The assonance used in the phrase ‘trucks thumped heavily past’ echoes the sound of the woman’s heartbeat as she breathlessly steps aside for the inevitability of what is to come.
The fields take on the mantle of personification when they are described as ‘dreary and forsaken’. The literary devices employed in the depiction of the pit (the heart and life blood of the village) in the sentence “The pit-bank loomed up beyond the pond, flames like red sores licking its ashy sides in the afternoon’s stagnant light,” leave no doubt that Lawrence was describing the gates of hell itself. The assonance of ‘flames like red sores licking its ashy sides’ denotes the sinister hissing sound of the steamy hellish abyss. The simile of flames like red sores only emphasise the awfulness of life centred on this dreadful chasm of despair.
‘The miners, single, trailing …..passed like shadows diverging home’. In the use of the simile ‘like shadows,’ suggest that the miners could be seen as only half alive, or perhaps more accurately, already half dead.
The scene being set by Lawrence is one of futility and inevitability. The emotions suggested are of hopelessness and resignation.
Elizabeth Bates is portrayed as a sad and bitter woman. The rhetorical repetition of ‘bitterly’ confirms this description. She even ‘laughed bitterly’. The house she lives in is covered in ivy. “A large, bony vine clutched at the house, as if to claw down the tiled roof.”The personification of the vine as it ‘clutched at the house’ and the symbolism suggested in that as the house was being smothered and suffocated by the strangling action of the ivy, so too was the relationship between man and wife living under the roof of this meagre cottage. The alliterative use of ‘b’ in the sentences “Round the bricked yard grew a few wintry primroses. Beyond, the long garden sloped down to a bush-covered brook course”, serve further to arouse the sensory perception of coldness in these barren, featureless surroundings.
The simile used in the words “Beside the path hung dishevelled, pink chrysanthemums like pink cloths hung on bushes, give us the first introduction to the eponymous flower.
That they are dishevelled and hanging like cloths not proud and holding their heads high alludes to the demeanour in which Elizabeth, a handsome woman of ‘imperious mien’ now finds herself. In the omniscient narration, Lawrence tells of Elizabeth’s personality, and describes her face as ‘calm and set’ her mouth ‘closed with disillusionment’.
Even her child is sulky when rebuked but quietly defiant when he acknowledges the ‘raspberry canes rose like whips’, a simile used as a menacing image to reveal the boy’s fear of punishment if he should go too far in defying his mother. The further description of her son, who was ‘resentful and taciturn in his movement’, portrays petulance akin to his father’s character, which too, is no doubt under the watchful and beady eyes of this fearsome matriarch.
The child’s petulance is further demonstrated by his actions of tearing at the ragged wisps of chrysanthemums and dropping the petals on the path. A symbolic act of defiance or perhaps a gesture of wilfulness directed at his mother echoing the spitefulness in the relationship between his parents.
In Elizabeth’s pitiful gesture of holding three or four of the wan flowers against her face, perhaps in the vain hope of a vestige of perfume left in the lifeless blooms, she belies her stern manner and resentment in this single gesture of lost youth and femininity. When she places the flowers into her apron-band instead of throwing the fading chrysanthemums aside, a glimmer of hope and beauty in a cheerless world is promised.
When mother and son together look across the bay of lines at the passing home of the miners the suggestion of the father coming home to a lit fire and a warm welcome perhaps do not seem so impossible………….
Brockenhurst College 11th
