D. H. Lawrence's Dendrophilia

DHL sitting under an olive tree in Italy (1926)

Lawrence is very fond of trees and there are many trees in his writings. In fact, at times, he feels there are too many trees crowding round and staring at him, interfering with his attempts to think about subjects other than trees (such as human babies and the complicated story of their unconscious life). 

The trees, he says, seem so much bigger and stronger in life than we are; so overwhelming in their silence and rather sinister arboreal presences. Lawrence writes, for example, of the magnificent cruelty or barbarous nature of the huge fir trees that grow in the Black Forest:

"It almost seems I can hear the slow, powerful sap drumming in their trunks. Great full-bodies trees, with strange tree-blood in them, soundlessly drumming."

He continues:

"Suppose you want to look a tree in the face? You can't. It hasn't got a face. You look at the strong body of a trunk; you look above you into the matted body-hair of twigs and boughs; you see the soft green tips. But there are no eyes to look into, you can't meet its gaze."

Thus it's pointless staring at a tree in an attempt to know it. All you can do is "sit among the roots and nestle against its strong trunk" in a form of insouciant tree worship and fantasise about becoming-tree, full of root-lust but completely mindless. 

If, at one time, he were frightened of the trees and felt them to be primeval enemies, now Lawrence says they are his "only shelter and strength" and that he is happy to lose himself amongst them and to be with them "in their silent, intent passion and great lust", feeding his soul with their non-human life and indomitable energy. He concludes this rather beautiful (and somewhat erotic) meditation on trees by saying:

"One of the few places that my soul will haunt, when I am dead, will be this. Among the trees here near Ebersteinburg ... I can't leave these trees. They have taken some of my soul."

But we should note, however, that Lawrence's trees - here, and most certainly in his poetry - are not simply natural phenomena; they are also ornamental figures of Gothic resistance forming part of an allegorical landscape that, as Amit Chaudhuri points out, "brings together the natural and the unnatural". 

Ultimately, Lawrence's thinking on trees (and flowers) owes more to Ruskin than to Wordsworth ...

Notes:

The quotations from Lawrence are from Chapter IV of Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). pp. 85-88.

The quote from Amit Chaudhuri is from D. H. Lawrence and 'Difference', (Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 208.