David Herbert Lawrence

“ His wimple, his blunt-prowed face,
His low forehead, his skinny neck, his long,
scaled, striving legs,
So striving, striving,
Are all more delicate than she,
And he has a cruel scar on his shell. ”

“ Time after time that frail, torn scream
After each jerk, the longish interval,
The tortoise eternity,
Agelong, reptilian persistence,
Heart-throb, slow heart-throb, persistent for the
next spasm. ”

“ Sex, which breaks up our integrity, our single
inviolability, our deep silence
Tearing a cry from us.
Sex, which breaks us into voice, sets us calling
across the deeps, calling, calling for the com-
plement,
Singing, and calling, and singing again, being
answered, having found.
Torn, to become whole again, after long seeking
for what is lost,
The same cry from the tortoise as from Christ,
the Osiris-cry of abandonment,
That which is whole, torn asunder,
That which is in part, finding its whole again
throughout the universe. ”

“ To roam, and feel the slow heart beat
Tortoise-wise, the first bell sounding
From the warm blood, in the dark-creation
morning.
Moving, and being himself,
Slow, and unquestioned,
And inordinately there, O stoic! ”

“ What a huge vast inanimate it is, that you must
row against,
What an incalculable inertia.
Challenger,
Little Ulysses, fore-runner,
No bigger than my thumb-nail,
Buon viaggio.
All animate creation on your shoulder,
Set forth, little Titan, under your battle-shield.
The ponderous, preponderate,
Inanimate universe;
And you are slowly moving, pioneer, you alone. ”

“ War-cry, triumph, acute-delight, death-scream
reptilian,
Why was the veil torn?
The silken shriek of the soul's torn membrane?
The male soul's membrane
Torn with a shriek half music, half horror. ”

“ Doomed to make an intolerable fool of himself
In his effort toward completion again.
Poor little earthy house-inhabiting Osiris,
The mysterious bull tore him at adolescence into
pieces,
And he must struggle after reconstruction, igno-
miniously. ”

“ Only agelessly silent, with a reptile's awful per-
sistency.
Grim, gruesome gallantry, to which he is doomed.
Dragged out of an eternity of silent isolation
And doomed to partiality, partial being,
Ache, and want of being,
Want,
Self-exposure, hard humiliation, need to add him-
self on to her.
Born to walk alone,
Forerunner,
Now suddenly distracted into this mazy side-
track,
This awkward, harrowing pursuit,
This grim necessity from within.
Does she know
As she moves eternally slowly away? ”

“ The sections of the baby tortoise shell.
Four, and a keystone;
Four, and a keystone;
Four, and a keystone;
Then twenty-four, and a tiny little keystone.
It needed Pythagoras to see life placing her
counters on the living back
Of the baby tortoise;
Life establishing the first eternal mathematical
tablet,
Not in stone, like the Judean Lord, or bronze, but
in life-clouded, life-rosy tortoise-shell. ”