ABSTRACT
This chapter utilises the term primitive, or mythic, sensibility to refer to the recreation of what many anthropologists have believed to be the most essential qualities of pre-civilized feeling and thought. The novel, The Rainbow, attempts to gather into a modern sensibility some of the richness and strength of the primitive sensibility without surrendering the poise of the civilized self. D. H. Lawrence has left an especially moving testament to his own natural piety in the matter of death. Dying slowly of tuberculosis and in circumstances of extreme bitterness he seems in some measure none the less to have welcomed the opportunity of facing his death knowingly and with acceptance. The poem The Ship of Death on which he was working as he died is perhaps his most impressive and beautiful achievement in the primitivist spirit.
