Whales Weep Not!

D. H. Lawrence opens his poem with an aphorism, or pithy common saying, from a mysterious “they” (Line 1). The poet does not expound on who these people are—perhaps, given Lawrence’s broader poetic philosophy, he’s referencing modern thinkers or writers (see Themes essay “Ancient Sensibility Versus Modern Rationality”). What is clear is that “they,” unlike Lawrence, consider the sea to be “cold” (Line 1). The poet knows better. He does not dispute the coldness of the water, but counters with a nuance of their observation: The sea may be cold, but it contains not only the hottest blood of all, but also the “wildest” and “most urgent” (Line 2).

Lawrence dramatically delays revealing whom this blood belongs to until Stanza 2. The ocean’s whales, he contends, are hot-blooded, and that hot blood propels them forward in constant, passionate motion. Lawrence introduces here the metaphorical, highly sexual language which permeates the rest of the poem. The whales “urge” on and on—a verbal form of the adjective describing their blood in Stanza 1, “urgent”—and Lawrence’s use of sonic repetition here mimics the repetitive, thrusting nature of the sex act. The whales (phallic symbols themselves) repeatedly dive beneath the rounded form of the “icebergs,” which evoke the mons pubis of human women. This connection between the whales’ activity and sexual intercourse is made explicit in Lines 6 and 7. Lawrence makes a double entendre on the famous whaler cry of “there she blows”: the spray from the whales’ blowholes, “hot wild white breath” (Line 6), alludes to orgasm and male ejaculation.

Lawrence keeps the sexual force of the poem rolling with more repetition at the beginning of Stanza 3, but he pulls the lens back a bit, not only in space—he references all the seven seas (Line 9)—but also in time (“the sensual ageless ages,” Line 8). His whales are apparently uninhibited by such human concepts. They are ageless, reveling in the very human feelings of drunkenness and desire, “like gods” (Line 12). The salt mentioned in Line 10 and later, in Line 38, recalls not only the salinity of the sea, but also sexual intercourse. The sweat and bodily fluids produced in sex are salty, too. 

Lawrence again zooms in, this time on one of the poem’s set-piece images: a bull whale having sex with his “bride,” another example of anthropomorphism (Stanzas 3 and 4). Lawrence returns to the image of the blood which so fascinated him in Stanza 1, this time more explicitly tying the fluid’s heat and vitality—and the pulsing thud of the heart—to sexual intercourse. In practical terms, the bull whale’s blood swells his erection (Lines 16-7), but it also represents the very source of his life force, and perhaps of all life.

This union between the bull whale and the female whale, Lawrence suggests, has something distinctly holy about it. The bliss of their mutual pleasure is ferried back and forth by angels—Cherubim, to be specific (Lines 21-9). This theme is continued in the next image, where whale mothers suckle their young in the depths and dream “in the / waters of / the beginning and the end” (Lines 32-3). This wording mimics the Biblical language of alpha and omega, God as both the beginning, end, and everything in-between.

But Lawrence’s vision of whales is not entirely metaphysical. He quickly returns to more concretely biological behaviors, like the bull whales circling and protecting the female whales and their young at the approach of danger (Lines 34-7). But again, these biological observations are tempered by a heavy dose of not only anthropomorphism, but spirituality. The whales are not just female whales, but “women,” and the bull whales protect them like fiery angelic Seraphim (Lines 34-6).

Lawrence is especially interested in using “real” whale behavior to model idealized human behavior. Here in the ocean, he explains, love can thrive “without words”—that is to say, without the many artifices human beings assign to it. The love of whales is an animalistic love, rooted firmly in sensual pleasure; it is love from a time before civilization, a theme Lawrence returns to again and again. He often rejects modern cerebralism in favor of primordial, animalistic sensuality.

Lawrence drives this connection home by shifting first to Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of sexual desire, in Lines 40 and 41. Last Poems often, in fact, uses imagery from Greek mythology to paint a poetic universe before the corruptive entrance of civilization. First Lawrence describes Aphrodite as the wife of the whales, a role which makes her incredibly happy (Lines 40-1). Then, in the form of Venus (the Roman equivalent of Aphrodite), the goddess not only refuses to shy away from male attention; she delights in being in their midst (Line 44). She seems to rapidly transform from one line to the next—she is first a she-dolphin, then a porpoise, then a tuna—hammering home Lawrence’s dedication to poetic fluidity and a lack of rationality. Like the male whales, Venus is “dense with happy blood” (Line 45). In concentrating on her feelings, Lawrence shifts from the male experience to the female experience, ultimately suggesting that both sexes are best served by giving in to their irrational, natural desires.

The poem’s final image, “dark rainbow bliss in the sea” (Line 45), completes the descent into the deep ocean. It mimics katabasis here, a Greek word for the journey into the Underworld. This fixation on darkness is seen elsewhere in Lawrence’s Last Poems, most famously in “The Ship Of Death,” where, like many poets, Lawrence equates darkness with death and human mortality. But interestingly, in “Whales Weep Not!” the darkness has a rainbow hue, evoking, perhaps, the prismatic sparkling of water and its ability to refract color. This paradoxical combination of darkness (the absence of light) and rainbows (light’s purest and most beautiful form) may signal the power of the procreative act, the power of purely sensual “bliss,” to beautify the dreary mortal experience.