Poetry Sunday: Autumn Rain by D.H. Lawrence

I had never actually realized that D.H. Lawrence wrote poetry. I think of him as a novelist and short-story writer. But in fact, he did write quite a bit of poetry. I read that he was a fan of Walt Whitman and his poetry was influenced by him. His favorite form seems to have been free verse.

I learned about Lawrence, the poet, as I was looking for poetry about autumn during the past week and I happened upon this one. It seems to speak with intensity and vigor of the poet's understanding of and empathy for the natural world. The poem was published in 1917 near the end of World War I and one feels that he must have been influenced by that conflagration. Perhaps that is what he refers to when he writes of "sheaves of pain" and "sheaves of dead men that are slain."

Autumn Rain

by D.H. Lawrence

The plane leaves
fall black and wet
on the lawn;

the cloud sheaves
in heaven’s fields set
droop and are drawn

in falling seeds of rain;
the seed of heaven
on my face

falling — I hear again
like echoes even
that softly pace

heaven’s muffled floor,
the winds that tread
out all the grain

of tears, the store
harvested
in the sheaves of pain

caught up aloft:
the sheaves of dead
men that are slain

now winnowed soft
on the floor of heaven;
manna invisible

of all the pain
here to us given;
finely divisible
falling as rain.