Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence

by D. H. Lawrence

  that never

  can blow across the dark seas to our usual world!

  And land that beats with a pulse!

  And valleys that draw close in love!

  And strange ways where I fall into oblivion of

  uttermost living!- —

  Also she who is the other has strange-mounded

  breasts and strange sheer slopes, and white levels.

  Sightless and strong oblivion in utter life takes

  possession of me!

  The unknown, strong current of life supreme

  drowns me and sweeps me away and holds me down

  to the sources of mystery, in the depths,

  extinguishes there my risen resurrected life

  and kindles it further at the core of utter mystery.

  GREATHAM

  ELYSIUM

  I HAVE found a place of loneliness

  Lonelier than Lyonesse

  Lovelier than Paradise;

  Full of sweet stillness

  That no noise can transgress

  Never a lamp distress.

  The full moon sank in state.

  I saw her stand and wait

  For her watchers to shut the gate.

  Then I found myself in a wonderland

  All of shadow and of bland

  Silence hard to understand.

  I waited therefore; then I knew

  The presence of the flowers that grew

  Noiseless, their wonder noiseless blew.

  And flashing kingfishers that flew

  In sightless beauty, and the few

  Shadows the passing wild-beast threw.

  And Eve approaching over the ground

  Unheard and subtle, never a sound

  To let me know that I was found.

  Invisible the hands of Eve

  Upon me travelling to reeve

  Me from the matrix, to relieve

  Me from the rest! Ah terribly

  Between the body of life and me

  Her hands slid in and set me free.

  Ah, with a fearful, strange detection

  She found the source of my subjection

  To the All, and severed the connection.

  Delivered helpless and amazed

  From the womb of the All, I am waiting, dazed

  For memory to be erased.

  Then I shall know the Elysium

  That lies outside the monstrous womb

  Of time from out of which I come.

  MANIFESTO

  I

  A WOMAN has given me strength and affluence.

  Admitted!

  All the rocking wheat of Canada, ripening now,

  has not so much of strength as the body of one woman

  sweet in ear, nor so much to give

  though it feed nations.

  Hunger is the very Satan.

  The fear of hunger is Moloch, Belial, the horrible

  God.

  It is a fearful thing to be dominated by the fear of hunger.

  Not bread alone, not the belly nor the thirsty throat.

  I have never yet been smitten through the belly,

  with the lack of bread,

  no, nor even milk and honey.

  The fear of the want of these things seems to be

  quite left out of me.

  For so much, I thank the good generations of man- kind.

  II

  AND the sweet, constant, balanced heat

  of the suave sensitive body, the hunger for this

  has never seized me and terrified me.

  Here again, man has been good in his legacy to us,

  in these two primary instances.

  III

  THEN the dumb, aching, bitter, helpless need,

  the pining to be initiated,

  to have access to the knowledge that the great dead

  have opened up for us, to know, to satisfy

  the great and dominant hunger of the mind;

  man’s sweetest harvest of the centuries, sweet,

  printed books,

  bright, glancing, exquisite corn of many a stubborn

  glebe in the upturned darkness;

  I thank mankind with passionate heart

  that I just escaped the hunger for these,

  that they were given when I needed them,

  because I am the son of man.

  I have eaten, and drunk, and warmed and clothed

  my body,

  I have been taught the language of understanding,

  I have chosen among the bright and marvellous books,

  like any prince, such stores of the world’s supply

  were open to me, in the wisdom and goodness of man.

  So far, so good.

  Wise, good provision that makes the heart swell

  with love!

  IV

  BUT then came another hunger

  very deep, and ravening;

  the very body’s body crying out

  with a hunger more frightening, more profound

  than stomach or throat or even the mind;

  redder than death, more clamorous.

  The hunger for the woman. Alas,

  it is so deep a Moloch, ruthless and strong,

  ‘tis like the unutterable name of the dread Lord,

  not to be spoken aloud.

  Yet there it is, the hunger which comes upon us,

  which we must learn to satisfy with pure, real satisfaction;

  or perish, there is no alternative.

  I thought it was woman, indiscriminate woman,

  mere female adjunct of what I was.

  Ah, that was torment hard enough

  and a thing to be afraid of,

  a threatening, torturing, phallic Moloch.

  A woman fed that hunger in me at last.

  What many women cannot give, one woman can;

  so I have known it.

  She stood before me like riches that were mine.

  Even then, in the dark, I was tortured, ravening, unfree,

  Ashamed, and shameful, and vicious.

  A man is so terrified of strong hunger;

  and this terror is the root of all cruelty.

  She loved me, and stood before me, looking to me.

  How could I look, when I was mad? I looked

  sideways, furtively,

  being mad with voracious desire.

  V

  THIS comes right at last.

  When a man is rich, he loses at last the hunger fear.

  I lost at last the fierceness that fears it will starve.

  I could put my face at last between her breasts

  and know that they were given for ever

  that I should never starve

  never perish;

  I had eaten of the bread that satisfies

  and my body’s body was appeased,

  there was peace and richness,

  fulfilment.

  Let them praise desire who will,

  but only fulfilment will do,

  real fulfilment, nothing short.

  It is our ratification

  our heaven, as a matter of fact.

  Immortality, the heaven, is only a projection of

  this strange but actual fulfilment,

  here in the flesh.

  So, another hunger was supplied,

  and for this I have to thank one woman,

  not mankind, for mankind would have prevented me;

  but one woman,

  and these are my red-letter thanksgivings.

  VI

  To be, or not to be, is still the question.

  This ache for being is the ultimate hunger.

  And for myself, I can say “almost, almost, oh,

  very nearly.”

  Yet something remains.

  Something shall not always remain.

  For the main already is fulfilment.

  What remains in me, is to be known even as I know.

  I know her now: or perhaps, I know my o
wn

  limitation against her.

  Plunging as I have done, over, over the brink

  I have dropped at last headlong into nought,

  plunging upon sheer hard extinction;

  I have come, as it were, not to know,

  died, as it were; ceased from knowing; surpassed myself.

  What can I say more, except that I know what it is

  to surpass myself?

  It is a kind of death which is not death.

  It is going a little beyond the bounds.

  How can one speak, where there is a dumbness on

  one’s mouth?

  I suppose, ultimately she is all beyond me,

  she is all not-me, ultimately.

  It is that that one comes to.

  A curious agony, and a relief, when I touch that

  which is not me in any sense,

  it wounds me to death with my own not-being;

  definite, inviolable limitation,

  and something beyond, quite beyond, if you

  understand what that means.

  It is the major part of being, this having surpassed oneself,

  this having touched the edge of the beyond, and

  perished, yet not perished.

  VII

  I WANT her though, to take the same from me.

  She touches me as if I were herself, her own.

  She has not realized yet, that fearful thing, that

  I am the other,

  she thinks we are all of one piece.

  It is painfully untrue.

  I want her to touch me at last, ah, on the root and

  quick of my darkness

  and perish on me, as I have perished on her.

  Then, we shall be two and distinct, we shall have

  each our separate being.

  And that will be pure existence, real liberty.

  Till then, we are confused, a mixture, unresolved,

  unextricated one from the other.

  It is in pure, unutterable resolvedness, distinction

  of being, that one is free,

  not in mixing, merging, not in similarity.

  When she has put her hand on my secret, darkest

  sources, the darkest outgoings,

  when it has struck home to her, like a death, “this

  is him!”

  she has no part in it, no part whatever,

  it is the terrible other,

  when she knows the fearful other flesh, ah, dark —

  ness unfathomable and fearful, contiguous and concrete,

  when she is slain against me, and lies in a heap

  like one outside the house,

  when she passes away as I have passed away

  being pressed up against the other,

  then I shall be glad, I shall not be confused with her,

  I shall be cleared, distinct, single as if burnished

  in silver,

  having no adherence, no adhesion anywhere,

  one clear, burnished, isolated being, unique,

  and she also, pure, isolated, complete,

  two of us, unutterably distinguished, and in

  unutterable conjunction.

  Then we shall be free, freer than angels, ah, perfect.

  VIII

  AFTER that, there will only remain that all men

  detach themselves and become unique,

  that we are all detached, moving in freedom more

  than the angels,

  conditioned only by our own pure single being,

  having no laws but the laws of our own being.

  Every human being will then be like a flower,

  untrammelled.

  Every movement will be direct.

  Only to be will be such delight, we cover our faces

  when we think of it

  lest our faces betray us to some untimely fiend.

  Every man himself, and therefore, a surpassing

  singleness of mankind.

  The blazing tiger will spring upon the deer, un- dimmed,

  the hen will nestle over her chickens,

  we shall love, we shall hate,

  but it will be like music, sheer utterance,

  issuing straight out of the unknown,

  the lightning and the rainbow appearing in us

  unbidden, unchecked,

  like ambassadors.

  We shall not look before and after.

  We shall be, now.

  We shall know in full.

  We, the mystic NOW.

  ZENNOR

  AUTUMN RAIN

  THE plane leaves

  fall black and wet

  on the lawn;

  The cloud sheaves

  in heaven’s fields set

  droop and are drawn

  in falling seeds of rain;

  the seed of heaven

  on my face

  falling — I hear again

  like echoes even

  that softly pace

  Heaven’s muffled floor,

  the winds that tread

  out all the grain

  of tears, the store harvested

  in the sheaves of pain

  caught up aloft:

  the sheaves of dead

  men that are slain

  now winnowed soft

  on the floor of heaven;

  manna invisible

  of all the pain

  here to us given;

  finely divisible

  falling as rain.

  FROST FLOWERS

  IT is not long since, here among all these folk

  in London, I should have held myself

  of no account whatever,

  but should have stood aside and made them way

  thinking that they, perhaps,

  had more right than I — for who was I?

  Now I see them just the same, and watch them.

  But of what account do I hold them?

  Especially the young women. I look at them

  as they dart and flash

  before the shops, like wagtails on the edge of a pool.

  If I pass them close, or any man,

  like sharp, slim wagtails they flash a little aside

  pretending to avoid us; yet all the time

  calculating.

  They think that we adore them — alas, would it

  were true!

  Probably they think all men adore them,

  howsoever they pass by.

  What is it, that, from their faces fresh as spring,

  such fair, fresh, alert, first-flower faces,

  like lavender crocuses, snowdrops, like Roman hyacinths,

  scyllas and yellow-haired hellebore, jonquils, dim anemones,

  even the sulphur auriculas,

  flowers that come first from the darkness, and feel

  cold to the touch,

  flowers scentless or pungent, ammoniacal almost;

  what is it, that, from the faces of the fair young women

  comes like a pungent scent, a vibration beneath

  that startles me, alarms me, stirs up a repulsion?

  They are the issue of acrid winter, these first —

  flower young women;

  their scent is lacerating and repellant,

  it smells of burning snow, of hot-ache,

  of earth, winter-pressed, strangled in corruption;

  it is the scent of the fiery-cold dregs of corruption,

  when destruction soaks through the mortified,

  decomposing earth,

  and the last fires of dissolution burn in the bosom

  of the ground.

  They are the flowers of ice-vivid mortification,

  thaw-cold, ice-corrupt blossoms,

  with a loveliness I loathe;

  for what kind of ice-rotten, hot-aching heart

  must they need to root in!

  CRAVING FOR SPRING

  I WISH it were spring in the world.

  Let it be spring!

&
nbsp; Come, bubbling, surging tide of sap!

  Come, rush of creation!

  Come, life! surge through this mass of mortifica- tion!

  Come, sweep away these exquisite, ghastly first- flowers,

  which are rather last-flowers!

  Come, thaw down their cool portentousness,

  dissolve them:

  snowdrops, straight, death-veined exhalations of

  white and purple crocuses,

  flowers of the penumbra, issue of corruption,

  nourished in mortification,

  jets of exquisite finality;

  Come, spring, make havoc of them!

  I trample on the snowdrops, it gives me pleasure

  to tread down the jonquils,

  to destroy the chill Lent lilies;

  for I am sick of them, their faint-bloodedness,

  slow-blooded, icy-fleshed, portentous.

  I want the fine, kindling wine-sap of spring,

  gold, and of inconceivably fine, quintessential

  brightness,

  rare almost as beams, yet overwhelmingly potent,

  strong like the greatest force of world-balancing.

  This is the same that picks up the harvest of wheat

  and rocks it, tons of grain, on the ripening wind;

  the same that dangles the globe-shaped pleiads of fruit

  temptingly in mid-air, between a playful thumb and finger;

  oh, and suddenly, from out of nowhere, whirls

  the pear-bloom,

  upon us, and apple- and almond- and apricot —

  and quince-blossom,

  storms and cumulus clouds of all imaginable blossom

  about our bewildered faces,

  though we do not worship.

  I wish it were spring

  cunningly blowing on the fallen sparks, odds and

  ends of the old, scattered fire,

  and kindling shapely little conflagrations