ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes a close reading of Lawrence’s dialect poems and shows how in them dialect draws attention to the sonorous materiality of its signs, while the personae repeatedly draw attention to their own physicality. The scenes depicted foreground orality, the phatic function of language, the habits of gossip, that is how words circulate, are literally exchanged, used as weapons or caresses within a community whose members speak a common dialect.
The peculiar poeticized dramatization of these very lively scenes raises the question of Lawrence’s personal voice which is actually heard both in and out of the dialectal speech, at once orchestrating very authentic conversations and indirectly commenting on them with an amused distance.
