'By the turfy road and under the rocks were many flowers: . . . '

The Captain’s Doll, by D.H. Lawrence (1923)

It isn’t true that men aren’t moved by flowers. D.H. Lawrence gushed over flowers and the sentence above, delivered from the point of view of Captain Hepburn in Lawrence’s novella, The Captain’s Doll, is a paean for the dark-purple and blue flowers; for harebells and monkshood that hang pendulously over the mountains in the Tyrol region, where Hepburn and his companion-love, Hannele, the dollmaker, are out climbing. As always with Lawrence, and Shakespeare, flowers press down with heavy symbolic weight, breathing out a heady aroma, grabbing our attention, calling us to halt: to stop and stare. But Lawrence’s passage is full of gush and flow. Flowers run down the slopes like water, bringing their long gush of sensory meaning, their floral tide. The complete, long sentence, produces the effect of walking, uphill and down, in a rush, alongside a stream, vertiginously, giddily, climbing, climbing, with the altitude gradually removing just a little more reason.

By the turfy road and under the rocks were many flowers: wonderful harebells, big and cold and dark, almost black, and seeming like purple-dark ice: then little tufts of tiny pale-blue bells, as if some fairy frog had been blowing spume-bubbles out of the ice: then the bishops-crosier of the stiff, bigger, hairy mountain-bell: then many stars of pale-lavender gentian, touched with earth colour: and then monkshood, yellow, primrose yellow monkshood and sudden places full of dark monkshood.

Lawrence’s captain is in floral ecstasy. But always in Lawrence’s heady, Romantic world, there is something darker breeding beneath the surface: some form of sublime knowledge of nature that lurks in ‘places full of dark’: in the recesses of our covetous, anxious minds that makes us look and look again, as does the Captain.

For Anne, whose knowledge of flowers and their dark secrets, is growing.