Whales Weep Not!

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1932

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

Ancient Sensibility Versus Modern Rationality

In the notebooks from which the Last Poems collection are drawn, Lawrence sets the scene in the Mediterranean sea, the vast expanse of water tucked between Europe to the north, and Africa to the south. For Lawrence, the Mediterranean is an ancient body of water, a quasi-mythological space where humans and gods and those in-between could interact with and impact each other. He wanted to return his readers to a mental space in mankind’s distant past; the collection opens, in fact, with “The Greeks Are Coming!”, a poem detailing the return of Greek gods and heroes on their ships.

The ancient Greeks held special significance for Lawrence as representatives of a more “primitive,” and therefore idealized, form of man. In contrast to modern people, Lawrence envisions the Greeks not only as assigning a mysterious spiritual value to all things—as Lawrence himself was inclined to do—but also as displaying a comfort with constant change and metamorphosis (as evoked by Venus’s many transformations in “Whales Weep Not!”). Most importantly, Lawrence believed the Greeks to be hyperattentive to physicality and sensory experience. As he wrote in his Apocalypse, “We have lost almost entirely the great and intricately developed sense-awareness, and sense-knowledge, of the ancients. It was a great depth of knowledge based not on words but on images […] the connection was not logical but emotional” (Apocalypse and the Writings of Revelation, D. H. Lawrence, edited by Mara Kalnins, Cambridge University Press (2002), page 91).

In Lawrence’s poetic universe, modern man’s greatest sin is his willingness to allow his mind to subjugate his more animalistic, sensory-oriented self. The poet’s use of striking, tactile images and lyrically beautiful verse are meant to be provocative, to jar the reader out of their patterns of rational thought. “Whales Weep Not!” is a great microcosm of this technique. In the poem’s lovely, colorful world, the whales—which can be interpreted as idealized humans—are directly likened to the Greek gods that swim alongside them (Line 12). The line between classical deities and humans and animals is blurred, a phenomenon Lawrence would have conceived of as especially Greek. His classical allusions often signify the triumph of this “primitive” desire over modern rationality.

Sex as the Epitome of the Animal (and Human) Experience

While Lawrence looked above to the Greek gods as poetic models for human behavior, he also looked “below” to the animal kingdom. In his private life, Lawrence was fascinated by the natural world. He studied biology in teacher’s college and remained something of a naturalist during his subsequent literary career. One of his earlier collections of poetry, Birds, Beasts, and Flowers (1923), features many works inspired by the natural world. Most, like “Whales Weep Not!”, are sexually charged. Lawrence finds common ground with living things first and foremost in their shared compulsion to reproduce, and he uses musings on this specific subset of animal behavior and motivation to understand human nature more clearly.

For Lawrence, the desire to procreate and the desire to live are inextricably entwined. He makes this connection clear in “Whales Weep Not!” when the body’s life force—the blood—propels the bull whale’s erection and brings him into union with the female whale. Lawrence often equates the act of sex to life itself: To have sex is, fundamentally, to be alive. For Lawrence, this is a truth never forgotten by animals, though apparently forgotten by modern man. As the poet describes in one of his letters, “The source of all life and knowledge is in man and woman, and the source of all living is in the interchange and the meeting and mingling of these two: man-life and woman-life […]” (The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, edited by James T. Bolton, Volume 2, Cambridge University Press (1979-2000), page 181). In his 1929 poem “We Are Transmitters” Lawrence further clarifies: “As we live, we are transmitters of life. / And when we fail to transmit life, life fails to flow through us / That is part of the mystery of sex, it is a flow onwards. / Sexless people transmit nothing.”