Red geranium and godly mignonette
D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Red Geranium and Godly Mignonette” was published in 1933, a few years after his death, in the collection “Last Poems of D. H. Lawrence”.
David Herbert Lawrence was born on 11 September 1885 in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England, and he died on 2 March 1930 in Vence, Alpes-Maritimes Department, France, at the age of 44.A writer, novelist, poet, and essayist, Lawrence wrote about modernity, industrialization, sexuality, emotional health, vitality, spontaneity, and instinct. His best-known novels—Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover—were the subject of censorship trials.
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Imagine that any mind ever thought a red geranium! As if the redness of a red geranium could be anything but a sensual experience and as if sensual experience could take place before there were any senses. We know that even God could not imagine the redness of a red geranium nor the smell of mignonette when geraniums were not, and mignonette neither. And even when they were, even God would have to have a nose to smell at the mignonette. You can’t imagine the Holy Ghost sniffing at cherry-pie heliotrope. Or the Most High, during the coal age, cudgelling his mighty brains even if he had any brains: straining his mighty mind to think, among the moss and mud of lizards and mastodons to think out, in the abstract, when all was twilit green and muddy: “Now there shall be tum-tiddly-um, and tum-tiddly um, hey-presto! scarlet geranium!”
We know it couldn’t be done.
But imagine, among the mud and the mastodons god sighing and yearning with tremendous creative yearning, in that dark green mess oh, for some other beauty, some other beauty that blossomed at last, red geranium, and mignonette.