D. H. Lawrence wrote “Frohnleichnam” in the stormy early years of his relationship with Frieda Weekley, and it appeared in the 1917 collection Look! We Have Come Through! That collection follows a couple’s flight from England into poverty, exile, and a hard-won union. The title is German for Corpus Christi, the feast of Christ’s body, and Lawrence sets the poem in an upper room above a Bavarian town preparing for that holy day. The speaker and his lover have hurt people to arrive here—she “carelessly,” he “in spite of my care”—but the poem does not ask forgiveness. It declares that their meeting has created a new kind of sacred space.
The central idea is that fully present, embodied love creates its own heaven by renouncing eternity. The speaker says, “At last I can throw away world without end, and meet you / Unsheathed and naked and narrow and white; / At last you can throw immortality off.” They do not want everlasting life; they want the glistening moment and “all your beauty.” The “upper room” quietly recalls the Last Supper and Pentecost, yet here two people, not apostles, become the sacrament. Their dance, their seeing, and their touch replace the religious feast outside. When the speaker says, “As we dance / Your eyes take all of me in as a communication,” mutual seeing becomes a form of holy understanding.
Lawrence builds the poem in free verse, without regular rhyme or meter, but repetition gives it a strong ritual rhythm. The opening parallelism—“You have come your way, I have come my way”—establishes two separate journeys meeting at last. Later, the sequence “Out of the sunshine into the shadow, / Passing across the shadow into the sunlight, / Out of sunlight to shadow” sways like the dance it describes. Short clauses such as “I have done;” and “You glow at last” create breathless arrivals, while longer landscape lines stretch outward from the balcony, as if the lovers’ private moment can hold mountains and rivers.
Imagery grounds the poem in a specific world: bullock-wagons with green and silver birch-trees, growing wheat, a jade-green river, pine-woods, and mountains “flashing with snow and the morning.” The speaker’s quiver goes through him “like the first / Breeze of the morning through a narrow white birch,” tying human feeling to landscape. Whiteness recurs—white birch, white bodies, white mountains—suggesting exposure, clarity, and stripped-back truth. Harsh-sounding words like “shameless,” “callous,” and “indifference” strip love of sentimental purity. These lovers have caused pain, and they love partly out of defiance against the world’s judgments.
The poem matters because Lawrence refuses to separate body and spirit. He takes a Catholic feast and translates it into an intimate ritual of two. Their dance becomes communion, and they make “heaven of our own, sheer with repudiation.” Emerging from Lawrence’s exile and published in a war-shadowed collection, that claim for personal, bodily joy is radical. It still feels daring: two people can sanctify the present moment, not through doctrine or guilt or a promised afterlife, but through the simple, difficult fact of being together.