Books

Lorna Rose and DH Lawrence:
A matching of Caterpillar Soup to Lawrence’s novels and poems, by Francis Sheppard

The comparison isn’t an obvious one. Separated by gender, class and a clear century, the two have little in common. Lawrence is known for his depiction of the coalmining midlands, the rural lands to the north and the interaction between the two as succeeding generations intertwine. Rose’s poetry uses the whole of Britain and occasionally that of destinations abroad – and does not draw on the past. She is the contemporary artist, for whom inner life finds its reflection in nature. Lawrence is in the modernist mode, that lets the object, the thing, speak for itself, as in Bavarian Gentians

Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark

darkening the day-time, 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.

In Rose’s poem Dandelions the spores, blown into a sunshiny day, after hours in a hospital ward, a farewell to a loved one, convey the departure of the spirit.

I pluck a dandelion

blasting its soft seeds onto an uncertain breeze

It takes it all without a word

and it’s all so fragile I can’t stand it.

Throughout the collection, Caterpillar Soup, the writing dwells on the self, its evolution, the imagery generally used as representation. The narrative of the sequenced sections is of a life and its coming to wholeness. Nature is part of that awakening of that perception, the city-dweller’s of the Scottish moorland

I never knew hares were so golden

that buzzards were so big.

that deer could run so fast on legs so spindly.

Valentine’s Day

The innocence towards the natural world is rightly at the beginning of the compilation, showing a transition from bare-earth nihilism to flowering fecundity. That transition is also at the heart of Lawrence’s whole oeuvre.

Lady Chatterley, having had her needs met by a man quite outside her social class, discovery of sexuality that compels her to leave her titled husband. In the array of characters that Lawrence shows us, some, like Gerald Crich in Women in Love, refuse the kind hand that beckons him to fulfilment. His eventual fate is to go out alone in the ice and snow of the high Alps. Rose’s persona discovers a masculine presence in Doors frontman Jim Morrison, deeply exciting and further, enabling the strength to deal with grief, to act as an individual without reference to others’ opinion, and to engage with the physical world that is the self.

If realisation of sexuality were the entire story, the book would be commonplace. That there is much more, the title ‘Caterpillar Soup’ gives the key. The foreword explains that the pupa ‘disintegrates inside the chrysalis into a liquid known as caterpillar soup’. To me, it recalled the stretches of timelessness where following the revelation that love is returned when, beside one another, the hours pass, all sense of things to do for once absent. As Lawrence describes the young Will Brangwen and his new bride Anna, over the weekend of their honeymoon.

They found themselves there, and they lay still, in each other’s

arms; for their moment they were at the heart of eternity, whilst time roared

far off, for ever far off, towards the rim.

The honeymoon is soon over and the life that awaits them is not without its difficulties, but by the Sunday evening Anna has come into her own as a young woman, and she is known as such by her father, when he calls. Chapter VII (The Cathedral), The Rainbow.

For Will the process is a longer one, involving illicit affairs with city girls he meets as he wanders at night, but is amazed by Anna’s acceptance and he realises the legitimacy of desire despite infidelity, and from the caterpillar soup of constant marital sex, he emerges ready to engage with the world, play a part in his community, and finally to develop himself as teacher.

The penultimate section of Rose’s book, entitled ‘A Virgin’s Guide to Hiring an Escort’ is similarly a manifesto for physical passion, whatever the circumstances of the engagement. Through the ‘caterpillar soup’ of the encounter, change comes.

Every cell of me has been re-forged under your mouth

and I’m irrevocably charged to keep gorging.

because there’s no putting the toothpaste back in the tube

or in this case, lube.

The final part, ‘Cosmos’, where the speaker declares

We are pure love, seething fire and the balancing flood

reflects Ursula Brangwen, who, at the end of The Rainbow, finds her place in the universe, in the purpose of things, when she returns from the south to the family home, to go forward in Women in Love to find a relationship that furthers her, and is outside the context of the early 20th Century, so Rose’s persona is enabled and empowered by the deep physical experience undergone, ‘To unravel me into a natural state of grace’.