This passage paints a vivid picture of the Wragby grounds during the early morning hours through visual and auditory imagery, as Constance and Clifford set off on the path around the park:
The sheep coughed in the rough, sere grass of the park, where frost lay bluish in the sockets of the tufts. Across the park ran a path to the wood-gate, a fine ribbon of pink. Clifford had had it newly gravelled with sifted gravel from the pit-bank. When the rock and refuse of the underworld had burned and given off its sulphur, it turned bright pink, shrimp-coloured on dry days, darker, crab-coloured on wet. Now it was pale shrimp-colour, with a bluish-white hoar of frost.
Although it is naturally beautiful, the landscape as it’s described here carries subtle undertones of decay and discomfort. Everything is attractive on the surface, but there’s a sense of stagnation, rot, and misplacement throughout. The sensory language of sound contains the passage’s first clue that something isn’t quite right. The mention of sheep "coughing" in the "rough, sere grass" is harsh and unexpected. Rather than the gentle bleating one might expect from a country scene, the sheep sound unhappy and diseased. This sound imagery gives the reader a sense that the stillness of the morning is being disturbed by the sheep, rather than seeming more pleasant and rustic.
The visual imagery further emphasizes the estate's unsettling aura. The newly graveled path that the Chatterleys are descending is a "fine ribbon of pink," which on its own might seem whimsical and charming. However, the source of this “pink” is revealed to be from the "rock and refuse of the underworld." It’s not stone that naturally belongs to this landscape, but the debris of Clifford's industrial mining. The language here all suggests that things have been brought to the surface that should have been left below. The “sulphur” it gives off is another reference to an unpleasant subterranean world, as the Christian version of Hell is supposed to smell like sulfur and burning things.
Lawrence expands this idea with descriptions of the path’s colors—on dry days, the gravel is "shrimp-coloured," and on wet days, it's "crab-coloured." The rocks of the path don’t look like pink flowers or gems, which might be a more conventional association. Instead, they resemble bottom-feeding crustaceans that live on the ocean floor. It’s as if the pink path is feeding on the decay of the estate like crabs and lobsters that scavenge the seabed for refuse. The “bluish-white” frost further amplifies this sense of chill and depth. Constance and Clifford have reached an impasse in their relationship, even if Clifford isn’t aware of it because he’s already emotionally numb. Wragby's February landscape mirrors the emotional barrenness of the characters. It's a frosty mirror to their rapidly cooling marriage.
As she wanders miserably through the grounds of Wragby Hall, Connie's emotional turmoil stands in stark contrast to the vitality of the spring around her. The author employs lush visual and tactile imagery to juxtapose Connie’s gray mood with the greening world:
Yet it was spring, and the bluebells were coming in the wood, and the leaf-buds on the hazels were opening like the spatter of green rain. How terrible it was that it should be spring, and everything cold-hearted, cold-hearted. Only the hens, fluffed so wonderfully on the eggs, were warm with their hot, brooding female bodies! Connie felt herself living on the brink of fainting all the time.
The vibrant imagery of this passage makes the Wragby woods seem like a rural paradise. The budding hazels and bluebells bursting into life, however, don’t cheer Connie up as she hopes they will. She is so tremendously unhappy that they only serve to make her feel worse, as this riot of color and life goes on and she can’t enjoy it. This environment brimming with sparkling green freshness just accentuates her feelings of despair and longing. Nothing helps, she remains sad and static, and "yet" the world around her is barreling upward with vivacious growth.
Lawrence then uses tactile imagery to further this contrast. Connie feels that she is “cold-hearted” and that everything else is too, until she notices the hens brooding on their newly laid eggs. The way the narrator describes the hens makes them seem like protective wrapping around a glowing heat source, radiating fertility and energy from within. These "hot, brooding female bodies" are juxtaposed against the “cold-heartedness” of Connie’s own childless life. This distinction highlights her yearning for the kind of warmth and intimacy represented by the nurturing hens. Her sense of being on the verge of fainting also emphasizes this. She’s so lacking in warmth and vitality that she regularly feels she might actually pass out from the “cold-heartedness” of everything.
As Connie and Mellors have sex, she realizes that for the first time in her life she isn’t in control of the sexual power dynamic. Lawrence describes this realization through visual imagery and a metaphor of a sea anemone. During their lovemaking, Connie feels an intense pressure building:
Whilst all her womb was open and soft, and softly clamoring, like a sea-anemone under the tide, clamoring for him to come in again and make a fulfilment for her.
A sea anemone is a soft, delicate little marine creature that opens and closes its one orifice in response to its environment. It is sightless, speechless, and immobile, only able to react to things that happen to it instead of taking action. This metaphor mirrors Connie's unexpected response to sex with Mellors. The idea of the sea anemone’s “mouth clamoring” ultimately echoes the silent dilation and closing of both an anemone's cavity underwater and a human vagina as it is penetrated. Lawrence goes further than this, saying that it’s not just her vagina that desires Mellors’s presence, but that her “womb” is “open and soft” in response to his penetration. While Connie had previously understood sex to be a way for her to reclaim power, with Mellors she is suddenly and involuntarily pushed into submission. Her internal organs are acting on their on accord.
This passage’s imagery evokes a sense of profound vulnerability. The texture of a sea anemone’s flesh is very much like the mucous membranes of a human vulva, and the reader gets a vivid picture of the yearning pinkish “mouth” opening and closing in this scene. The “tide” that Lawrence describes also evokes the image of repeating movements back and forth, like those Connie and Mellors are making during intercourse. Connie is swept up in a tide of sensations, unable to regain self-control as she “clamors” for fulfillment in an unfamiliar way.
As Connie and Mellors have sex, Lawrence explains the intensity of Connie’s feelings through tactile imagery and a series of similes:
Rippling, rippling, rippling, like a flapping overlapping of soft flames, soft as feathers, running to points of brilliance, exquisite, exquisite and melting her all molten inside. It was like bells rippling up and up to a culmination.
The similes in this passage refer to Mellors attempting to bring Connie to orgasm. Mellors’s touch and the sensations she is feeling are like “flames” and “feathers,” things that are almost too soft and delicate to be stimulating. This simile gives an impression of many tiny touches building and repeating themselves into something greater, "flapping" and "overlapping" upon each other. The narrator explains further when they say the feeling is like “bells rippling up and up to a culmination.” Connie is ascending toward a climax and can only understand it in the terms of ascensions and buildups she’s already familiar with.
Connie is feeling so many sensations that her sense of touch almost blends into her sense of sight. The tactile imagery of the passage is somewhat confusing because it reflects the newness of this experience for this character. Connie is confused and overwhelmed, and so the imagery is confusing and somewhat overwhelming. The sensations are new to her, so they all blend together into a riot of energy and feeling. Mellors’s body makes her feel as though feathers or flames are running all over her to “points of brilliance,” as though she can feel their heat “melting her all molten inside.”
In this passage from Chapter 14, Lawrence employs auditory imagery to immerse readers in the serenity of the morning after Mellors’s proposal:
Then he woke up and looked at the light. The curtains were drawn. He listened to the loud wild calling of blackbirds and thrushes in the wood. It would be a brilliant morning, about half past five, his hour for rising. He had slept so fast! It was such a new day! The woman was still curled asleep and tender. His hand moved on her, and she opened her blue wondering eyes, smiling unconsciously into his face.
The passage distinguishes sharply between the profound early-morning silence enveloping the world and the overpowering, "loud wild" calls of the birds. Rather than interrupting the silence, the bird calls emphasize it. The cottage where Mellors and Constance wake up seems even more separate from the real world of Wragby, motorcars, and divorces.
This imagery underscores the significance of this moment as a turning point for Connie and Mellors. The events of the previous night mean that they now have a plan for the future. Mellors feels this intensely. To him, it isn’t just a morning, but “such a new day!” In the quietude of the forest, the powerful calls of the blackbirds and thrushes remind him of the potential for renewal and hope. Even if the future is uncertain, after proposing, he now has the prospect of waking with Constance “smiling unconsciously into his face” in a permanent, legal way.
At the beginning of Chapter 14, the author utilizes visual imagery to portray the contrast between the tanned and untanned parts of Mellors’s body as he undresses in front of Connie:
And he took off his old cotton pyjama-jacket, and pushed down the trousers. Save for his hands and wrists and face and neck he was white as milk, with fine slender muscular flesh. To Connie he was suddenly piercingly beautiful again, as when she had seen him that afternoon washing himself.
As Mellors takes off his jacket, Connie is struck by how the vulnerability of his pale flesh increases his sexual appeal to her. Mellors works outside, so the parts of his skin that are exposed to the light are darkly tanned. The rest of his body is “white as milk” because it’s always covered by clothes.
This distinction illustrates the relationship between Mellors’s body and his physical labor. The stark contrast between his dark, suntanned skin exposed to harsh sun and hard work and the white, untouched skin hidden beneath his clothing reminds Connie of his humanity. Everyone else, she realizes, only sees the tanned parts of Oliver Mellors. They think of him as being all toughness and strength. However, in this scene, she sees the “fine slender muscular flesh” that he hides from the world. She is “piercingly attracted” to him again by this contrast, because it mirrors the way he exposes his vulnerabilities and his intellect to her. Both “inside” Oliver and “outside” Oliver exist simultaneously here. It is an important moment in the novel, as Connie is explicitly reminded of the duality of her "mind" and "body" and of Oliver's own.
As they lie naked in his bed and he talks to her quietly, Mellors strokes Connie's buttocks and genitals. Lawrence brings the scene to life for the reader with strong tactile imagery:
All the while he spoke, he exquisitely stroked the rounded tail, till it seemed as if a slippery sort of fire came from it into his hands. And his fingertips touched the two secret openings to her body, time after time, with a soft little brush of fire.
This scene brings the sexual energy passing between the pair explicitly to the foreground. This passage's “slippery sort of fire” could refer to three things. As Mellors “exquisitely” strokes Connie’s “rounded tail,” his touch begins to provoke the production of bodily fluids. These fluids could be sweat on Connie’s skin or vaginal lubrication that she’s producing because she finds his touch arousing—or, more simply, the passage could be describing the feeling of the warmth from her skin coursing through Mellors’s fingertips. Because he isn't specific, Lawrence leaves room for readers to entertain all three ideas at once.
The scene’s tactile imagery also does a lot to emphasize the mutual nature of Constance and Mellors’s desire. The perspective of the scene shifts from what Mellors feels to what Connie feels. It's echoing the processes it’s describing: the reader "feels" Connie's damp skin as Mellors, and then Mellors's soft touch as Connie.
Both characters feel that the physical contact is provoking a “fire” on their skins. Connie’s buttocks radiate it into Mellors’s hands, and his fingertips “brush” her “secret openings” with a flame-like sensation. He isn't burning her, but she can feel the heated, stroking energy radiating from him. Although it’s powerful, all of this scene’s sensory language of touch is gentle, delicate, and controlled.
