SOURCE: Wright, T. R. “Last Poems: final thoughts.” In D. H. Lawrence and the Bible, pp. 245-51. Cambridge, Great Britain: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Wright traces the appearance of Scripture phrases in Lawrence's Last Poems, and discusses Biblical influences on the poet's works throughout his career.

Lawrence's last years at Bandol from November 1928 onwards saw a regeneration of his interest in poetry which was to result in four volumes of verse: Pansies (1929), Nettles (1930), More Pansies and Last Poems, the last two edited from his notebooks by Richard Aldington in 1932. The word ‘pansies’, as Lawrence explains in his introduction to the volume, derives (in Derridean fashion) from a conflation of the French for to think (penser) and to soothe (panser) ([The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence] CP 417). Sandra Gilbert, acknowledging their spontaneous, deliberately rough and fragmentary quality, calls them ‘inspired graffiti’ (Gilbert 1990: 259). Nettles are particularly...