SOURCE: "'The Passionate Struggle into Conscious Being': D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow," in The D. H. Lawrence Review, Vol. 7, No. 3, Fall, 1974, pp. 275-90.

In the following essay, Brown interprets The Rainbow in light of Lawrence's writings on human consciousness.

At the beginning of The Rainbow the experience of the early Brangwen men and the kind of relationship they have with their world are described:

They felt the rush of the sap in spring, they knew the wave which cannot halt, but every year throws forward young-born on the earth. They knew the intercourse between heaven and earth, sunshine drawn into the breast and bowels, the rain sucked up in the daytime, nakedness that comes under the wind in autumn, showing the birds' nests no longer worth hiding. Their life and interrelations were such; feeling the pulse and body of the soil, that opened to their furrow for the...