Whales Weep Not!

The last portion of “Whales Weep Not!” concentrates on two aspects of the “same” goddess: the Greek Aphrodite and the Roman Venus. Lawrence invokes Aphrodite first, “the wife of whales” (Line 40). As the goddess’s older and more primal form, Aphrodite was concerned with base sexual desire. She was a primordial goddess for the Greeks—in some myths, she even predates the Olympian pantheon—and she is definitively oceanic. One version of Aphrodite’s origin story sees her birthed not through traditional means, but rather from the contact of the sky god Ouranos’s severed genitals with sea foam (an allusion to semen). Like Lawrence (Lines 10 and 38), the Greeks saw a natural connection between the salinity of the ocean and its role as a cradle of life and fertility. In “Whales Weep Not!”, the sea goddess Aphrodite embodies these characteristics and more.

Aphrodite’s Roman incarnation, Venus, on the other hand, is more associated with “proper” romantic love than raw sexual passion. Her transformation was largely affected by the Roman general Julius Caesar and his heir Augustus, Rome’s first emperor. Because their family claimed descent from Venus, the Julio-Claudians had vested interest in stripping the goddess of her unseemly sexual elements. In referencing both Aphrodite and Venus, Lawrence attempts to encapsulate love in all its forms: romantic and sexual.

Lawrence also uses Aphrodite/Venus to allude to some of the more evocative—and provocative—concepts of ancient sexuality. He describes Aphrodite as a “wife of whales” (Line 40), and Venus, too, loves the attention of various male marine animals (Stanza 7). Their apparently free-spirited seduction of animals recalls various ancient myths of bestiality, which detail explicit sexual relationships between human women and animals. As always, Lawrence challenges the reader to imagine making their human rationality subject to their baser, animalistic desires.

Finally, Lawrence uses Venus on a metaliterary level to suggest the transmutability and ever-changing aspects of good poetry. The goddess transforms repeatedly in the final stanza—she is first a she-dolphin, then a porpoise, then a female tunny-fish. Her fluidity reflects Lawrence’s literary philosophy, his determination that a poet never commit to a specific meaning, value, or form. Rather, Lawrence—like other Modernists—seeks to be a conduit for spontaneous thoughts, passively recording truths even as they mutate and change. In this schema, “truth” is never fixed, but is rather believed to be as transient and malleable as human nature itself.