SOURCE: Farr, Judith. “D. H. Lawrence's Mother as Sleeping Beauty: The ‘Still Queen’ of His Poems and Fictions.” Modern Fiction Studies 36, no. 2 (summer 1990): 195-207.

In the following essay, Farr examines the recurring motif of the “Sleeping Beauty” in Lawrence's works from the perspective of the poet's intense affection for his mother.

                    A queen, they'll say, Has slept unnoticed on a forgotten hill. Sleeps on unknown, unnoticed there, until                     Dawns my insurgent day. 

—“On That Day,” New Poems (1918)

To the demon, the past is not past. 

—MS: Discarded Foreward to Collected Poems (1928) (Printed in Appendix I of Complete Poems II 850)

I

D. H. Lawrence's deep and painful love for his mother is one of the best known facts of literary biography. He was himself utterly candid about its nature and effects, writing to Rachel Annand Taylor as Mrs. Lawrence lay dying in 1910, “We have loved each other, almost with...