride and her groom.

D. H. Lawrence wrote:  "My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle."

I believe this is a wonderful thing for the writer of fiction or poems to remember.  Lawrence's words connect with those of Tim O'Brien, novelist, with the idea that you feel stories not in your head but in your whole body.  When you're writing fiction or poetry, you need to feel what you're writing in your whole body.  It can't just be an intellectual exercise.  We use the intellect later to compare the gentian to the Persephone Myth, and that's a useful exercise.  But we FEEL the poem first (then we analyze it).

The blue gentian is our body, which will, like the plant, die.  Not everyone has gentians in "his house in soft September"  because not everyone knows how to be oneself, the way flowers do.  In 1913, Lawrence wrote in a letter:  "I conceive a man's body as a kind of flame, like a candle flame,
forever upright and yet flowing: and the intellect is just the light that is shed on to the things around. And I am not so much concerned with the things around -- which is really mind--but with the mystery of the flame forever flowing, coming God knows how from out of practically nowhere, and being itself, whatever there is around it, that it lights
up. We have got so ridiculously mindful, that we never know that we ourselves are anything--we think there are only the objects we shine upon. And there the poor flame goes on burning ignored, to produce this light. And instead of chasing the mystery in the fugitive, half-lighted things outside us, we ought to look at ourselves, and say 'My God, I am myself!'"

To not recognizeyour true self is a kind of living-death.  Indeed,Lawrence wrotea great deal about the marriage of opposites, life and death, light and dark.  And that is what Persephone represents, the marriage of life and death, of light and dark.  Persephone's love for Pluto represents our own return to our origins, the womb of the Earth, where death and life embrace.  As Octavio Paz writes:  "the return to the Great Whole is the descent to the depths, to the underground palace of Pluto and Persephone."

Note: 

Not every man has gentians in his house
in soft September, at slow, sad Michaelmas.

The feast of St. Michael and All Angels or Michaelmas fell about the time of the autumnal equinox. The equinox marked the period when the nights would be getting longer and the earth would begin to die. St. Michael came to be seen as the protector against the forces of the dark and so became very popular in the Middle Ages.