there must be an ebb.

I've already expressed my love for DH Lawrence in previous posts and his short story "The Rocking Horse Winner" is a prime example of why I love him so much.

Just look at the first two sentences of the story: "There was a woman who was beautiful, who started with all the advantages, yet she had no luck. She married for love, and the love turned to dust." The first sentence sounds like the beginning of a bedtime story my dad would make up when I was a tiny tot. It is a classic story beginning: "There once was a woman who had no luck." I appreciate that Lawrence treats his story AS a story immediately.

Next, read these first two sentences aloud. They have an excellent rhythm and even a slant rhyme in "luck" and "dust." Its very poetic.

The story as a whole is conscious of itself as a story--I feel that Lawrence does this intentionally, much like Rushdie does with his stories--and the first paragraph lays out the map of this story. It touches on several pillars of the story: luck and the mother's lack thereof, the hardness in her heart towards her children, and how her eyes and her childrens' betrayed their true feelings for one another. The characters are constantly striving for luck throughout, especially Paul. We see the mother's heart truly turn cold and hard in her guilt and anxiety for Paul and his madness over luck. And finally, it is Paul's eyes that Lawrence describes so intently, while the boy is mad. It is his eyes that make his mother finally notice something is terribly wrong:

"I've got to know for the Derby! I've got to know for the Derby!" the child reiterated, his big blue eyes blazing with a sort of madness.

His mother noticed how overwrought he was.

'You'd better go to the seaside. Wouldn't you like to go now to the seaside, instead of waiting? I think you'd better,' she said, looking down at him anxiously, her heart curiously heavy because of him.

But the child lifted his uncanny blue eyes...

Lawrence writes in these details in the beginning, but lets the story flesh them out and carry their dense meanings.

The "whisper" of the house is another example of Lawrence's effective use of symbols in the story. At first I thought the whisper for "more money!" was just a one time metaphor, but the whispers, in fact, turned out not just to be a striking metaphor of the mother's greed, but a vital part of the story. Lawrence is very intentional and these symbols and themes hardly have a single meaning or implication; instead, they span the story and give it depth.