Pomegranate by D.H. Lawrence

Pomegranate
By D.H.Lawrence

You tell me I am wrong.
Who are you, who is anybody to tell me I am wrong?
I am not wrong.

In Syracuse, rock left bare by the viciousness of Greek
women,
No doubt you have forgotten the pomegranate-trees in
flower,
O so red, and such a lot of them.

Whereas at Venice,
Abhorrent, green, slippery city
Whose Doges were old, and had ancient eyes,
In the dense foliage of the inner garden
Pomegranates like bright green stone,
And Barbed, barbed with a crown.
Oh, crown of spiked green metal
Actually growing!

Now in Tuscany,
Pomegranates to warm your hands at;
And crowns, kingly, generous, tilting crowns
Over the left eyebrow.

And, if you dare, the fissure!

Do you mean to tell me you will see no fissure?
Do you prefer to look on the plain side?

For all that, the setting suns are open.
The end cracks open with the beginning:
Rosy, tender, glittering within the fissure.

Do you mean to tell me there should be no fissure?
No glittering, compact drops of dawn?
Do you mean it is wrong, the gold-filmed skin, integument,
shown ruptured?

For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken.
It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.

San Gervasio in Tuscany 1923



D.H. Lawrence' s novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, and literary criticism earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his “savage pilgrimage.” The first lines of this poem is

You tell me I am wrong.
Who are you, who is anybody to tell me I am wrong?
I am not wrong.


Although at his early death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as, “The greatest imaginative novelist of our generation.” Later, the influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the canonical “great tradition” of the English novel. Much has been made of his book, Lady Chatterly's Lover which is about a woman who falls in love with her husband's game keeper but it is also about the changes in England after World War I. It helped break down the laws of censorship both in Europe and in this country.

I find this poem Lawrence's declaration that he is right about his work and ideas and he uses the Pomegranate to talk about his ideas about love and passion. I see this poem as an artist's right to artistic and creative freedom no matter what the subject is and what others think is morally correct.