… there’s this amazing bit of writing at the end of D.H. Lawrence’s story, Odour of Chrysanthemums, in which a miner’s wife gazes at his dead body laid out in her parlor. Her husband has just suffocated in a sudden mine collapse (his body is still warm). As she prepares his body for burial, she thinks about their lives, and about his death….

Before I quote those lines: Lawrence’s theme is the polar opposite of the theme we’ve all been rather emotional about as we watch long-buried husbands triumph over isolation and darkness. We watch them return to union with life and with their beloved, and our sense of love as the central reality of human existence is deepened.

It’s positively mythic! The return from the underworld… Their eyes, too weak for the radiance of above-ground life, had sunglasses on them… Now gradually they regain that radiance: The love of life, and the love of the beloved.

************************************

In Lawrence, the darkness of the mine has fetched up as the deeper truth of the woman’s life.

… She saw him, how utterly inviolable he lay in himself. She had nothing to do with him. She could not accept it. Stooping, she laid her hand on him, in claim. He was still warm, for the mine was hot where he had died. His mother had his face between her hands, and was murmuring incoherently. The old tears fell in succession as drops from wet leaves; the mother was not weeping, merely her tears flowed. Elizabeth embraced the body of her husband, with cheek and lips. She seemed to be listening, inquiring, trying to get some connection. But she could not. She was driven away. He was impregnable.

… They never forgot it was death, and the touch of the man’s dead body gave them strange emotions, different in each of the women; a great dread possessed them both, the mother felt the lie was given to her womb, she was denied; the wife felt the utter isolation of the human soul, the child within her was a weight apart from her.

… The man’s mouth was fallen back, slightly open under the cover of the moustache. The eyes, half shut, did not show glazed in the obscurity. Life with its smoky burning gone from him, had left him apart and utterly alien to her. And she knew what a stranger he was to her. In her womb was ice of fear, because of this separate stranger with whom she had been living as one flesh. Was this what it all meant—utter, intact separateness, obscured by heat of living? In dread she turned her face away. The fact was too deadly. There had been nothing between them, and yet they had come together, exchanging their nakedness repeatedly. Each time he had taken her, they had been two isolated beings, far apart as now. He was no more responsible than she. The child was like ice in her womb. For as she looked at the dead man, her mind, cold and detached, said clearly: “Who am I? What have I been doing? I have been fighting a husband who did not exist. He existed all the time. What wrong have I done? What was that I have been living with? There lies the reality, this man.”—And her soul died in her for fear: she knew she had never seen him, he had never seen her, they had met in the dark and had fought in the dark, not knowing whom they met nor whom they fought. And now she saw, and turned silent in seeing. For she had been wrong. She had said he was something he was not; she had felt familiar with him. Whereas he was apart all the while, living as she never lived, feeling as she never felt…

Life with its smoky burning gone from him… Great writing.