Reply #8: Also Lawrences letters from Italy and his three books on Italy

[Trevelyan]

Sea and Sardinia, Etruscan Places and Twilight in Italy have a lot about the rituals of the Catholic church including whole villages turning out for processions which retained some of the "pagan" or "collective unconsious" needs which are written about beautifully in "The Marble Faun" as well.

DH Lawrence would sometimes make fun of the Catholic church but other times would write very sensitively about how the Catholic church filled deep needs like the Feast Days keeping a sense of the rhythms of the year. And Pasternak's novel "Dr. Zhivago has some similar passages that are very beautiful and true.

Lawrence also writes beautifully of the "Afterworld" scenes painted in Etruscan tombs and the other objects buried like jewelry and little ships to help people to pass into the next world "Michael Row the Boat Ashore" "Crossing Jordan". At the end of his life, the last book Lawrence read was about Christopher Columbus and DHL wrote a long poem "I will build my ship of death" which Dylan Thomas made a showpiece in his stage tours of recitations of poems. I was surprised because Dylan Thomas wrote so many poems himself. DHL's wife's daughter who nursed him in his last illness wrote that DHL was interested in the quote from "Peter Pan" "Death must be a very great adventure."