Guards! D. H. Lawrence and the Potency of Men

Guards erect with breasts bright red 

and the skins of bears upon their head

All the nice girls love a sailor, so they say [1].

 

But for D. H. Lawrence, it's all the king's soldiers who catch his eye; especially those guards marching stiffly in red tunics and black busbies in whom phallic pride and sun glory is manifest in equal measure. 

 

This is made clear in the early poem 'Guards' [2], where he writes of smouldering soldiers with dark eyes and closed warm lips who advance upon him in a soft-impulsive but somewhat threatening manner, like a wave, before then turning, leaving him to admire their burning shoulders in retreat. 

 

The encounter is clearly, for Lawrence, one with homoerotic overtones. I don't agree with everything that Gregory Woods writes, but it's hard to argue with his claim that in the section of 'Guards' entitled 'Evolution of Soldiers', "their apparent evolution is similar to that of a penis, through tumescence and detumescence" [3]. 

 

Expanding on his theme, Woods continues:

 

"Perspective causes each man to seem to grow as he approaches with red tunic, black busby and 'dark threats'. He passes 'above us', in the classic position of sexual advantage. At 'ebb-time', when the group has just passed by, its phalluses remain erect for a glorious moment, before subsiding." [4]  

 

 

II. 

 

Almost twenty years later, and Lawrence is still thinking of the soldiers in Hyde Park he saw in the summer of 1909. 

 

In a letter sent to Harry Crosby in 1928, he encloses an extended version of 'Guards' - one with an unpublished third section which describes the soldiers as a "column of flesh erect and painted vermillion" and as "Sun-dipped men [...] all blood-potent", who have come together in their maleness [5].

                   

Again, you don't need to be an expert in queer studies to appreciate that this verse is invested with erotic desire for the male body: "And the male body is the symbol of its own sexual focus, the phallus." [6] 

 

Thus, whilst there is "no questioning the fact that his art is primarily hetero-erotic in intention" [7], Lawrence also loves daydreaming about the potency of men and phallic heroes dipped in scarlet.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] "Ship Ahoy! (All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor)" is an English music hall song from 1908, written by Bennett Scott and A. J. Mills. The song was first performed by male impersonator Hetty King.  

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Guards!', in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 34-35. 

      As Pollnitz notes: "DHL regularly visited Hyde Park, in central London. He planned to take Louie Burrows there in July 1909 as he had Jessie Chambers on an earlier visit [...]." See The Poems, Vol. II, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press 2013), p. 843. Whether either young woman was particularly interested in seeing soldiers on parade, I don't know, but Lawrence adored the spectacle of erect young men in uniform marching past.   

 

[3] Gregory Woods, Articulate Male Flesh: Male Homo-eroticism and Modern Poetry, (Yale University Press, 1987), p. 130.  

 

[4] Ibid.  

[5] See Lawrence's letter to Harry Crosby [30 April - 1 May 1928], in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton, with Gerald M. Lacy, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 388-390. The third part of 'Guards' is entitled 'Potency of Men' and consists of five rhyming quatrains. It is reproduced in full on pp. 388-89 from Lawrence's MS.  

[6] Gregory Woods, Articulate Male Flesh, pp. 130-31. 

[7] Ibid., p. 137. 

 

 

To read a sister post to this one, on Lawrence's extended version of the poem 'Gipsy' contained in the Crosby letter, click here. 

On the Queer Love Affair at the Heart of Quetzalcoatl

Quetzalcoatl was Lawrence's first version of the novel that would be published after extensive rewriting as The Plumed Serpent three years later in 1926. Both works examine political, religious and racial issues and both feature an Anglo-Irish heroine called Kate whose ambivalence about the sort of life she is offered in Mexico reflects Lawrence's violent attraction-repulsion to a culture so profoundly alien to his own.

Whilst this is not the place to offer a full and serious reading of the text, there is nevertheless one aspect of the novel that I would like to comment on here; namely, the queer relationship between Ramón and Cipriano. 

Although described by Kate's cousin Owen as "a David and Jonathan couple without any love" [38], there is nevertheless a kind of perverse dynamic at play; Cipriano is clearly enthralled by Ramón and ultimately their hearts beat in unison. Lawrence writes: 

"The two had known each other for some years. ... But they had never been really intimate. They had kept aloof ... although all the time they knew there was some secret bond between them. A bond which must one day assert itself." [114]

And so it is that when not endlessly staring into one another's eyes and discussing the nature of their manhood, Ramón and Cipriano like to engage in homoerotic games of domination and submission. Thus the interesting scene in Chapter VII when Ramón presses his hands over Cipriano's eyes and the latter promises to obey him, having felt a dark fountain of life rise up within him. He then drops to his knees and kisses the bare feet of the other man - an act that causes Ramón's heart to stand still.   

Later, in Chapter XV, there is a far more explicit scene between the two. Ramón approaches Cipriano from behind and again places his hands over the younger man's eyes, pressing them shut. "Cipriano, startled, braced himself to resist", before relaxing beneath the "soft, firm pressure of the hands that darkened him". As Cipriano drifts into a state of blissful semi-consciousness, he allows Ramón to penetrate him in his depths. Keeping one hand held tightly over Cipriano's eyes, Ramón "pressed the middle finger of the other hand over a certain awake place at the base of Cipriano's spine", making his soul tremble, until, finally, Cipriano dissolves into the joy of complete surrender and felt himself passing into a kind of death that was "infinitely satisfying" [241].

I would concede that there is a certain Lawrentian vagueness about this scene, meaning we can never be entirely sure what has happened. In the explanatory notes provided by the Cambridge editor we are led to believe it's an esoteric passage to do with chakras and the serpent-power of kundalini. However, it sounds to me very much as if Ramón has simply finger-fucked Cipriano and treated him to a prostate massage. 

Either way, Cipriano is a different man afterwards and he has to reconcile himself to this and learn how to treasure what has passed between him and Ramón as his "innermost secret" [243]. If he still wants a woman - still wants Kate as a wife - nevertheless it is to Ramón he returns whenever he wants to rediscover his most impersonal and demonic self. 

Note: page references refer to the Cambridge University Press edition of Quetzalcoatl, (2011), ed. N. H. Reeve.