The Crown

The Crown by D.H. Lawrence (1915)

"The Crown" is D.H. Lawrence's wartime philosophical essay, first published in 1915 in *The Signature*, constructed around the heraldic emblem of the lion and the unicorn locked in eternal combat beneath an unclaimed crown. Lawrence uses this image as an extended metaphor for the fundamental duality he sees governing all existence: the opposition between darkness and light, flesh and spirit, power and love, the Beginning and the End. He argues that the lion (representing power, darkness, the primal source, the Old Testament God) and the unicorn (representing purity, light, spiritual aspiration, the New Testament ideal) are not fighting to win the crown. Rather, the crown—the Absolute, the timeless moment of consummation—rests upon their opposition itself. Neither can defeat the other without both perishing, since each exists only in relation to, and by virtue of, its opposite. Lawrence insists that any attempt to force reconciliation ("the lion shall lie down with the lamb") or to let one side triumph absolutely is a blasphemy against the true nature of being, which requires perpetual, balanced tension rather than resolution. Humanity, Lawrence writes, exists "within the womb" of its historical era, suspended between the two infinities of origin and destiny, craving a birth into new being that the exhausted, rigid forms of contemporary civilization can no longer deliver. The individual is likened to fruit that cannot fall from a withered tree, or an unborn child trapped in a womb whose walls have lost their capacity to labor and deliver. Denied true consummation—the fusion of darkness and light into the "iris," the rainbow, the foam where two waves clash—the self collapses inward, mistaking its own enclosed, sterile condition for completeness. This is the birth of the "ego": a false, static self that declares itself absolute and entire, refusing further growth, and increasingly given over to processes of "reduction" or "corruption" rather than creation. Lawrence traces this pathology through literature and history: David's spiritual sterility despite his triumphs, Dostoevsky's characters Dmitri Karamazov and Prince Myshkin as figures of destructive and introspective disintegration respectively, and the doomed self-completion of tyrants such as Caesar and Napoleon, whose very triumphs guaranteed their downfall, since triumph itself is a "false absolution" that supplants genuine consummation with vain egoism. He contrasts creatures who achieve true, timeless consummation—the tiger, the phoenix, the flowering weed caught for an instant between earth and heaven—with those trapped in arrested, self-perpetuating decay: the vulture, the hyena, the baboon, which he presents as grotesque, "static" images of an aristocratic will and a democratic will each hardened into obscene, carrion-feeding permanence. The essay turns explicitly to contemporary Europe and the First World War, which Lawrence reads as society's monstrous, externalized expression of this same inward sterility and craving for sensation. Modern man, walled up inside a "glassy envelope" of self-satisfied, completed selfhood—bourgeois complacency, humanitarianism, scientific analysis, sexual and social "reduction"—can no longer create, only dissolve, and seeks in war and violence the sensational "reduction" and contact with death that his hollow, ego-bound existence otherwise denies him. He describes a maimed soldier on a pier, radiant with a kind of terrible completeness born of his brush with death, besieged by onlookers hungry to vicariously share that consummation—an emblem of a culture addicted to destruction as its only remaining mode of intensity. Yet Lawrence insists destruction and corruption are not simply evil in themselves; they are one half of the necessary duality, the "flux" by which old, dead forms are broken down to permit new creation. What is truly evil is the "static will," the rigid, self-perpetuating form—whether an ossified social order, a fixed moral absolute, or the entrenched ego—that seeks to arrest this flux, contain corruption within an intact shell, and endure unchanged, becoming a spiritually undead "sepulchre." True being, by contrast, is achieved only fleetingly, in the "spark" or "Holy Ghost" generated at the meeting-point of the two eternities—an event outside time altogether, comparable to the momentary appearance of a rainbow or the blossoming of a flower, which cannot be fixed, preserved, or repeated, only continually re-achieved. The essay closes on the necessity of breaking through the deadened, mannered forms of present human relationship and consciousness—the false, inherited conceptions of self, sun, earth, and other people—into a fresh, direct, and ever-renewed relatedness with a transfigured universe, arguing that only through such perpetual consummation, not through any fixed doctrine or permanent institution, can humanity attain what Lawrence calls immortality: not endless duration, but achieved, absolute being.

By D.H. Lawrence · First published 1915 · Genre: Philosophical Essay, Metaphysical Literature, Spiritual Writing · 6 chapters · 27,210 words

First lines

What is it then, that they want, that they are forever rampant and unsatisfied, the king of beasts and the defender of virgins? What is this Crown that hovers between them, unattainable? Does either of them ever hope to get it?

But think of the king of beasts lying serene with the crown on his head! Instantly the unicorn prances from every heart. And at the thought of the lord of chastity with the crown ledged above his golden horn, lying in virgin lustre of sanctity, the lion springs out of his lair in every soul, roaring after his prey.

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philosophical · metaphysical · dualism · essay · existential · political · social-commentary · conflict · nature · spirituality · power-dynamics · consciousness

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