D. H. Lawrence

[ Version 1: 1921 ] The quick sparks on the gorse bushes are leaping, Little jets of sunlight-texture imitating flame; Above them, exultant, the peewits are sweeping: They are lords of the desolate wastes of sadness their screamings proclaim. Rabbits, handfuls of brown earth, lie Low-rounded on the mournful grass they have bitten down to the quick. Are they asleep? — Are they alive? — Now see, when I Move my arms the hill bursts and heaves under their spurting kick. The common flaunts bravely; but below, from the rushes Crowds of glittering king-cups surge to challenge the blossoming bushes; There the lazy streamlet pushes Its curious course mildly; here it wakes again, leaps, laughs, and gushes. Into a deep pond, an old sheep-dip, Dark, overgrown with willows, cool, with the brook ebbing through so slow, Naked on the steep, soft lip Of the bank I stand watching my own white shadow quivering to and fro. What if the gorse flowers shrivelled and kissing were lost? Without the pulsing waters, where were the marigolds and the songs of the brook! If my veins and my breasts with love embossed Withered, my insolent soul would be gone like flowers that the hot wind took. So my soul like a passionate woman turns, Filled with remorseful terror to the man she scorned, and her love For myself in my own eyes' laughter burns, Runs ecstatic over the pliant folds rippling down to my belly from the breast-lights above. Over my sunlit skin the warm, clinging air, Rich with the songs of seven larks singing at once, goes kissing me glad. And the soul of the wind and my blood compare Their wandering happiness, and the wind, wasted in liberty, drifts on and is sad. Oh but the water loves me and folds me, Plays with me, sways me, lifts me and sinks me as though it were living blood, Blood of a heaving woman who holds me, Owning my supple body a rare glad thing, supremely good. [ Version 2: 1928 ] The quick sparks on the gorse-bushes are leaping Little jets of sunlight texture imitating flame; Above them, exultant, the peewits are sweeping: They have triumphed again o'er the ages, their screamings proclaim. Rabbits, handfuls of brown earth, lie Low-rounded on the mournful turf they have bitten down to the quick. Are they asleep? — are they living? — Now see, when I Lift my arms, the hill bursts and heaves under their spurting kick! The common flaunts bravely; but below, from the rushes Crowds of glittering king-cups surge to challenge the blossoming bushes; There the lazy streamlet pushes His bent course mildly; here wakes again, leaps, laughs, and gushes Into a deep pond, an old sheep-dip, Dark, overgrown with willows, cool, with the brook ebbing through so slow; Naked on the steep, soft lip Of the turf I stand watching my own white shadow quivering to and fro. What if the gorse-flowers shrivelled, and I were gone? What if the waters ceased, where were the marigolds then, and the gudgeon? What is this thing that I look down upon? White on the water wimples my shadow, strains like a dog on a string, to run on. How it looks back, like a white dog to its master! I on the bank all substance, my shadow all shadow looking up to me, looking back! And the water runs, and runs faster, runs faster, And the white dog dances and quivers, I am holding his cord quite slack. But how splendid it is to be substance, here! My shadow is neither here nor there; but I, I am royally here! I am here! I am here! screams the peewit; the may-blobs burst out in a laugh as they hear! Here! flick the rabbits. Here! pants the gorse. Here! say the insects far and near. Over my skin in the sunshine, the warm, clinging air Flushed with the songs of seven larks singing at once, goes kissing me glad. You are here! You are here! We have found you! Everywhere We sought you substantial, you touchstone of caresses, you naked lad! Oh but the water loves me and folds me, Plays with me, sways me, lifts me and sinks me, murmurs: Oh marvellous stuff! No longer shadow! — and it holds me Close, and it rolls me, enfolds me, touches me, as if never it could touch me enough. Sun, but in substance, yellow water-blobs! Wings and feathers on the crying, mysterious ages, peewits wheeling! All that is right, all that is good; all that is God takes substance! a rabbit lobs In confirmation, I hear sevenfold lark-songs pealing.

I thought he was dumb, I said he was dumb, Yet I've heard him cry. First faint scream, Out of life's unfathomable dawn, Far off, so far, like a madness, under the horizon's dawning rim, Far, far off, far scream. Tortoise in extremis . Why were we crucified into sex? Why were we not left rounded off, and finished in ourselves, As we began, As he certainly began, so perfectly alone? A far, was-it-audible scream, Or did it sound on the plasm direct? Worse than the cry of the new-born, A scream, A yell, A shout, A pæan, A death-agony, A birth-cry, A submission, All tiny, tiny, far away, reptile under the first dawn. 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. Crucifixion. Male tortoise, cleaving behind the hovel-wall of that dense female, Mounted and tense, spread-eagle, out-reaching out of the shell In tortoise-nakedness, Long neck, and long vulnerable limbs extruded, spread-eagle over her house-roof, And the deep, secret, all-penetrating tail curved beneath her walls, Reaching and gripping tense, more reaching anguish in uttermost tension Till suddenly, in the spasm of coition, tupping like a jerking leap, and oh! Opening its clenched face from his outstretched neck And giving that fragile yell, that scream, Super-audible, From his pink, cleft, old-man's mouth, Giving up the ghost, Or screaming in Pentecost, receiving the ghost. His scream, and his moment's subsidence, The moment of eternal silence, Yet unreleased, and after the moment, the sudden, startling jerk of coition, and at once The inexpressible faint yell — And so on, till the last plasm of my body was melted back To the primeval rudiments of life, and the secret. So he tups, and screams 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. 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; I remember hearing a wild goose out of the throat of night Cry loudly, beyond the lake of waters; I remember the first time, out of a bush in the darkness, a nightingale's piercing cries and gurgles startled the depths of my soul; I remember the scream of a rabbit as I went through a wood at midnight; I remember the heifer in her heat, blorting and blorting through the hours, persistent and irrepressible; I remember my first terror hearing the howl of weird, amorous cats; I remember the scream of a terrified, injured horse, the sheet-lightning And running away from the sound of a woman in labor, something like an owl whooing, And listening inwardly to the first bleat of a lamb, The first wail of an infant, And my mother singing to herself, And the first tenor singing of the passionate throat of a young collier, who has long since drunk himself to death, The first elements of foreign speech On wild dark lips. And more than all these, And less than all these, This last, Strange, faint coition yell Of the male tortoise at extremity, Tiny from under the very edge of the farthest far-off horizon of life. The cross, The wheel on which our silence first is broken, 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 complement, 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.

Making his advances He does not look at her, nor sniff at her, No, not even sniff at her, his nose is blank. Only he senses the vulnerable folds of skin That work beneath her while she sprawls along In her ungainly pace, Her folds of skin that work and row Beneath the earth-soiled hovel in which she moves. And so he strains beneath her housey walls And catches her trouser-legs in his beak Suddenly, or her skinny limb, And strange and grimly drags at her Like a dog, Only agelessly silent, with a reptile's awful persistency. 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 himself 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? Or is he driven against her with a bang, like a bird flying in the dark against a window, All knowledgeless? The awful concussion, And the still more awful need to persist, to follow, follow, continue, Driven, after æons of pristine, fore-god-like singleness and oneness, At the end of some mysterious, red-hot iron, Driven away from himself into her tracks, Forced to crash against her. Stiff, gallant, irascible, crook-legged reptile, Little gentleman, Sorry plight, We ought to look the other way. Save that, having come with you so far, We will go on to the end.

Love has crept into her sealed heart As a field bee, black and amber, Breaks from the winter-cell, to clamber Up the warm grass where the sunbeams start. Love has crept into her summery eyes, And a glint of colored sunshine brings Such as his along the folded wings Of the bee before he flies. But I with my ruffling, impatient breath Have loosened the wings of the wild young sprite; He has opened them out in a reeling flight, And down her words he hasteneth. Love flies delighted in her voice: The hum of his glittering, drunken wings Sets quivering with music the little things That she says, and her simple words rejoice.

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me; Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings. In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide. So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

The great gold apples of night Hang from the street's long bough Dripping their light On the faces that drift below, On the faces that drift and blow Down the night-time, out of sight In the wind's sad sough. The ripeness of these apples of night Distilling over me Makes sickening the white Ghost-flux of faces that hie Them endlessly, endlessly by Without meaning or reason why They ever should be.

When did you start your tricks Monsieur? What do you stand on such high legs for? Why this length of shredded shank You exaltation? Is it so that you shall lift your centre of gravity upwards And weigh no more than air as you alight upon me, Stand upon me weightless, you phantom? I heard a woman call you the Winged Victory In sluggish Venice. You turn your head towards your tail, and smile. How can you put so much devilry Into that translucent phantom shred Of a frail corpus? Queer, with your thin wings and your streaming legs How you sail like a heron, or a dull clot of air, A nothingness. Yet what an aura surrounds you; Your evil little aura, prowling, and casting a numbness on my mind. That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic: Invisibility, and the anæsthetic power To deaden my attention in your direction. But I know your game now, streaky sorcerer. Queer, how you stalk and prowl the air In circles and evasions, enveloping me, Ghoul on wings Winged Victory. Settle, and stand on long thin shanks Eyeing me sideways, and cunningly conscious that I am aware, You speck. I hate the way you lurch off sideways into air Having read my thoughts against you. Come then, let us play at unawares, And see who wins in this sly game of bluff. Man or mosquito. You don't know that I exist, and I don't know that you exist. Now then! It is your trump It is your hateful little trump You pointed fiend, Which shakes my sudden blood to hatred of you: It is your small, high, hateful bugle in my ear. Why do you do it? Surely it is bad policy. They say you can't help it. If that is so, then I believe a little in Providence protecting the innocent. But it sounds so amazingly like a slogan A yell of triumph as you snatch my scalp. Blood, red blood Super-magical Forbidden liquor. I behold you stand For a second enspasmed in oblivion, Obscenely ecstasied Sucking live blood My blood. Such silence, such suspended transport, Such gorging, Such obscenity of trespass. You stagger As well as you may. Only your accursed hairy frailty Your own imponderable weightlessness Saves you, wafts you away on the very draught my anger makes in its snatching. Away with a pæan of derision You winged blood-drop. Can I not overtake you? Are you one too many for me Winged Victory? Am I not mosquito enough to out-mosquito you? Queer, what a big stain my sucked blood makes Beside the infinitesimal faint smear of you! Queer, what a dim dark smudge you have disappeared into!

She is large and matronly And rather dirty, A little sardonic-looking, as if domesticity had driven her to it. Though what she does, except lay four eggs at random in the garden once a year And put up with her husband, I don't know. She likes to eat. She hurries up, striding reared on long uncanny legs, When food is going. Oh yes, she can make haste when she likes. She snaps the soft bread from my hand in great mouthfuls, Opening her rather pretty wedge of an iron, pristine face Into an enormously wide-beaked mouth Like sudden curved scissors, And gulping at more than she can swallow, and working her thick, soft tongue, And having the bread hanging over her chin. O Mistress, Mistress, Reptile Mistress, Your eye is very dark, very bright, And it never softens Although you watch. She knows, She knows well enough to come for food, Yet she sees me not; Her bright eye sees, but not me, not anything, Sightful, sightless, seeing and visionless, Reptile mistress. Taking bread in her curved, gaping, toothless mouth, She has no qualm when she catches my finger in her steel overlapping gums, But she hangs on, and my shout and my shrinking are nothing to her, She does not even know she is nipping me with her curved beak. Snake-like she draws at my finger, while I drag it in horror away. Mistress, reptile mistress, You are almost too large, I am almost frightened. He is much smaller, Dapper beside her, And ridiculously small. Her laconic eye has an earthy, materialistic look, His, poor darling, is almost fiery. 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. Poor darling, biting at her feet, Running beside her like a dog, biting her earthy, splay feet, Nipping her ankles, Which she drags apathetic away, though without retreating into her shell. Agelessly silent, And with a grim, reptile determination, Cold, voiceless age-after-age behind him, serpents' long obstinacy Of horizontal persistence. Little old man Scuffling beside her, bending down, catching his opportunity, Parting his steel-trap face, so suddenly, and seizing her scaly ankle, And hanging grimly on, Letting go at last as she drags away, And closing his steel-trap face. His steel-trap, stoic, ageless, handsome face. Alas, what a fool he looks in this scuffle. And how he feels it! The lonely rambler, the stoic, dignified stalker through chaos, The immune, the animate, Enveloped in isolation, Forerunner. Now look at him! Alas, the spear is through the side of his isolation. His adolescence saw him crucified into sex, Doomed, in the long crucifixion of desire, to seek his consummation beyond himself. Divided into passionate duality, He, so finished and immune, now broken into desirous fragmentariness, 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, ignominiously. And so behold him following the tail Of that mud-hovel of his slowly-rambling spouse, Like some unhappy bull at the tail of a cow, But with more than bovine, grim, earth-dank persistence, Suddenly seizing the ugly ankle as she stretches out to walk, Roaming over the sods, Or, if it happen to show, at her pointed, heavy tail Beneath the low-dropping back-board of her shell. Their two shells like domed boats bumping, Hers huge, his small; Their splay feet rambling and rowing like paddles, And stumbling mixed up in one another, In the race of love — Two tortoises, She huge, he small. She seems earthily apathetic, And he has a reptile's awful persistence. I heard a woman pitying her, pitying the Mère Tortue. While I, I pity Monsieur. "He pesters her and torments her," said the woman. How much more is he pestered and tormented, say I. What can he do? He is dumb, he is visionless, Conceptionless. His black, sad-lidded eye sees but beholds not As her earthen mound moves on, But he catches the folds of vulnerable, leathery skin, Nail-studded, that shake beneath her shell, And drags at these with his beak, Drags and drags and bites, While she pulls herself free, and rows her dull mound along.

Version 1 (1921) Yours is the shame and sorrow, But the disgrace is mine; Your love was dark and thorough, Mine was the love of the sun for a flower He creates with his shine. I was diligent to explore you, Blossom you stalk by stalk, Till my fire of creation bore you Shrivelling down in the final dour Anguish — then I suffered a balk. I knew your pain, and it broke My fine, craftsman's nerve; Your body quailed at my stroke, And my courage failed to give you the last Fine torture you did deserve. You are shapely, you are adorned, But opaque and dull in the flesh, Who, had I but pierced with the thorned Fire-threshing anguish, were fused and cast In a lovely illumined mesh. Like a painted window: the best Suffering burnt through your flesh, Undrossed it and left it blest With a quivering sweet wisdom of grace: but now Who shall take you afresh? Now who will burn you free From your body's terrors and dross, Since the fire has failed in me? What man will stoop in your flesh to plough The shrieking cross? A mute, nearly beautiful thing Is your face, that fills me with shame As I see it hardening, Warping the perfect image of God, And darkening my eternal fame. Version 2 (1928) Yours is the sullen sorrow, The disgrace is also mine; Your love was intense and thorough, Mine was the love of a growing flower For the sunshine. You had the power to explore me, Blossom me stalk by stalk; You woke my spirit, you bore me To consciousness, you gave me the dour Awareness — then I suffered a balk. Body to body I could not Love you, although I would. We kissed, we kissed though we should not. You yielded, we threw the last cast, And it was no good. You only endured, and it broke My craftsman's nerve. No flesh responded to my stroke; So I failed to give you the last Fine torture you did deserve. You are shapely, you are adorned But opaque and null in the flesh; Who, had I but pierced with the thorned Full anguish, perhaps had been cast In a lovely illuinined mesh Like a painted window; the best Fire passed through your flesh, Undrossed it, and left it blest In clean new awareness. But now Who shall take you afresh? Now who will burn you free From your body's deadness and dross? Since the fire has failed in me, What man will stoop in your flesh to plough The shrieking cross? A mute, nearly beautiful thing Is your face, that fills me with shame As I see it hardening; I should have been cruel enough to bring You through the flame.

When she rises in the morning I linger to watch her; She spreads the bath-cloth underneath the window And the sunbeams catch her Glistening white on the shoulders, While down her sides the mellow Golden shadow glows as She stoops to the sponge, and her swung breasts Sway like full-blown yellow Gloire de Dijon roses. She drips herself with water, and her shoulders Glisten as silver, they crumple up Like wet and falling roses, and I listen For the sluicing of their rain-dishevelled petals. In the window full of sunlight Concentrates her golden shadow Fold on fold, until it glows as Mellow as the glory roses.