ŷ������

“She turned, and saw a great white moon looking at her over the hill. And her breast opened to it, she was cleaved like a transparent jewel to its light. She stood filled with the moon, offering herself. Her two breasts opened to make way for it, her body opened wide like a quivering anemone, a soft, dilated invitation touched by the moon.�� (268)

Re-reading "The Rainbow" after so many years has been like a shattering force of nature. A rampant flood that has washed me anew, a piercing light that has blinded my eyes but stimulated my senses bringing back all the reasons that make of D.H. Lawrence one of my favorite writers of all times.
His falling from grace within the literary circles in recent years led me to take this novel with wariness and apprehension, lest I would be obliged to dethrone one the literary idols of my teenage days.
There was no need for fretting. I met Lawrence again, gasped trying to catch my breath in gulps of stupefaction and drowned in the blissful confusion of Lawrence's engulfing narrative, which was consistently censored during his time for its “obscene and blasphemous" approach to sexuality and for the inherent reproval of the institution of marriage in the corseted post-Victorian society.

Setting the story in the span of three generations of the Brangwen family, Lawrence echoes the opposing rhythms of continuity and change of the rural world of Midlands in the 1840s towards the industrialization of the 20thC and projects the shifting social circumstances onto its characters, which co-exist in ceaseless conflict with their inner male and female groundings and the inexorable breach that separate individuals who instinctively crave for spiritual unity.
The social ideal of marital union appears fractured in front of the sexual experience, which is given the dimension of religious mystery, whereas love surfaces as the “means�� and not the “end�� in itself to cross the bridge of strangeness between independent beings that will steer them towards the so much desired sacred consummation.
It is in the second half of the novel where Ursula, the main protagonist and the third generation of the Brangwen women, epitomizes the combative terrain of human relationships in dark, fluid and almost metaphysical eroticism that transcends gender, class or any other categorization, setting the foundations for the sequel to this novel “Women in Love��.

“Love is a dead idea to them. They don’t come to one and love one they come to an idea, and they say “You are my idea��, so they embrace themselves.�� (288)

Lawrence's prose is the result of a bewildering compendium of biblical allusions, pagan and natural imagery and a profound grasp of the synaptic connections that trigger desire, yearning and the irrepressible urge to abandon the safety of one's individuality to leap into the unknown abyss of another being, to lose grip of self-dominance in favor of frenzied carnal and spiritual lust and to withstand the tempestuous battle of wills inherent in any relationship.
His writing is lyrical but not soothing and saturated with many ongoing contradictions that materialize in rhetorical repetitiousness, alliterations and dense passages reflecting the labyrinthine crevices of the human psyche, combining the realistic tradition, the classic mysticism and a modern diction assimilating the stream of consciousness technique.
From the magnetic lure of the erect church to the pond trembling with the glitter of the full moon, Lawrence seduces and repels, exults and smothers, fuses and tears the reader’s soul apart with his dialectical opposites in constant generative antagonism. And so light upon darkness, fecundity upon death and gloom folded music upon silence draw a vivid, magnificent rainbow as a promise of universal rebirth, wherein love and death burn and melt leaving only the ashes of an indomitable passion. A passion for living.