Poetry day! D.H. Lawrence

A few days ago, in one of my classes, we went to the archives and looked at some of the stuff from the Lawrence collection. The archivist had brought out for us a kind of series of the development of this one poem, from the early notebooks to the final (in his lifetime) published version. There are essentially three versions of this poem: the first is called "Last Words to Muriel" and the final two are "Last Words to Miriam." It is an overwhelmingly sexual poem, so if you're uncomfortable with me talking about sex, stop reading now. You have been warned.

The way I read it, the poem tells the story of the speaker's first time with Muriel/Miriam, who is a virgin. It does not go well, and the speaker feels...bad about it? At least, that's the impression I get from the first two versions. Some of it I genuinely don't understand - some of it may be punctuation errors - but I can't quite parse it. However, some of it I do get, and it's kind of disturbing. There's a distinct change in perspective between the first two versions and the last, and it bothers me.

In the first two versions, the speaker is the seducer. He recognizes his role in the events, acknowledges it, and accepts it. It is a little bit Pygmalion-esque, to be sure [Mine was the love of the sun for a flower / He creates with his shine. / I was diligent to explore you / Blossom you stalk by stalk] but he's the speaker, he's allowed to be a little bit selfish. At least he's consistent with it: he is definitely the initiator in this version.

But then the last version turns all that around. Instead of the speaker being the sun, now she is. [Mine was the love of a growing flower / For the sunshine. / You had the power to explore me, / Blossom me stalk by stalk] Miriam is now the seducer, the one with the power and control. The poor innocent poet is as helpless as a flower responding to the sunshine.

This makes the next bit a little bit odd:

You yielded, we threw the last cast,
And it was no good.

You only endured, and it broke
My craftsman's nerve.

Question 1: If she is the seducer, why is she the one yielding? Why is she only enduring? If she's the seducer, isn't this what she wants? Isn't she the one taking charge? Do I have the definition of seducer wrong?
Question 2: If she is the seducer and he is just a flower responding to the sunshine, where did he develop this craftsman's nerve? And isn't that a little bit overconfident in his abilities? (As we shall see further on in the poem...)

And then, the word that is the bane of my existence. Granted, I am overly sensitive to this word because of past experiences. But be that as it may, this is where he completely loses my sympathy:

No flesh responded to my stroke;
So I failed to give you the last
Fine torture you did deserve.

"So" is a causal conjunction. It signals a cause-effect relationship between the clauses that it is joining. This happened, so that happened. This caused that. There is no other reading when you use "so." If you want to imply mutual fault, use "and." By using "so," the speaker is blatantly blaming the girl's unresponsiveness for his failure. First he blames her for seducing him, then he implies that he has to do all the work, and then he blames her for his failure.

Don't use the word "so". I'm just saying.

The next-to-last stanza is also troubling to me.

Since the fire has failed in me,
What man will stoop in your flesh to plough
The shrieking cross?

Let's ignore the vulgarity of "to plough the shrieking cross" and focus instead on the insufferable smugness of the opening clause. It reads to me like "who's going to want you now?" Like he's the best lover she could ever hope for, so if he failed no one else even has a chance. (That is a correct use of the word "so.") That's right, ladies, what Lawrence is telling you here is that, if your first time doesn't go well, you are doomed to a life of pain and celibacy. You couldn't come with him, so you will never have sex again. And, by the way, it's your fault, you frigid seductress.

I'm so disappointed in Lawrence with this poem. I stick up for him a lot - of the "big three" of the modernists (Joyce and Woolf being the others) I like him the best, and I will defend Lady Chatterley's Lover to anyone, but the third version of this poem seems so misogynistic and wrong - worse even than Sons and Lovers, which also disturbed me. I definitely liked the second version of it better. Someone in class commented on the move to "aesthetic perfection" with this poem, implying that the third version is more beautiful than the first two, but for me, if it doesn't have emotional consistency as well, then it fails. And the third version just doesn't have emotional consistency. Fail, Lawrence.