D. H. Lawrence, the English novelist and poet born in 1885, published “Submergence” in Amores, a 1916 collection assembled while Europe was being reshaped by the First World War. That backdrop matters less as a direct subject than as a pressure: the speaker carries a private “bereavement,” a loss figured as “the gap in the great constellation, / The place where a star used to be.” Walking along a city pavement, he discovers that the anonymity of a crowd can briefly dissolve that wound.
The poem’s central impulse is not traditional consolation. It offers submersion—the title’s governing metaphor—into the flickering life of passers-by. Lawrence turns the pavement into a night sky: people are “palpitating flames of life,” small bright points that “flicker round me.” The city crowd becomes a galaxy, and the speaker’s loss becomes a vacancy in a once-fixed pattern. When he looks at the moving street, he forgets the missing star, not because the loss is healed but because he is absorbed into a larger, living constellation.
Lawrence works in free verse, but he builds a strong ritual shape. The poem begins and ends with variations of the same “When… I forget my bereavement” movement, so the act of forgetting is framed as repeated, almost habitual, rather than achieved once. The long dependent clauses—“When along the pavement,” “Nay, though the pole-star”—delay the main verb, creating a rhythm of suspension and release, like someone pausing in a crowd and then letting the wave of movement carry them. There is no regular rhyme, but the language rhymes conceptually: “pole-star,” “pleiads,” and the “street’s long outstretched Milky Way” all answer one another across the poem, stitching sky and pavement together.
The vocabulary of light and instability performs the poem’s emotional work. “Flicker” and “blown out like a candle” imply fragility; every flame, human or stellar, can vanish. “Gap” is the most painful word because it names an absence rather than a presence. Yet the street offers “pleiads of people”—a cluster named after the mythological sisters transformed into stars—and a living Milky Way underfoot. These images reverse the usual direction of metaphor: instead of reaching for the stars to describe people, Lawrence uses people to rebuild the sky. “Deployed” suggests order and purpose, as if the crowd has arranged itself to hold the speaker amid his loss. “Palpitating” gives the pavement a heartbeat, so the city is not dead stone but a living body.
The poem is significant because it makes a quiet argument about grief and human presence. Many modernist poems of the same period treat the city crowd as alienating; Lawrence treats it as redemptive, at least for a while. He does not claim the bereavement disappears—the final line returns to “I forget my bereavement,” keeping the loss intact just behind the present moment. The healing, if any, is in submersion: letting the many small lights of other lives carry him, as water would, until the missing star is momentarily not the only thing visible.