T. E. Lawrence: an autobiography in verse

From 1919 to 1927 Lawrence collected 112 of his favorite poems, 30 of them from the Oxford Book of English Verse (1900).  He copied them by hand into his notebook, in random order and without author or title, and silently included several lines from these poems in his prose masterpiece Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926).  This personal anthology and poetical autobiography—called Minorities, edited by J. M. Wilson, and not published until 1971—provides a new perspective on Lawrence.

Seven poems come from the English Renaissance.  Lawrence then jumps over the 18th century—though William Cowper’s “The Castaway” (1800) would have suited his melancholy mood—to the Romantics, Victorians, Georgians, World War I poets and a few obscure versifiers.  Though Lawrence was a classical scholar and linguist, there are no poems in Greek, Latin, French or Italian, only one excerpt from Goethe’s Faust, none from the adventurer Lord Byron, or from the moderns: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot or W.H. Auden, who wrote an essay and a play about him.  William Morris, by his day an old-fashioned choice, had the most poems with ten; Thomas Hardy got five; William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, James Elroy Flecker and Siegfried Sassoon were awarded four each.  Among contemporary poets, Lawrence personally knew Rudyard Kipling, Flecker, Robert Graves, Sassoon and Hardy, but included only the last two.

“Minorities” suggests minor, youthful poems as well as themes about subordinates, underdogs and outcasts.  In his letters Lawrence called this collection “small poems of big men and better poems of small men, all in a minor key,” and said it was “a summary of what I have thought and done and made of myself in these first thirty years.”  He searched for poems that revealed not only his taste, but also his character, and feelings.  They also reflect the sense of failure that made him give up the promise of high office, and to punish himself by enlisting in the ranks of the RAF and reenlisting in the hateful Tank Corps after he’d been forced by unwelcome publicity to leave the Air Force.

Lawrence chose those poems less for their quality than for the language and ideas that expressed his emotions.  Their old-fashioned and dreamlike diction, mostly in rhymed quatrains, offered him an escape from the modern world to the pseudo-medievalism of William Morris and Charles Doughty, and to the deserts of the East in Flecker’s “Golden Journey to Samarkand.”  The dominant themes of his via dolorosa are nostalgia for prewar peace, his sense of loss, solitude and sadness, exhaustion and depression, loneliness and darkness, longing for death and the fear of extinction.  He is plagued in these poems by sex, guilt and weariness, wounded body, endless pain and imminent death, worthless achievements and restless torments.  These poems portray his personal life in a series of vivid scenes.

Lawrence condemned himself, but refused to pray (as the poets did) for relief from pain and hope for a better life.  Only Christopher Marlowe’s hedonistic “The Passionate Shepherd to his Love” (1599) is completely free from morbid feelings: “The shepherd swains shall dance and sing / For thy delight each May morning: / If these delights thy mind may move, / Then live with me and be my Love.”

Walter de la Mare’s “Arabia” suggests Lawrence’s mad passion for the Eastern deserts: “He is crazed with the spell of far Arabia, / They have stolen his wits away.”

John Davidson’s “The Last Journey” describes the physical agony that Lawrence had experienced during his solitary, three-month, thousand-mile pilgrimage on foot through Syria.  When studying the Crusader castles (about which he later wrote a book) in the summer of 1909, he was robbed, beaten and left for dead.  Davidson writes:

My feet are heavy now, but on I go,

My head erect beneath the tragic years.

The way is steep, but I would have it so;

And dusty, but I lay the dust with tears,

Though none can see me weep: alone I climb

The rugged path that leads me out of time.

William Blake’s “Jerusalem” defines Lawrence’s convictions: his intellectual approach to war and fierce attitude to battle: “I will not cease from mental fight, / Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand.”  Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound”—“To defy Power, which seems omnipotent”—suggests how Lawrence defeated the huge Turkish army in the Hejaz with his vastly outnumbered and poorly armed Arab guerrillas.  The Turks he’d slaughtered in war—and his own Arabs whom he had to kill to avoid blood feuds— induced the excruciating guilt that Algernon Swinburne expresses in “The Pilgrims”:

No man’s heart shall beat

But somewhat in it of our blood once shed

Shall quiver and quicken, as now in us the dead

Blood of men slain.

 D.H. Lawrence’s “Ballad of a Wilful Woman” describes an orgasm and ejaculation (not noticed by the editor) that would have appealed to the homosexual T.E. Lawrence: “While a naked man comes swiftly / Like a spurt of white foam.”

He longed for physical contact but was also repelled by it.  As George Herbert, blending the physical and the spiritual, writes: “Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back, / Guilty of dust and sin.”  He had been captured and tortured by the Turks in Deraa and also felt imprisoned in the Tank Corps.  Morris represents Lawrence’s hellish claustrophobic feelings: “Lie I, with life all dark, / Feet tether’d, hands fetter’d, / Fast to the stone, / The grim walls, square-letter’d, / With prison’d men’s groan.”  Shelley’s “Stanzas Written in Dejection near Naples” also expresses Lawrence’s postwar mood, and his intense depression in the Tank Corps when his body was wrecked and his spirit was wounded: “I have not hope nor health, / Nor peace within nor calm around.”

Like Lawrence, Christina Rossetti seeks solace and asks, “But is there for the night a resting-place? . . . Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?”  Ernest Dowson, echoing Ecclesiastes 12:6, also hopes for release from pain: “But once before the sand is run and the silver thread is broken, / Give me a grace and cast aside the veil of dolorous years.”  Laurence Housman echoes this wretched condition: “When like a robe, you lay your body by, / Unloosed at last,–how worn, and soiled, and frayed.”  James Elroy Flecker, again like Lawrence, sees only eternal suffering: “Beneath me lay my Body’s Chain and all the Dragons born of Pain.”  John Donne is afraid he won’t be saved: “I have a sin of fear, that when I’ve spun / My last thread, I shall perish on the shore.”  In “Ode to a Nightingale”, John Keats describes most brilliantly a powerful longing to escape from pain and find relief in death: “Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget / The weariness, the fever, and the fret. . . . Now more than ever seems it rich to die, / To cease upon the midnight with no pain.”

James Shirley’s “Death the Leveller” (1659) bitterly describes the conqueror as victim and predicts that all his great achievements are destined to be eclipsed by death:

The glories of our blood and state

Are shadows, not substantial things. . . .

The garlands wither on your brow;

Then boast no more your mighty deeds!

Upon death’s purple altar now

See where the victor-victim bleeds.

Despite his military triumphs, Lawrence felt wounded, broken and miserable.

George Herbert’s “The Pulley” (1633) is perhaps the greatest and most revealing choice in Minorities.  He writes that when God created man, He gave him a “glass of blessings”:

So strength first made a way,

Then beauty flow’d, then wisdom, honour, pleasure.

But God held back the final gift of peace and calm:

Yet let him keep the rest,

But keep them with repining restlessness;

Let him be rich and weary.

Lawrence had indeed great gifts but was not (as in Herbert’s poem) drawn to God.  Exhausted, restless and tormented, he could not find peace and thrust himself into the penitential barracks.

The epitaph from Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, inscribed on Joseph Conrad’s grave but not included in Minorities, would have afforded some consolation and been appropriate for Lawrence: “Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas, / Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please.”

Jeffrey Meyers has published The Wounded Spirit: A Study of Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1973), T. E. Lawrence: A Bibliography (1974) and T.E. Lawrence: Soldier, Writer, Legend (1989).

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