D. H. Lawrence

“ Iron-breaking,
The rusty swords of almond-trees.
Trees suffer, like races, down the long ages.
They wander and are exiled, they live in exile through long ages
Like drawn blades never sheathed, hacked and gone black,
The alien trees in alien lands: and yet
The heart of blossom,
The unquenchable heart of blossom!
Look at the many-cicatrised frail vine, none more scarred and frail,
Yet see him fling himself abroad in fresh abandon
From the small wound-stump.
Even the wilful, obstinate, gummy fig-tree
Can be kept down, but he’ll burst like a polyp into prolixity. ”

“ Thick, smooth-fleshed silver, dull only as human limbs are dull
With the life-lustre,
Nude with the dim light of full, healthy life
That is always half-dark,
And suave like passion-flower petals,
Like passion-flowers,
With the half-secret gleam of a passion-flower hanging from the rock,
Great, complicated, nude fig-tree, stemless flower-mesh,
Flowerily naked in flesh, and giving off hues of life.
Rather like an octopus, but strange and sweet-myriad-limbed octopus;
Like a nude, like a rock-living, sweet-fleshed sea-anemone,
Flourishing from the rock in a mysterious arrogance. ”

“ Then gay fear, that turns the tail sprightly, from a shadow.
Food, and fear, and joie de vivre,
Without love.
The other way about:
Joie de vivre, and fear, and food,
All without love.
Quelle joie de vivre
Dans l’eau!
Slowly to gape through the waters,
Alone with the element;
To sink, and rise, and go to sleep with the waters;
To speak endless inaudible wavelets into the wave;
To breathe from the flood at the gills,
Fish-blood slowly running next to the flood, extracting fish-fire;
To have the element under one, like a lover ”

“ For the almighty eagle of the fore-ordaining Mind
Is looking rather shabby and island-bound these days:
Moulting, and rather naked about the rump, and down in the beak,
Rather dirty, on dung-whitened Patmos.
From which we are led to assume
That the old bird is weary, and almost willing
That a new chick should chip the extensive shell
Of the mundane egg.
The poor old golden eagle of the creative spirit
Moulting and moping and waiting, willing at last
For the fire to burn it up, feathers and all
So that a new conception of the beginning and end
Can rise from the ashes. ”

“ And at last the Pera-hera procession, flambeaux aloft in the tropical night, of blazing cocoa-nut,
Naked dark men beneath,
And the huge frontal of three great elephants stepping forth to the tom-tom’s beat, in the torch-light,
Slowly sailing in gorgeous apparel through the flame-light, in front of a towering, grimacing white image of wood.
The elephant bells striking slow, tong-tong, tong-tong,
To music and queer chanting:
Enormous shadow-processions filing on in the flare of fire
In the fume of cocoa-nut oil, in the sweating tropical night,
In the noise of the tom-toms and singers ”

“ Come down, crapa, out of that almond tree!
Instead of which she strangely rears on her perch in the air, vast beast,
And strangely paws the air, delicate,
And reaches her black-striped face up like a snake, far up,
Subtly, to the twigs overhead, far up, vast beast,
And snaps them sharp, with a little twist of her anaconda head;
All her great hairy-shaggy belly open against the morning.
At seasons she curls back her tail like a green leaf in the fire,
Or like a lifted hand, hailing at her wrong end. ”

“ Time after time that frail, torn scream
After each jerk, the longish interval,
The tortoise eternity,
Age-long, reptilian persistence,
Heart-throb, slow heart-throb, persistent for the next spasm.
I remember, when I was a boy,
I heard the scream of a frog, which was caught with his foot in the mouth of an up-starting snake;
I remember when I first heard bull-frogs break into sound in the spring ”

“ As if his nostrils were going to curve back to the root of his tail.
As he charges slow among the herd
And rows among the females like a ship pertinaciously,
Heavy with a rancid cargo, through the lesser ships—
Old father
Sniffing forever ahead of him, at the rear of the goats, that they lift the little door,
And rowing on, unarrived, no matter how often he enter:
Like a big ship pushing her bowsprit over the little ships
Then swerving and steering afresh
And never, never arriving at journey’s end, at the rear of the female ships. ”

“ Ramping round, guarding the flock of mankind,
Sharpening his teeth on the wolves,
Ramping up through the air like a kestrel
And lashing his tail above the world
And enjoying the sensation of heaven and righteousness and voluptuous wrath.{80}
There is a new sweetness in his voluptuously licking his paw
Now that it is a weapon of heaven.
There is a new ecstasy in his roar of desirous love
Now that it sounds self-conscious through the unlimited sky. ”

“ For oh, I know, in the dust where we have buried
The silenced races and all their abominations,
We have buried so much of the delicate magic of life.
There in the deeps
That churn the frankincense and ooze the myrrh,
Cypress shadowy,
Such an aroma of lost human life!
They say the fit survive,
But I invoke the spirits of the lost.
Those that have not survived, the darkly lost,
To bring their meaning back into life again,
Which they have taken away
And wrapt inviolable in soft cypress-trees,
Etruscan cypresses.{40}
Evil, what is evil? ”

“ They are royalty, dark-faced royalty, showing the conscious whites of their eyes
And stepping in homage, stubborn, to that nervous pale lad up there.
More elephants, tong, tong-tong, loom up,
Huge, more tassels swinging, more dripping fire of new cocoa-nut cressets
High, high flambeaux, smoking of the east;
And scarlet hot embers of torches knocked out of the sockets among bare feet of elephants and men on the path in the dark.
And devil dancers luminous with sweat, dancing on to the shudder of drums,
Tom-toms, weird music of the devil, voices of men from the jungle singing ”

“ And I must resume my nakedness like a fish, sinking down the dark reversion of night
Like a fish seeking the bottom, Jesus,
ΙΧΘΥΣ
Face downwards
Veering slowly
Down between the steep slopes of darkness, fucus-dark, seaweed-fringed valleys of the waters under the sea
Over the edge of the soundless cataract
Into the fathomless, bottomless pit
Where my soul falls in the last throes of bottomless convulsion, and is fallen
Utterly beyond Thee, Dove of the Spirit;
Beyond everything, except itself.
Nay, Son of Man, I have been lifted up.
To Thee I rose like a rocket ending in mid-heaven. ”

“ In elephants and the east are two devils, in all men maybe.
The mystery of the dark mountain of blood, reeking in homage, in lust, in rage,
And passive with everlasting patience,
Then the little, cunning pig-devil of the elephant’s lurking eyes, the unbeliever.
We dodged, when the Pera-hera was finished, under the hanging, hairy pigs’ tails
And the flat, flaccid mountains of the elephants’ standing haunches,
Vast-blooded beasts,
Myself so little dodging rather scared against the eternal wrinkled pillars of their legs, as they were being dismantled ”

“ That’s how it should be, the female should always be secret.
There never was any standing aloft and unfolded on a bough
Like other flowers, in a revelation of petals;
Silver-pink peach, Venetian green glass of medlars and sorb-apples,
Shallow wine-cups on short, bulging stems
Openly pledging heaven:
Here’s to the thorn in flower! Here is to Utterance!
The brave, adventurous rosaceæ.
Folded upon itself, and secret unutterable,
And milky-sapped, sap that curdles milk and makes ricotta,
Sap that smells strange on your fingers, that even goats won’t taste it ”

“ Small, interspersed with jewels of white gold
Frail-filigreed among the rest;
Rose of the oldest races of princesses, Polynesian
Hibiscus.
Eve, in her happy moments,
Put hibiscus in her hair,
Before she humbled herself, and knocked her knees with repentance.
Sicilian bolshevists,
With hibiscus flowers in the buttonholes of your Sunday suits,
Come now, speaking of rights, what right have you to this flower?
The exquisite and ageless aristocracy
Of a peerless soul,
Blessed are the pure in heart and the fathomless in bright pride;
The loveliness that knows noblesse oblige ”

“ The upstart of your round-barred, sun-round tail!
Whilst between the two, along the tense arch of your back
Blows the magnetic current in fierce blasts,
Ruffling black, shining feathers like lifted mail,
Shuddering storm wind, or a water rushing through.
Your brittle, super-sensual arrogance
Tosses the crape of red across your brow and down your breast
As you draw yourself upon yourself in insistence.
It is a declaration of such tension in will
As time has not dared to avouch, nor eternity been able to unbend
Do what it may.
A raw American will, that has never been tempered by life ”

“ Your wattles drip down like a shawl to your breast
And the point of your mantilla drops across your nose, unpleasantly.
Or perhaps it is something unfinished
A bit of slag still adhering, after your firing in the furnace of creation.
Or perhaps there is something in your wattles of a bull’s dew-lap
Which slips down like a pendulum to balance the throbbing mass of a generous breast,
The over-drip of a great passion hanging in the balance. ”

“ Things of iron are beaten on the anvil,
And he-goat is anvil to he-goat, and hammer to he-goat
In the business of beating the mettle of goats to a godhead.{162}
But they’ve taken his enemy from him
And left him only his libidinousness,
His nostrils turning back, to sniff at even himself
And his slitted eyes seeking the needle’s eye,
His own, unthreaded, forever.
So it is, when they take the enemy from us,
And we can’t fight.
He is not fatherly, like the bull, massive Providence of hot blood ”

“ And then the fig has kept her secret long enough.
So it explodes, and you see through the fissure the scarlet.
And the fig is finished, the year is over.
That’s how the fig dies, showing her crimson through the purple slit
Like a wound, the exposure of her secret, on the open day.
Like a prostitute, the bursten fig, making a show of her secret.
That’s how women die too.
The year is fallen over-ripe,
The year of our women.
The year of our women is fallen over-ripe. ”

“ Climbing through the January snow, into the Lobo canyon
Dark grow the spruce-trees, blue is the balsam, water sounds still unfrozen, and the trail is still evident.
Men!
Two men!
Men! The only animal in the world to fear!
They hesitate.
We hesitate.
They have a gun.
We have no gun.
Then we all advance, to meet.
Two Mexicans, strangers, emerging out of the dark and snow and inwardness of the Lobo valley.
What are they doing here on this vanishing trail?
What is he carrying?
Something yellow.
A deer?
Qué tiene, amigo?
León—
He smiles, foolishly, as if he were caught doing wrong. ”

“ Am drawn to the Uplifted, as all men are drawn,
To the Son of Man
Filius Meus.
Wilt thou lift me up, Son of Man?
How my heart beats!
I am man.
I am man, and therefore my heart beats, and throws the dark blood from side to side
All the time I am lifted up.{74}
Yes, even during my uplifting.
And if it ceased?
If it ceased, I should be no longer man
As I am, if my heart in uplifting ceased to beat, to toss the dark blood from side to side, causing my myriad secret streams. ”

“ American eagle?
As if you owed him an old, old grudge, great sun: or an old, old allegiance.
When you pick the red smoky heart from a rabbit or a light-blooded bird
Do you lift it to the sun, as the Aztec priests used to lift red hearts of men?
Does the sun need steam of blood do you think
In America, still,
Old eagle?
Does the sun in New Mexico sail like a fiery bird of prey in the sky
Hovering?{149}
Does he shriek for blood? ”

“ White men make gold-mines and the mountains unmake them
In their sleep.
The Indians laugh in their sleep
From fear,
Like a man when he sleeps and his sleep is over, and he can’t wake up,
And he lies like a log and screams and his scream is silent
Because his body can’t wake up;
So he laughs from fear, pure fear, in the grip of the sleep.
A dark membrane over the will, holding a man down
Even when the mind has flickered awake ”

“ And remain lapsed on earth,
Not quite alive.
A tiny, fragile, half-animate bean.
To open your tiny beak-mouth, that looks as if it would never open,
Like some iron door;
To lift the upper hawk-beak from the lower base
And reach your skinny little neck
And take your first bite at some dim bit of herbage,
Alone, small insect,
Tiny bright-eye,
Slow one.
To take your first solitary bite
And move on your slow, solitary hunt.
Your bright, dark little eye,
Your eye of a dark disturbed night,
Under its slow lid, tiny baby tortoise,
So indomitable.{118}
No one ever heard you complain. ”

“ As an eagle staring down on the Sun!{85}
The Logos, the Logos!
“In the beginning was the Word.”
Is there not a great Mind pre-ordaining?
Does not a supreme Intellect ideally procreate the Universe?
Is not each soul a vivid thought in the great consciousness stream of God?
Put salt on his tail
The sly bird of John.
Proud intellect, high-soaring Mind
Like a king eagle, bird of the most High, sweeping the round of heaven
And casting the cycles of creation
On two wings, like a pair of compasses ”

“ Handing out a few loose golden breast-feathers, at moulting time;
Or a sort of prosperity-gander
Fathering endless ten-dollar golden eggs.
Or whether it actually is an eagle you are,
With a Roman nose
And claws not made to shake hands with,
And a Me-Almighty eye.
The new Proud Republic
Based on the mystery of pride.
Overweening men, full of power of life, commanding a teeming obedience.{207}
Eagle of the Rockies, bird of men that are masters,
Lifting the rabbit-blood of the myriads up into something splendid,
Leaving a few bones ”