Whales Weep Not!

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1932

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Literary Context

As an oceanic poem, “Whales Weep Not!” can be situated in a long literary history portraying the sea as an adversarial force to humankind, particularly the human individual. Lawrence’s warm-blooded whales, whom he identifies with people, are contrasted strongly with the cold, unfeeling depths of the ocean. While such characterizations find their origins in the classical literature which inspired Last Poems—namely Homer’s Odyssey, where the sea and its gods play primary antagonists to the hero Odysseus—similar themes can also be found in more contemporary works. The English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for example, touched on similar themes in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798). Later, Ernest Hemingway presents perhaps the most famous literary depiction of this antagonism in his 1951 short novel, The Old Man and the Sea.

The most important literary intertext for “Whales Weep Not!” though, is Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Published in 1851 to resoundingly negative reviews, Moby Dick is now recognized as one of the great American novels, lauded for diving not only into cetacean behavior, but also, human nature. Like Lawrence, Melville was as much a naturalist as he was a poet. Moby Dick is (in)famous for its long-winded, scientific descriptions of whale behaviors, which Melville apparently sourced from both his own experience as a whaler and from his immersion in Nantucket whaler literature and culture.

D. H. Lawrence was unabashedly obsessed with Moby Dick. In his essay on Melville in Studies in Classic American Literature, he describes Moby Dick as “one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world” and “the greatest book of the sea ever written” (Studies in Classic American Literature, D. H. Lawrence, edited by Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen, Cambridge University Press (2003), pages 40 and 146). Lawrence’s effusive praise revived interest in a novel which, in Melville’s own day, was ruthlessly maligned. An especially informative quote sees Lawrence describe the great white whale, Moby Dick, as being “the last phallic being of the white man. […] Our blood-self subjected to our will” (ibid., page 146). The influence of this correlation between masculine sexuality and whales is deeply felt in “Whales Weep Not!”.

Lawrence arguably adapted from Melville not only this metaphorical framework, but also his highly utilitarian perspective on marine life. Lawrence’s detailed (if not always accurate) descriptions of the habits and behaviors of whales may, in fact, be drawn directly from Melville’s book, as Robert Hogan details in his article on whale symbolism in Lawrence (“The Amorous Whale: A Study in the Symbolism of D. H. Lawrence,” Robert Hogan, Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 5 No. 1 (1959), pages 40-1).

Historical Context

D. H. Lawrence was a complex and controversial figure in his time (and our own). Lawrence was noted by contemporaries as harboring potentially anti-democratic and fascist tendencies; he was enamored, for example, with the concept of a benevolent dictator, though he leaned tentatively into a more socialist outlook in his later years (as reflected in his establishment of an artistic commune in New Mexico). Lawrence’s elitist politics were seemingly at odds with not only his own background as the son of working-class parents, but also with the vivid and sympathetic portraits he painted of working-class people in his novels.

Lawrence’s works were also noted for their unusually frank treatment of sexuality and their detailing not only of explicit sexual acts, but also of then-unprintable sexual expletives. “Whales Weep Not!” fits neatly into this category. Lawrence’s most famous novels, The Rainbow (1915) and its sequel, Women in Love (1921), were highly controversial; both were banned in the UK for obscenity. The overt sexuality between the upper-class Constance Chatterley and her gamekeeper in Lawrence’s later novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, meant it was not published in the UK until 1960, despite being released in Italy and France decades earlier (1928 and 1929, respectively). Even then, Lady Chatterley’s UK publisher, Penguin Books, quickly found itself at the center of a sensational censorship trial in the UK in 1960, a full 30 years after Lawrence’s death. The publishing house was accused of being in violation of the Obscene Publications Act of 1959. Penguin was ultimately found not guilty, with the prosecutors ridiculed as being out of touch with the times. This shift in the reaction to Lawrence presaged his reception today, where Lawrence is largely seen as a flawed, difficult individual who nonetheless drove an important conversation forward for “men and women to be able to think about sex, fully, completely, honestly, and cleanly” (A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover' and Other Essays, D. H. Lawrence, Penguin Books (1961), page 89).