"It's no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You've got to stick to it all your life."
— D.H. Lawrence
D.H. Lawrence, widely recognized for his novels, was also a poet deeply preoccupied with solitude, introspection, death, and humanity’s bond with nature. His time in northern New Mexico, particularly near Taos in the 1920s, intensified these themes as he sought refuge from industrial civilization and his own inner unrest.
Lawrence’s poetry lingers in the uneasy space between solitude as exile and solitude as revelation. It is both a burden and a liberation, a paradox sharpened by his drifting existence and the slow withering of his body.
Stricken with tuberculosis, he wandered, seeking a place where solitude would nourish rather than consume him.
In New Mexico, amid the austere vastness, he found a solitude not of despair, but of elemental force—a silence that did not suffocate, but stirred something raw and untamed. His poetry never bemoans isolation; it wrestles with it and distills life from it.
If you find yourself near Taos (I’m heading there soon), the D.H. Lawrence Ranch stands as a forlorn testament to this tension—a vestige of the solitude that both tormented and sustained him.
Below are some of his brief poems that reflect his love of solitude and the experience of being alone, often tinged with both reverence and melancholy.
Delight of Being Alone
I know no greater delight than the sheer delight of being alone. It makes me realise the delicious pleasure of the moon that she has in travelling by herself: throughout time, or the splendid growing of an ash-tree alone, on a hill-side in the north, humming in the wind.
Lonely, Lonesome, Lonely—O
When I hear somebody complain of being lonely
or, in American, lonesome
I really wonder and wonder what they mean.
Do they mean they are a great deal alone?
But what is lovelier than to be alone?
escaping the petrol fumes of human conversation
and the exhaust-smell of people
and be alone!
Be alone, and feel the trees silently growing.
Be alone, and see the moonlight outside, white and busy and
silent.
Be quite alone, and feel the living cosmos softly rocking,
soothing and restoring and healing.
Soothed, restored and healed
when I am alone with the silent great cosmos
and there is no grating of people with their presences gnawing
at the stillness of the air. Loneliness
I never know what people mean when they complain of loneliness. To be alone is one of life’s greatest delights, thinking one’s own thoughts, doing one’s own little jobs, seeing the world beyond and feeling oneself uninterrupted in the rooted connection with the centre of all things.
The Breath of Life
The breath of life is in the sharp winds of change mingled with the breath of destruction. But if you want to breathe deep, sumptuous life breathe all alone, in silence, in the dark, and see nothing.
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