D. H. Lawrence wrote “Sickness” in the shadow of his own tuberculosis, most likely during his final years moving restlessly across Italy and France in search of healthier air. The poem appeared posthumously in *Last Poems*, a collection shaped by Lawrence’s long, intimate acquaintance with bodily decline. Here, sickness is not simply pain or fever but a state of terrible disorientation, in which the simplest physical gesture—a hand reaching into the dark—might accidentally brush against death.
The poem imagines a sick man lying in darkness, his hands “waving slowly before me, pushed into the dark.” Those hands are both guided and unguided, exploring a silence so thick it feels like a substance. Lawrence calls the body a “bark,” drawn “slowly behind,” as if the speaker’s skin has become a dry, heavy shell lagging after his searching hands. The central fear is not that death will arrive dramatically, but that he will stumble into it by mistake: “What if in their flight / My hands should touch the door!” That door, once touched, could swing open before he can pull back. Sickness has dissolved the clear boundary between living and dying, leaving only a blind groping through a room that might not be a room at all.
Lawrence builds the poem in five three-line stanzas. Each begins with a long rhyming couplet—dark/bark, night/flight, door/before, wide/tide, breasts/wrests—and then drops into a shorter unrhymed line, like a footstep falling through the dark. The couplets push forward, but the third line leaves the motion unresolved, mirroring the speaker’s uncertainty. The word “door” becomes the poem’s hinge. It first appears as something the hands might touch, then as something the speaker might “push,” and finally as “the door of eternity.” The enjambment between the second and third stanzas places “the door” at the end of one stanza and “Open” at the start of the next, so the crossing happens in the white space between lines. The long, heavily paused lines—“Waving slowly before me, pushed into the dark”—force the reader to move with the same hesitant, sweeping rhythm as those blind hands.
The imagery turns familiar symbols inside out. “The fleece of night” sounds soft, even woolly, but it also blinds, smothering the face and eyes. Dawn, normally a sign of hope, becomes a “great grey dawn” that “swirls over my feet” and sweeps the speaker down the “tide / Of eternal hereafter.” This is not a gentle passage but a drowning, a loss of footing. The repeated hands are the poem’s real actors: they explore, touch, push, and set wide the door, acting almost independently of the speaker’s will. Only in the final stanza does another person enter: “Catch my hands, my darling, between your breasts.” The word “catch” is urgent, even desperate, interrupting the hands’ dangerous venture. The rhyme of “breasts” with “wrests” places the warmth of a lover’s body directly against the violence of fate, which might otherwise wrench the meaning out of those hands.
What makes “Sickness” significant is its refusal to turn death into a noble confrontation. Instead, death appears as an accident—a door opened because a sick man misjudged the dark. The poem captures how serious illness can strip away agency, leaving a person feeling like a body being led rather than a self making choices. Yet the final plea to “my darling” restores a fragile human claim. Salvation is not religious or heroic; it is another person holding the hands that would otherwise wander into eternity. That blend of cosmic dread and intimate need gives the poem its strange power: a whisper against the horrible dawn.