Resumo de The Rainbow - D.H. Lawrence

THE RAINBOW : A POETIC NOVEL

Bonamy Dobree recommended that Lawrence must be judged by poetic standards: ?? he [ D.H. Lawrence] is primarily a poet, it is as a poet that he must not only be judged, but also tasted and enjoyed.? Though Lawrence won great recognition as a novelist, yet it has also been acknowledged that he was gifted with the genius of a lyrical poet. J.W. Beach suggested that Lawrence is as lyrical and romantic as Meredith and Hardy. Passions and emotions are predominant features of his novels. Lawrence affirmed that he used the novel form to reveal ?the passional secret places of life?.
Lawrence pointed out that his art of characterization in The Rainbow is different from his earlier novels. He is not concerned here with the old stable ego but with the unrecognizable ego within, the basic carbon that constitutes the essence of both coal and diamond and yet which remains radically unchanged despite passing ?through, as it were, allotropic states which it needs a deeper sense? to discover. He indulges in the ever shifting and changing moods and attitudes that are characteristic of human relationship. Moreover, his feelings have an intensity and urgency and like a true lyric poet he is personally involved in the experience of his characters.
His characters pass through various moods as the emotional tide ebb and flow; he enters into their feelings or states of mind and depicts them in his own vivid, concrete and moving language, charged with lyrical fervour. Tom and Lydia, the lovers of the first generation, despite their differences attain fulfillment and the author waxes poetic: ?At last they had thrown open the doors, each to the other, while the light flooded out from behind??.. it was the transfiguration, the glorification, the admission?.
In describing the lovers of the second generation, Lawrence shows the inadequacy which Will suffers and wishes Anna to complete him. Their love reaches culmination in the bliss of matrimonial union, but it soon becomes conflict ridden as Anna tries to strives to be her own self and Will is eager to posses her. The author poetically describes Will?s condition and his desire: ?It was as if he ended uncompleted, as yet uncreated on the darkness, and he wanted her to come and liberate him into the whole.?
In the third generation, the strength of Ursula, her sensitiveness and passionate self-abandonment demand a highly charged description with which Lawrence conveys both the fulfillment and the failure of her relationship with Skrebensky. The moon consummation scene, one of the ritualistic scenes in the novel, describes in poetic terms Ursula annihilating Skrebensky: ?But hard and fierce she had fastened upon him, cold as the moon and burning as fierce salt??? So she held him there, the victim, consumed annihilated. She had triumphed: he was not any more.?
Apart from the poetical descriptions of the relations between different characters, Lawrence excels in poetic descriptions of the landscape. The description of the Marsh farm and the Brangwens in the opening chapter, soaked in poetry and imagery bearing in them the life of the action in meaningful narrative significance, is akin to Hardy in spirit and content. An example will clearly underscore the assertion: ?So the Brangwens came and went without fear of necessity, working hard because of the life that was in them, not for want of themoney??.. But heaven and earth was teeming around them, and how should this cease?? Hardy and Lawrence in their symbolic mould of description impart to the novel some of the qualities of the Elizabethan and Jacobean poetic drama.
The first chapter like a prologue inscapes the rural life and scene through charged language full of metaphoric terms and vibrating rhythms. The linguistic mastery is able to create the life of blood intimacy, the concept so close to Lawrence?s heart, with the magic touch of his poetic pen, and the inextricable physical livingness of the earth and of the men is almost instantaneously invoked. Lawrence often referred to the ?religious and ritualistic rhythm of the year, in human life? ? a rhythm which nourishes faith and hope and reflects human being?s adjustment to the cosmos in its revolutions. The rhythm and imagery in the novel are used to convey that religious and ritualistic rhythm of the year by which man is rendered a witness to his blood-ties with the cosmos. The major trope working to embody this relationship is the one comprising the images of sexual encounter : begetting, seed, intercourse, nakedness, smooth and supple body.
Thus The Rainbow is a poetic novel par excellence. Though Arnold Kettle maintains that the excessive intensity gives the book ?an obsessive quality?, yet it may not be denied that Lawrence?s writing quivers with the pulse beats of life. Perhaps no other prose writer has tried to capture, as Lawrence does, the flickering, leaping and burning human heart in words.

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