The Ship of Death By D.H.Lawrence

By: Bijay Kant Dubey

I

Now it is autumn and the falling fruit

and the long journey towards oblivion.

The apples falling like great drops of dew

to bruise themselves an exit from themselves.

And it is time to go, to bid farewell

to one’s own self, and find an exit

from the fallen self.

II

Have you built your ship of death, O have you?

O build your ship of death, for you will need it.

The grim frost is at hand, when the apples will fall

thick, almost thundrous, on the hardened earth.

And death is on the air like a smell of ashes!

Ah! can’t you smell it?

And in the bruised body, the frightened soul

finds itself shrinking, wincing from the cold

that blows upon it through the orifices.

III

And can a man his own quietus make

with a bare bodkin?

With daggers, bodkins, bullets, man can make

a bruise or break of exit for his life;

but is that a quietus, O tell me, is it quietus?

Surely not so! for how could murder, even self-murder

ever a quietus make?

IV

O let us talk of quiet that we know,

that we can know, the deep and lovely quiet

of a strong heart at peace!

How can we this, our own quietus, make?

V

Build then the ship of death, for you must take

the longest journey, to oblivion.

And die the death, the long and painful death

that lies between the old self and the new.

Already our bodies are fallen, bruised, badly bruised,

already our souls are oozing through the exit

of the cruel bruise.

Already the dark and endless ocean of the end

is washing in through the breaches of our wounds,

already the flood is upon us.

Oh build your ship of death, your little ark

and furnish it with food, with little cakes, and wine

for the dark flight down oblivion.

VI

Piecemeal the body dies, and the timid soul

has her footing washed away, as the dark flood rises.

We are dying, we are dying, we are all of us dying

and nothing will stay the death-flood rising within us

and soon it will rise on the world, on the outside world.

We are dying, we are dying, piecemeal our bodies are dying

and our strength leaves us,

and our soul cowers naked in the dark rain over the flood,

cowering in the last branches of the tree of our life.

VII

We are dying, we are dying, so all we can do

is now to be willing to die, and to build the ship

of death to carry the soul on the longest journey.

A little ship, with oars and food

and little dishes, and all accoutrements

fitting and ready for the departing soul.

Now launch the small ship, now as the body dies

and life departs, launch out, the fragile soul

in the fragile ship of courage, the ark of faith

with its store of food and little cooking pans

and change of clothes,

upon the flood’s black waste

upon the waters of the end

upon the sea of death, where still we sail

darkly, for we cannot steer, and have no port.

There is no port, there is nowhere to go

only the deepening black darkening still

blacker upon the soundless, ungurgling flood

darkness at one with darkness, up and down

and sideways utterly dark, so there is no direction any more

and the little ship is there; yet she is gone.

She is not seen, for there is nothing to see her by.

She is gone! gone! and yet

somewhere she is there.

Nowhere!

VIII

And everything is gone, the body is gone

completely under, gone, entirely gone.

The upper darkness is heavy as the lower,

between them the little ship

is gone

she is gone.

It is the end, it is oblivion.

IX

And yet out of eternity a thread

separates itself on the blackness,

a horizontal thread

that fumes a little with pallor upon the dark.

Is it illusion? or does the pall or fume

A little higher?

Ah wait, wait, for there’s the dawn,

the cruel dawn of coming back to life

out of oblivion.

Wait, wait, the little ship

drifting, beneath the deathly ashy grey

of a flood-dawn.

Wait, wait! even so, a flush of yellow

and strangely, O chilled wan soul, a flush of rose.

A flush of rose, and the whole thing starts again.

X

The flood subsides, and the body, like a worn sea-shell

emerges strange and lovely.

And the little ship wings home, faltering and lapsing

on the pink flood,

and the frail soul steps out, into the house again

filling the heart with peace.

Swings the heart renewed with peace

even of oblivion.

Oh build your ship of death, oh build it!

for you will need it.

For the voyage of oblivion awaits you.

The Ship of Death taken from Last Poems is one of those longer poems of D.H.Lawrence wherein he asks us to get the ship of death built and to be ready as for the dark journey of oblivion to begin. The writer who is famous for endowing his novels with sexual mysticism and the dreams of love and beauty psychologically here mesmerizes with religious mysticism and a mythical base of own which we find it in his The Lost Girl and The Plumed Serpent and the travelogues. A Georgian, an imagist, Lawrence as a poet is very casual, apart from occasional, conversational, circumstantial, autobiographical and sketchy often, but sometimes serious too whose mark we can see it here in this poem. The poetical piece, The Ship of Death though full of repetitions is almost like W.B.Yeats’ Sailing To Byzantium. Endowed with a nice poetic genius which but we cannot deny it, he spoils it after taking  casually and switching over to novels for a poetic lucidity to impart with. Poetic tidbits, chit-chats disturb the readers in assessing them. But the present poem is like Donne’s Death, Be Not Proud, Keats’ The Terror of Death, Tennyson’s Crossing The Bar, Rossetti’s Up-hill, Whitman’s Crossing Brooklyn Ferry. The Ship of Death is but the dark journey of oblivion he speaks of as it has come down to us during his last stage of life when he was but a dying man afflicted with tuberculosis.

Now it is the autumn time and the apples have started falling down. So it is time to get ready for to set out on the final journey of life which to begin and to be prepared for going. It is time to bid farewell, to bid goodbye forever. The ship will sail away floating on the waters.

The starting lines of the poem begin the poetic narrative against the backdrop of the autumn and falling fruits. Shrouded in mystery, mist, dew and gloom, the journey will start. And man has to go, go as a pilgrim, as a voyager, as a tourist, a traveler, a passenger, a pedestrian. The autumn time and the shipman, the mariner alighting on a travel and launching the ship into the waters add to the journey of the poem. It is time to bid farewell and to move away:

Now it is autumn and the falling fruit

and the long journey towards oblivion.

The apples falling like great drops of dew

to bruise themselves an exit from themselves.

And it is time to go, to bid farewell

to one’s own self, and find an exit

from the fallen self.

One man cannot end up one’s life so easily. It is really that quietude composes in, but the tumult takes over, how to relate it? This has invigorated him for so long, nourished the soul and the body.

O let us talk of quiet that we know,

that we can know, the deep and lovely quiet

of a strong heart at peace!

How can we this, our own quietus, make?

A peaceful life and its bounties are definitely blissful. But what is that to release him from? What it to give quietus?

But the ruffle saying it differently, the water in ripples is the panorama of the seascape. So there is no option left to confide in rather than sailing out and going on the journey:

Build then the ship of death, for you must take

the longest journey, to oblivion.

And die the death, the long and painful death

that lies between the old self and the new.

The transmigration of the soul has a process of own to undertake and the chasm between the old self and the new self is phantasmal. The Bhagavad-gita too speaks of the same as the poet keeps it narrating.

The below-quoted lines tell of a sick and ailing body with the soul lodged in:

And in the bruised body, the frightened soul

finds itself shrinking, wincing from the cold

that blows upon it through the orifices.

The bruised body and the frightened soul are the states through which he has tried to coax us into a make-believe imagery, but the reality of life too is the same when the body lies it frail and ailing.

Jerome K.Jerome’s Packing is humorous and all that he has to says he humouously with regard to packing and to be on the journey. But The Ship of Death is a sort of packing, Jerome’s Packing in a metaphysical strain, full of religious and spiritual overtones and undertones. Sometimes the description us to the Pharoahs and their burial rites, the pyramids and mummies.

A poet counting the last days of his life is the point of deliberation and his expression is one grappling with death, the fear of dying and passing into oblivion. There are a few Yama poems written by Tagore and included in Gitanjali.  What to do it now rather than sailing the ship, getting it built. Fraught with such an imagery which keeps him engaging the mindscape and mental plane, the poet thinks of death, opines about and struggles hard to move out of this siuation:

We are dying, we are dying, so all we can do

is now to be willing to die, and to build the ship

of death to carry the soul on the longest journey.

The below-referenced stanza brings to our memory the scenes and sites of Coleridge’s The Rime of The Ancient Mariner:

Now launch the small ship, now as the body dies

and life departs, launch out, the fragile soul

in the fragile ship of courage, the ark of faith

with its store of food and little cooking pans

and change of clothes,

upon the flood’s black waste

upon the waters of the end

upon the sea of death, where still we sail

darkly, for we cannot steer, and have no port.

The ark of faith with the sick body and the ailing soul and the goods loaded onto, where to go, where the ship to take it away? Where to drift into the sea of death? There is no lighthouse to show the beacon light. There is darkness all around the fathomless sea. No ports, no harbours, no seashores are visible to come to rescue out of it. In the Bible, Noah built a vessel to save his family and the animals to save them from the flood.

The lines hereunder our discussion tell of the change in situation, the shift in imagery as the poet is in a state of being transformed, metamorphosed: 

Wait, wait, the little ship

drifting, beneath the deathly ashy grey

of a flood-dawn.

Wait, wait! even so, a flush of yellow

and strangely, O chilled wan soul, a flush of rose.

A flush of rose, and the whole thing starts again.

The words, ‘ a flush of rose’ and ‘the whole thing starts again’ take us to the plane of creational time when after a tryst the whole reverses it again, to re-start.

The picture is like that of Look, Stranger of Auden and Dylan Thomas’ Poem in October, Auden describing the ships and cargoes going as does John Masefield in Sea Fever and Dylan writing about his birthday celebration near the harbor or sea-port town, but in a different context. Let us see how the ship keeps tumbling over, vanishing out of sight. What to say about the body, what about the soul, the body carrying the soul? The soul remains lodged in as long as the body is and when the body itself grows weak and pale, the clock gets it dismantled from the tower, dilapidates and totters to fall down.

The below-quoted lines themselves put it in words:

And everything is gone, the body is gone

completely under, gone, entirely gone.

The upper darkness is heavy as the lower,

between them the little ship

is gone

she is gone.

It is the end, it is oblivion.

The last stanza of the poem reiterates the same theme with a note of assertion to build it:

Oh build your ship of death, oh build it!

for you will need it.

For the voyage of oblivion awaits you.

There are several versions and texts of the poem, revisions and editions of it which the poem has undergone naturally and it speaks of the theme in volumes and similar is the case with Wordsworth’s Prelude and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. The Ship of Death as a poem is one of a mythical base and imagery wherein the terror of death restrained to some extent with the tell-tale narrative. But we are not sure of it where this journey will end up, where the ship will take to finally. There is something of the Hindu view of life which we see it during the pinda-dana rituals, when the mantras for the solace of the bereaved and departed soul with a handful of  food grains and water is given, when dana, gifts and donations are made in forms of materials for the dead soul needed for his journey from earth to heaven, as for example, dish, cup, plate, bed sheet, pillow, slippers, umbrella, foodstuffs, etc. There is also something like that of the Buddhist content when he talks of the rose, the dawn or lotus-like observation. This samsara is of suffering as well as a way to be out of for the nirvana. But how to mitigate the element of pain? How to get relief after bhoga?  How to lessen it bhoga? The sun motif is very strong in him which we may find it in Wilfred Owen too. 

The Ship of Death as a poem is one from a dying man, a dying poet as Keats has Ode to a Nightingale. William Wordsworth too makes us speechless and spell-bound when he speaks of the death of Lucy Gray in A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal and Strange Fits of Passion. C.G.Rossetti’s Up-hill too speaks of the winding up-hill journey of life and the pilgrim exasperated with travel-sore and fatigue resting in an inn.