D.H. Lawrence and the Virgo/Pisces Tension

Marianne Moore isn't mentioned in the Lawrence biography by John Worthen, but she published his poems in The Dial and they exchanged numerous letters. After his death, Moore wrote privately that she had a "deep, indeed reverent regard for him."

Marianne Moore was often characterized as a spinster, yet she learned from feisty and frequently censored D.H. Lawrence that there's "dignity and mystery even in carnality," writes Moore's biographer Linda Leavell. And when Moore heard that some of Lawrence's poems were going to be cut by his publishers, she wrote him a letter of support: "In person you could instruct me in many things... I shall always be a learner at your hand." With his Virgo Sun conjunct her Mars, Lawrence mentors Moore's courage — a courage she displayed when she published Lawrence's 'To Let Go or to Hold on — ?' in the magazine she edited. A poem which contains the word "sperm" five times!

In the poem, Lawrence raises the essential Virgo question:

Or else, or else

shall a man brace himself up

and lift his face and set his breast

and go forth to change the world?

gather his will and his energy together

and fling himself in effort after effort

upon the world, to bring a change to pass?

If Virgo has the keen ability to see the ideal, is Virgo also obligated to try to close the gap between the ideal and the real?

Lawrence's answer to that question is ambivalent and expresses the Virgo/Pisces tension and his own nodal crisis: the measurer vs. the mystic; the drive to improve vs. the habit of release/surrender.

Must we hold on, hold on

and go ahead with what is human nature

and make a new job of the human world?

Or can we let it go?

O, can we let it go,

and leave it to some nature that is more than human

to use the sperm of what’s worth while in us

and thus eliminate us?

Is the time come for humans

now to begin to disappear,

leaving it to the vast revolutions of creative chaos

to bring forth creatures that are an improvement on humans,

as the horse was an improvement on the ichthyosaurus?

Must we hold on?Or can we now let go?

Or is it even possible we must do both?

Lawrence's karmic habit was to let go, "like the sperm of fishes that drifts upon time and chaos." But effort after effort was his greater calling, even if it did make him fractious and fussy at times.

Sources:

Linda Leavell, Holding on Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore.