Lawrence’s metaphoric structure establishes that living beings are not static, discrete entities, but rather energy fields constantly in motion. The metaphor of openness is critical to Lawrence’s metaphors of transformation. If the outlet is blocked, the organism’s energy or movement will cease and it will become inert, much as a blocked artery will stop a human heart. The hard rind, or closed shell, is a metaphor in Lawrence’s poetry for the “self-conscious ego,” the “false absolute self,” “mechanistic self,” that kills all natural life within us. To Lawrence, the greatest evil of the mechanistic paradigm is that it insulates human beings from recognizing the vivid relatedness between themselves and the reminder of the universe. Lawrence found in myth and the old pagan religions a language of metaphors informed by a counterpart to his own attempts to provide alternative to the mechanistic paradigm. Lawrence claims that the old pagan religions were exact and apparently perfect in their cosmology because they expressed in metaphoric terms the fundamental transformation of which life is composed. (Namseoul University)