“And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me” —
That is Jesus.
But then Jesus was not quite a man.
He was the Son of Man
Filius Meus, O remorseless logic
Out of His own mouth.
I, Matthew, being a man
Cannot be lifted up, the Paraclete
To draw all men unto me,
Seeing I am on a par with all men.
I, on the other hand,
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.
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.
After the cessation
I might be a soul in bliss, an angel, approximating to the
Uplifted;
But that is another matter;
I am Matthew, the man,
And I am not that other angelic matter.
So I will be lifted up, Saviour,
But put me down again in time, Master,
Before my heart stops beating, and I become what I am not.
Put me down again on the earth, Jesus, on the brown soil
Where flowers sprout in the acrid humus, and fade into
humus again.
Where beasts drop their unlicked young, and pasture, and
drop their droppings among the turf.
Where the adder darts horizontal.
Down on the damp, unceasing ground, where my feet belong
And even my heart, Lord, forever, after all uplifting:
The crumbling, damp, fresh land, life horizontal and ceaseless.
Matthew I am, the man.
And I take the wings of the morning, to Thee, Crucified,
Glorified.
But while flowers club their petals at evening
And rabbits make pills among the short grass
And long snakes quickly glide into the dark hole in the
wall, hearing man approach,
I must be put down, Lord, in the afternoon,
And at evening I must leave off my wings of the spirit
As I leave off my braces
And I must resume my nakedness like a fish, sinking down
the dark reversion of night
Like a fish seeking the bottom, Jesus,
ICTHUS
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.
But even Thou, Son of Man, canst not quaff out the dregs
of terrestrial manhood!
They fall back from Thee.
They fall back, and like a dripping of quicksilver taking the
downward track.
Break into drops, burn into drops of blood, and dropping,
dropping take wing
Membraned, blood-veined wings.
On fans of unsuspected tissue, like bats
They thread and thrill and flicker ever downward
To the dark zenith of Thine antipodes
Jesus Uplifted.
Bat-winged heart of man
Reversed flame
Shuddering a strange way down the bottomless pit
To the great depths of its reversed zenith.
Afterwards, afterwards
Morning comes, and I shake the dews of night from the
wings of my spirit
And mount like a lark, Beloved.
But remember, Saviour,
That my heart which like a lark at heaven’s gate singing,
hovers morning-bright to Thee,
Throws still the dark blood back and forth
In the avenues where the bat hangs sleeping, upside-down
And to me undeniable, Jesus.
Listen, Paraclete.
I can no more deny the bat-wings of my fathom-flickering
spirit of darkness
Than the wings of the Morning and Thee, Thou Glorified.
I am Matthew, the Man:
It is understood.
And Thou art Jesus, Son of Man
Drawing all men unto Thee, but bound to release them
when the hour strikes.
I have been, and I have returned.
I have mounted up on the wings of the morning, and I
have dredged down to the zenith’s reversal.
Which is my way, being man.
Gods may stay in mid-heaven, the Son of Man has climbed
to the Whitsun zenith,
But I, Matthew, being a man
Am a traveller back and forth.
So be it.
ST MARK
THERE was a lion in Judah
Which whelped, and was Mark.
But winged.
A lion with wings.
At least at Venice.
Even as late as Daniele Manin.
Why should he have wings?
Is he to be a bird also?
Or a spirit?
Or a winged thought?
Or a soaring consciousness?
Evidently he is all that
The lion of the spirit.
Ah, Lamb of God
Would a wingless lion lie down before Thee, as this
winged lion lies?
The lion of the spirit.
Once he lay in the mouth of a cave
And sunned his whiskers,
And lashed his tail slowly, slowly
Thinking of voluptuousness
Even of blood.
But later, in the sun of the afternoon
Having tasted all there was to taste, and having slept his fill
He fell to frowning, as he lay with his head on his paws
And the sun coming in through the narrowest fibril of a
slit in his eyes.
So, nine-tenths asleep, motionless, bored, and statically
angry.
He saw in a shaft of light a lamb on a pinnacle, balancing a
flag on its paw.
And he was thoroughly startled.
Going out to investigate
He found the lamb beyond him, on the inaccessible pinnacle
of light.
So he put his paw to his nose, and pondered.
“Guard my sheep,” came the silvery voice from the
pinnacle,
“And I will give thee the wings of the morning.”
So the lion of the senses thought it was worth it.
Hence he became a curly sheep-dog with dangerous pro —
pensities
As Carpaccio will tell you:
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.
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.
He is well aware of himself
And he cherishes voluptuous delights, and thinks about
them
And ceases to be a blood-thirsty king of beasts
And becomes the faithful sheep-dog of the Shepherd, think —
ing of his voluptuous pleasures of chasing the sheep to
the fold
And increasing the flock, and perhaps giving a real nip here
and there, a real pinch, but always well meant.
And somewhere there is a lioness
The she-mate.
Whelps play between the paws of the lion
The she-mate purrs
Their castle is impregnable, their cave,
The sun comes in their lair, they are well-off
A well-to-do family.
Then the proud lion stalks abroad, alone
And roars to announce himself to the wolves
And also to encourage the red-cross Lamb
And also to ensure a goodly increase in the world.
Look at him, with his paw on the world
At Venice and elsewhere.
Going blind at last.
ST LUKE
A WALL, a bastion,
A living forehead with its slow whorl of hair
And a bull’s large, sombre, glancing eye
And glistening, adhesive muzzle
With cavernous nostrils where the winds run hot
Snorting defiance
Or greedily snuffling behind the cows.
Horns
The golden horns of power,
Power to kill, power to create
Such as Moses had, and God,
Head-power.
Shall great wings flame from his shoulder-sockets
Assyrian-wise?
It would be no wonder.
Knowing the thunder of his heart
The massive thunder of his dew-lapped chest
Deep and reverberating,
It would be no wonder if great wings, like flame, fanned
out from the furnace-cracks of his shoulder-sockets.
Thud! Thud! Thud!
And the roar of black bull’s blood in the mighty passages of
his chest.
Ah, the dewlap swings pendulous with excess.
The great, roaring weight above
Like a furnace dripping a molten drip.
The urge, the massive, burning ache
Of the bull’s breast.
The open furnace-doors of his nostrils.
For what does he ache, and groan?
In his breast a wall?
Nay, once it was also a fortress wall, and the weight of a
vast battery.
But now it is a burning hearthstone only,
Massive old altar of his own burnt offering.
It was always an altar of burnt offering
His own black blood poured out like a sheet of flame over
his fecundating herd
As he gave himself forth.
But also it was a fiery fortress frowning shaggily on the world
And announcing battle ready.
Since the Lamb bewitched him with that red-struck flag
His fortress is dismantled
His fires of wrath are banked down
His horns turn away from the enemy.
He serves the Son of Man.
And hear him bellow, after many years, the bull that serves
the Son of Man.
Moaning, booing, roaring hollow
Constrained to pour forth all his fire down the narrow sluice
of procreation
Through such narrow loins, too narrow.
Is he not over-charged by the dammed-up pressure of his
own massive black blood
Luke, the Bull, the father of substance, the Providence Bull,
after two thousand years?
Is he not over-full of offering, a vast, vast offer of himself
Which must be poured through so small a vent?
Too small a vent.
Let him remember his horns, then.
Seal up his forehead once more to a bastion,
Let it know nothing.
Let him charge like a mighty catapult on the red-cross flag,
let him roar out challenge on the world
And throwing himself upon it, throw off the madness of his
blood.
Let it be war.
And so it is war.
The bull of the proletariat has got his head down.
ST JOHN
JOHN, oh John,
Thou honourable bird
Sun-peering eagle.
Taking a bird’s-eye view
Even of Calvary and Resurrection
Not to speak of Babylon’s whoredom.
High over the mild effulgence of the dove
Hung all the time, did we but know it, the all-knowing
shadow
Of John’s great gold-barred eagle.
John knew all about it
Even the very beginning.
“In the beginning was the Word
And the Word was God
And the Word was with God.”
Having been to school
John knew the whole proposition.
As for innocent Jesus
He was one of Nature’s phenomena, no doubt.
Oh that mind-soaring eagle of an Evangelist
Staring creation out of countenance
And telling it off
As an eagle staring down on the Sun!
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;
Jesus’ pale and lambent dove, cooing in the lower boughs
On sufferance.
In the beginning was the Word, of course.
And the word was the first offspring of the almighty Johannine
mind,
Chick of the intellectual eagle.
Yet put salt on the tail of the Johannine bird
Put salt on its tail
John’s eagle.
Shoo it down out of the empyrean
Of the all-seeing, all-fore-ordaining ideal.
Make it roost on bird-spattered, rocky Patmos
And let it moult there, among the stones of the bitter sea.
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.
Ah Phoenix, Phoenix
John’s Eagle!
You are only known to us now as the badge of an insurance
Company.
Phoenix, Phoenix
The nest is in flames
Feathers are singeing.
Ash flutters flocculent, like down on a blue, wan fledgeling.
San Gervasio.
CREATURES
THE MOSQUITO
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 anaesthetic 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.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated) Page 841
