hawking over the lake.
And I, a naked man, calling
calling to thee for my mana,
my kingdom, my power, and my glory.
MANA OF THE SEA
Do you see the sea, breaking itself to bits against the islands
yet remaining unbroken, the level great sea?
Have I caught from it
the tide in my arms
that runs down to the shallows of my wrists, and breaks
abroad in my hands, like waves among the rocks of substance?
Do the rollers of the sea
roll down my thighs
and over the submerged islets of my knees
with power, sea-power sea-power
to break against the ground
in the flat, recurrent breakers of my two feet?
And is my body ocean, ocean
whose power runs to the shores along my arms
and breaks in the foamy hands, whose power rolls out
to the white-treading waves of two salt feet?
I am the sea, I am the sea!
SALT
SALT is scorched water that the sun has scorched
into substance and flaky whiteness
in the eternal opposition
between the two great ones, Fire, and the Wet.
THE FOUR
To our senses, the elements are four
and have ever been, and will ever be
for they are the elements of life, of poetry, and of perception
the four Great Ones, the Four Roots, the First Four
of Fire and the Wet, Earth and the wide Air of the world.
To find the other many elements, you must go to the laboratory
and hunt them down.
But the four we have always with us, they are our world.
Or rather, they have us with them.
THE BOUNDARY STONE
So, salt is the boundary mark between Fire that burns, and
the Wet.
It is the white stone of limits, the term, the landmark between
the two great and moving Ones, Fire and the yielding Wet.
It is set up as a boundary, and blood and sweat
are marked out with the boundary of salt, between Fire and
the Wet.
SPILLING THE SALT
DON’T spill the salt, for it is the landmark,
and cursed be he that removeth his neighbour’s landmark.
And the watchers, the dividers, those swift ones with dark
sharp wings
and keen eyes, they will hover, they will come between you,
between you and your purpose like a knife’s edge shadow
cutting you off from your joy.
For the unseen witnesses are the angels of creation
but also the sunderers, the angels with black, sharp wing-tips.
WALK WARILY
WALK warily, walk warily, be careful what you say:
because now the Sunderers are hovering round,
the Dividers are close upon us, dogging our every breath
and watching our every step.
and beating their great wings in our panting faces.
The angels are standing back, the angels of the Kiss.
they wait, they give way now
to the Sunderers, to the swift ones
the ones with the sharp black wings
and the shudder of electric anger
and the drumming of pinions of thunder
and hands like salt
and the sudden dripping down of the knife-edge cleavage of the lightning
cleaving, cleaving.
Lo, we are in the midst of the sunderers
the cleavers, that cleave us forever apart from one another,
and separate heart from heart, and cut away all caresses
with the white triumphance of lightning and electric delight,
the Dividers, the Thunderers, the Swift Ones, blind with speed
who put salt in our mouths
and currents of excitement in our limbs
and hotness, and then more crusted brine in our hearts.
It is the day of the Sunderers
and the angels are standing back.
MYSTIC
THEY call all experience of the senses mystic, when the
experience is considered.
So an apple becomes mystic when I taste in it
the summer and the snows, the wild welter of earth
and the insistence of the sun.
All of which things I can surely taste in a good apple.
Though some apples taste preponderantly of water, wet and sour
and some of too much sun, brackish sweet
like lagoon-water, that has been too much sunned.
If I say I taste these things in an apple, I am called mystic,
which means a liar.
The only way to eat an apple is to hog it down like a pig
and taste nothing
that is real.
But if I eat an apple, I like to eat it with all my senses awake.
Hogging it down like a pig I call the feeding of corpses.
ANAXAGORAS
WHEN Anaxagoras says: Even the snow is black!
he is taken by the scientists very seriously
because he is enunciating a “ principle,” a “ law “
that all things are mixed, and therefore the purest white snow
has in it an element of blackness.
That they call science, and reality.
I call it mental conceit and mystification
and nonsense, for pure snow is white to us
white and white and only white
with a lovely bloom of whiteness upon white
in which the soul delights and the senses
have an experience of bliss.
And life is for delight, and for bliss
and dread, and the dark, rolling ominousness of doom
then the bright dawning of delight again
from off the sheer white snow, or the poised moon.
And in the shadow of the sun the snow is blue, so blue-aloof
with a hint of the frozen bells of the scylla flower
but never the ghost of a glimpse of Anaxagoras’ funeral black.
KISSING AND HORRID STRIFE
I HAVE been defeated and dragged down by pain
and worsted by the evil world-soul of to-day.
But still I know that life is for delight
and for bliss
as now when the tiny wavelets of the sea
tip the morning light on edge, and spill it with delight
to show how inexhaustible it is.
And life is for delight, and bliss
like now where the white sun kisses the sea
and plays with the wavelets like a panther playing with its
cuffing them with soft paws,
and blows that are caresses,
kisses of the soft-balled paws, where the talons are.
And life is for dread,
for doom that darkens, and the Sunderers
that sunder us from each other
that strip us and destroy us and break us down
as the tall fox-gloves and the mulleins and mallows
are torn down by dismembering autumn
till not a vestige is left, and bleak winter has no trace
of any such flowers;
and yet the roots below the blackness are intact:
the Thunderers and the Sunderers have their term
their limit, their thus far and no further.
Life is for kissing and for horrid strife.
Life is for the angels and the Sunderers
Life is for the daimons and the demons
those that put honey on our Hps, and those that put salt.
But life is not
for the dead vanity of knowing better, nor the blank
cold superiority, nor silly
conceit of
being immune,
nor puerility of contradictions
like saying snow is black, or desire is evil.
Life is for kissing and for horrid strife,
the angels and the Sunderers.
And perhaps in unknown Death we perhaps shall know
Oneness and poised immunity.
But why then should we die while we can live?
And while we live
the kissing and communing cannot cease
nor yet the striving and the horrid strife.
WHEN SATAN FELL
WHEN Satan fell, he only fell
because the Lord Almighty rose a bit too high,
a bit beyond himself.
So Satan only fell to keep a balance.
“ Are you so lofty, O my God?
Are you so pure and lofty, up aloft?
Then I will fall, and plant the paths to hell
with vines and poppies and fig-trees
so that lost souls may eat grapes
and the moist fig
and put scarlet buds in their hair on the way to hell,
on the way to dark perdition.”
And hell and heaven are the scales of the balance of life
which swing against each other.
DOORS
BUT evil is a third thing.
No, not the ithyphallic demons
not even the double Phallus of the devil himself
with his key to the two dark doors
is evil.
Life has its palace of blue day aloft
and its halls of the great dark below,
and there are the bright doors where souls go gaily in:
and there are the dark doors where souls pass silently
holding their breath, naked and darkly alone
entering into the other communion.
There is a double sacredness of doors.
Some you may sing through, and all men hear,
but others, the dark doors, oh hush! hush!
let nobody be about! slip in! go all unseen.
But evil, evil is another thing! in another place!
EVIL IS HOMELESS
EVIL has no home,
only evil has no home,
not even the home of demoniacal hell.
Hell is the home of souls lost in darkness,
even as heaven is the home of souls lost in light.
And like Persephone, or Attis
there are souls that are at home in both homes.
Not like grey Dante, colour-blind
to the scarlet and purple flowers at the doors of hell.
But evil
evil has no dwelling-place
the grey vulture, the grey hyaena, corpse-eaters
they dwell in the outskirt fringes of nowhere
where the grey twilight of evil sets in.
And men that sit in machines
among spinning wheels, in an apotheosis of wheels
sit in the grey mist of movement which moves not
and going which goes not
and doing which does not
and being which is not:
that is, they sit and are evil, in evil,
grey evil, which has no path, and shows neither light nor dark
and has no home, no home anywhere.
WHAT THEN IS EVIL?
OH, in the world of the flesh of man
iron gives the deadly wound
and the wheel starts the principle of all evil.
Oh, in the world of things
the wheel is the first principle of evil.
But in the world of the soul of man
there, and there alone lies the pivot of pure evil
only in the soul of man, when it pivots upon the ego.
When the mind makes a wheel which turns on the hub of the ego
and the will, the living dynamo, gives the motion and the speed
and the wheel of the conscious self spins on in absolution, absolute
absolute, absolved from the sun and the earth and the moon,
absolute consciousness, absolved from strife and kisses
absolute self-awareness, absolved from the meddling of creation
absolute freedom, absolved from the great necessities of being
then we see evil, pure evil
and we see it only in man
and in his machines.
THE EVIL WORLD-SOUL
OH, there is evil, there is an evil world-soul.
But it is the soul of man only, and his machines
which has brought to pass the fearful thing called evil,
hyaenas only hint at it.
Do not think that a machine is without a soul.
Every wheel on its hub has a soul, evil,
it is part of the evil world-soul, spinning.
And every man who has become a detached and self-activated ego
is evil, evil, part of the evil world-soul
which wishes to blaspheme the world into greyness,
into evil neutrality, into mechanism.
The Robot is the unit of evil.
And the symbol of the Robot is the wheel revolving.
THE WANDERING COSMOS
OH, do not tell me the heavens as well are a wheel.
For every revolution of the earth around the sun
is a footstep onwards, onwards, we know not whither
and we do not care,
but a step onwards in untraveiled space,
for the earth, like the sun, is a wanderer.
Their going round each time is a step
onwards, we know not whither,
but onwards, onwards, for the heavens are wandering
the moon and the earth, the sun, Saturn and Betelgeuse, Vega
and Sirius and Altair
they wander their strange and different ways in heaven
past Venus and Uranus and the signs.
For life is a wandering, we know not whither, but going.
Only the wheel goes round, but it never wanders.
It stays on its hub.
DEATH IS NOT EVIL, EVIL IS MECHANICAL
ONLY the human being, absolved from kissing and strife
goes on and on and on, without wandering
fixed upon the hub of the ego
going, yet never wandering, fixed, yet in motion,
the kind of hell that is real, grey and awful
sinless and stainless going round and round
the kind of hell grey Dante never saw
but of which he had a bit inside him.
Know thyself, and that thou art mortal.
But know thyself, denying that thou art mortal:
a thing of kisses and strife
a lit-up shaft of rain
a calling column of blood
a rose tree bronzey with thorns
a mixture of yea and nay
a rainbow of love and hate
a wind that blows back and forth
a creature of conflict, like a cataract:
know thyself, in denial of all these things.
And thou shalt begin to spin round on the hub of the obscene ego
a grey void thing that goes without wandering
a machine that in itself is nothing
a centre of the evil world.
STRIFE
WHEN strife is a thing of two
each knows the other in struggle
and the conflict is a communion
a twoness.
But when strife is a thing of one
a single ego striving for its own ends
and beating down resistances
then strife is evil, because it is not strife.
THE LATE WAR
THE War was not strife
it was murder
each side trying to murder the other side evilly.
MURDER
KILLING is not evil.
A man may be my enemy to the death,
and that is passion and communion.
But murder is always evil
being an act of one
perpetrated upon the other
without cognisance or communion.
MURDEROUS WEAPONS
So guns and strong explosives
are evil, evil
they let death upon unseen men
in sheer murder.
And most murderous of all devices
are poison gases and air-bombs
refinements of evil.
DEPARTURE
Now some men must get up and depart
from evil, or all is lost.
The evil will in many evil men
makes an evil world-soul, which purposes
to reduce the world to grey ash.
Wheels are evil
and machines are evil
and the will to make money is evil.
All forms of abstraction are evil:
finance is a great evil abstraction
science has now become an evil abstraction
education is an evil abstraction.
Jazz and film and wireless
are all evil abstractions from life.
And politics, now, are an evil abstraction from life.
Evil is upon us and has got hold of us.
Men must depart from it, or all is lost.
We must make an isle impregnable
against evil.
THE SHIP OF DEATH
I
Now it is autumn and the falling fruit
and the long journey towards oblivion.
The apples falling like great drops of dew —
to bruise themselves an exit from themselves.
And it is time to go, to bid farewell
to one’s own self, and find an exit
from the fallen self.
II
Have you built your ship of death, O have you?
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated) Page 864
