B&P’s Shadorma & Beyond – Autumn Rain by DH Lawrence – October 1, 2016

Hello Everyone!

Here’s Bastet back at B&P opening the new season of Shadorma & Beyond.  Today I’ll follow the summer lead introduced by Candy, whom we thank sincerely for all her time and inspiring effort.

So, today we’ll look one more time at a poem and reinterpret using the shadorma form … A shadorma is, of course, written with a syllable count of 3/5/3/3/7/5. It can be one stanza or several – so long as each stanza follows 3/5/3/3/7/5.

Autumn can inspire  many feelings, more often than not though they tend to be about the closing and passing of the year.  It’s more autumn than winter that inspires reflections of passing and death.  Spring is the renewal … all things are popping with new life but autumn all that activity is coming to an end.

Today we look at a poem by D. H. Lawrence, published in February of 1917 in the Egoist edited by Dora Marsden and Harriet Shaw Weaver but  written in the autumn of 1916 when Europe was in the throes of the “Great War” so it can be read in the light of that war itself or we can read it in its more naturalistic meaning of the end of the growing season and movement towards death, decay and eventual resurrection.

For an in-depth study of the poem I’ll refer you to Carol Rumens’s poem of the week on the Guardian published almost exactly 100 years later, not so surprising since we’re in the middle of the remembrance of the European 1914-1917 War.

Autumn Rain

The plane leaves
fall black and wet
on the lawn;

the cloud sheaves
in heaven’s fields set
droop and are drawn

in falling seeds of rain;
the seed of heaven
on my face

falling — I hear again
like echoes even
that softly pace

heaven’s muffled floor,
the winds that tread
out all the grain

of tears, the store
harvested
in the sheaves of pain

caught up aloft:
the sheaves of dead
men that are slain

now winnowed soft
on the floor of heaven;
manna invisible

of all the pain
here to us given;
finely divisible
falling as rain.

D. H. Lawrence

@)—>—>—

Autumn Rain

The rain falls
a harvest of tears
black and wet
sheaves of pain
as the stalks droop and are drawn
what was sown is reaped.

Into the cold
no warmth awaits now
dripping rain
falling leaves
no thoughts of resurrection
men are slain – rain falls.

Redemption:
in the falling rain
winter fields
lie fallow
until the awakening
in heaven’s fields set.

Gsk ’16

After you’ve written your Shadorma post it on your own blog. Tag it B&Ps Shadorma and Beyond and MindLoveMisery’sMenagerie, then link it here so we can all read and enjoy your work. Don’t forget to visit and comment on other blogs!

See you soon!