Part 1

BIRDS, BEASTS AND FLOWERS

_By the same Author_

The Lost Girl Women in Love Aaron’s Rod The Ladybird Kangaroo

Sea and Sardinia

New Poems

Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious Fantasia of the Unconscious

BIRDS, BEASTS AND FLOWERS

POEMS BY D. H. LAWRENCE

LONDON MARTIN SECKER NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET ADELPHI

Printed in Great Britain by The Riverside Press Limited Edinburgh

LONDON: MARTIN SECKER (LTD.) 1923

SOME of these poems have appeared in _Poetry_, _The Dial_, _The New Republic_, _The Bookman_, _The English Review_.

CONTENTS

FRUITS:

PAGE

POMEGRANATE 11 PEACH 13 MEDLARS AND SORB-APPLES 15 FIGS 18 GRAPES 22 THE REVOLUTIONARY 25 THE EVENING LAND 28 PEACE 33

TREES: CYPRESSES 37 BARE FIG-TREES 41 BARE ALMOND-TREES 44 TROPIC 46 SOUTHERN NIGHT 47

FLOWERS: ALMOND BLOSSOM 51 PURPLE ANEMONES 56 SICILIAN CYCLAMENS 60 HIBISCUS AND SALVIA FLOWERS 63

THE EVANGELISTIC BEASTS: ST MATTHEW 73 ST MARK 78 ST LUKE 81 ST JOHN 84

CREATURES: MOSQUITO 89 FISH 93 BAT 100 MAN AND BAT 103

REPTILES: SNAKE 113 BABY TORTOISE 117 TORTOISE SHELL 121 TORTOISE FAMILY CONNECTIONS 124 LUI ET ELLE 127 TORTOISE GALLANTRY 132 TORTOISE SHOUT 134

BIRDS: TURKEY-COCK 141 HUMMING-BIRD 146 EAGLE IN NEW MEXICO 147 BLUE JAY 150

ANIMALS: ASS 155 HE-GOAT 160 SHE-GOAT 165 ELEPHANT 169 KANGAROO 176 BIBBLES 179 MOUNTAIN LION 187 THE RED WOLF 190

GHOSTS: MEN IN NEW MEXICO 197 AUTUMN AT TAOS 199 SPIRITS SUMMONED WEST 201

THE AMERICAN EAGLE 205

FRUITS

POMEGRANATE

You tell me I am wrong. Who are you, who is anybody to tell me I am wrong? I am not wrong.

In Syracuse, rock left bare by the viciousness of Greek women, No doubt you have forgotten the pomegranate-trees in flower, Oh so red, and such a lot of them.

Whereas at Venice Abhorrent, green, slippery city Whose Doges were old, and had ancient eyes, In the dense foliage of the inner garden Pomegranates like bright green stone, And barbed, barbed with a crown. Oh, crown of spiked green metal Actually growing!

Now in Tuscany, Pomegranates to warm your hands at; And crowns, kingly, generous, tilting crowns Over the left eyebrow.

And, if you dare, the fissure!

Do you mean to tell me you will see no fissure? Do you prefer to look on the plain side?

For all that, the setting suns are open. The end cracks open with the beginning: Rosy, tender, glittering within the fissure.

Do you mean to tell me there should be no fissure? No glittering, compact drops of dawn? Do you mean it is wrong, the gold-filmed skin, integument, shown ruptured?

For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack. _San Gervasio in Tuscany._

PEACH

Would you like to throw a stone at me? Here, take all that’s left of my peach.

Blood-red, deep; Heaven knows how it came to pass. Somebody’s pound of flesh rendered up.

Wrinkled with secrets And hard with the intention to keep them.

Why, from silvery peach-bloom, From that shallow-silvery wine-glass on a short stem This rolling, dropping, heavy globule?

I am thinking, of course, of the peach before I ate it.

Why so velvety, why so voluptuous heavy? Why hanging with such inordinate weight? Why so indented?

Why the groove? Why the lovely, bivalve roundnesses? Why the ripple down the sphere? Why the suggestion of incision?

Why was not my peach round and finished like a billiard ball? It would have been if man had made it. Though I’ve eaten it now.

But it wasn’t round and finished like a billiard ball. And because I say so, you would like to throw something at me.

Here, you can have my peach stone. _San Gervasio._

MEDLARS AND SORB-APPLES

I love you, rotten, Delicious rottenness.

I love to suck you out from your skins So brown and soft and coming suave, So morbid, as the Italians say.

What a rare, powerful, reminiscent flavour Comes out of your falling through the stages of decay: Stream within stream.

Something of the same flavour as Syracusan muscat wine Or vulgar Marsala.

Though even the word Marsala will smack of preciosity Soon in the pussy-foot West.

What is it? What is it, in the grape turning raisin, In the medlar, in the sorb-apple, Wineskins of brown morbidity, Autumnal excrementa; What is it that reminds us of white gods?

Gods nude as blanched nut-kernels, Strangely, half-sinisterly flesh-fragrant As if with sweat, And drenched with mystery.

Sorb-apples, medlars with dead crowns.

I say, wonderful are the hellish experiences Orphic, delicate Dionysos of the Underworld.

A kiss, and a vivid spasm of farewell, a moment’s orgasm of rupture, Then along the damp road alone, till the next turning. And there, a new partner, a new parting, a new unfusing into twain, A new gasp of further isolation, A new intoxication of loneliness, among decaying, frost-cold leaves.

Going down the strange lanes of hell, more and more intensely alone, The fibres of the heart parting one after the other And yet the soul continuing, naked-footed, ever more vividly embodied Like a flame blown whiter and whiter In a deeper and deeper darkness Ever more exquisite, distilled in separation.

So, in the strange retorts of medlars and sorb-apples The distilled essence of hell. The exquisite odour of leave-taking. _Jamque vale!_ Orpheus, and the winding, leaf-clogged, silent lanes of hell.

Each soul departing with its own isolation, Strangest of all strange companions, And best.

Medlars, sorb-apples More than sweet Flux of autumn Sucked out of your empty bladders And sipped down, perhaps, with a sip of Marsala So that the rambling, sky-dropped grape can add its music to yours, Orphic farewell, and farewell, and farewell And the _ego sum_ of Dionysos The _sono io_ of perfect drunkenness Intoxication of final loneliness. _San Gervasio._

FIGS

The proper way to eat a fig, in society, Is to split it in four, holding it by the stump, And open it, so that it is a glittering, rosy, moist, honied, heavy-petalled four-petalled flower.

Then you throw away the skin Which is just like a four-sepalled calyx, After you have taken off the blossom with your lips.

But the vulgar way Is just to put your mouth to the crack, and take out the flesh in one bite.

Every fruit has its secret.

The fig is a very secretive fruit. As you see it standing growing, you feel at once it is symbolic: And it seems male. But when you come to know it better, you agree with the Romans, it is female.

The Italians vulgarly say, it stands for the female part; the fig-fruit: The fissure, the yoni, The wonderful moist conductivity towards the centre.

Involved, Inturned, The flowering all inward and womb-fibrilled; And but one orifice.

The fig, the horse-shoe, the squash-blossom. Symbols.

There was a flower that flowered inward, womb-ward; Now there is a fruit like a ripe womb.

It was always a secret. That’s how it should be, the female should always be secret.

There never was any standing aloft and unfolded on a bough Like other flowers, in a revelation of petals; Silver-pink peach, Venetian green glass of medlars and sorb-apples, Shallow wine-cups on short, bulging stems Openly pledging heaven: _Here’s to the thorn in flower! Here is to Utterance!_ The brave, adventurous rosaceæ.

Folded upon itself, and secret unutterable, And milky-sapped, sap that curdles milk and makes ricotta, Sap that smells strange on your fingers, that even goats won’t taste it; Folded upon itself, enclosed like any Mohammedan woman, Its nakedness all within-walls, its flowering forever unseen, One small way of access only, and this close-curtained from the light; Fig, fruit of the female mystery, covert and inward, Mediterranean fruit, with your covert nakedness, Where everything happens invisible, flowering and fertilisation, and fruiting In the inwardness of your you, that eye will never see Till it’s finished, and you’re over-ripe, and you burst to give up your ghost.

Till the drop of ripeness exudes, And the year is over.

And then the fig has kept her secret long enough. So it explodes, and you see through the fissure the scarlet. And the fig is finished, the year is over.

That’s how the fig dies, showing her crimson through the purple slit Like a wound, the exposure of her secret, on the open day. Like a prostitute, the bursten fig, making a show of her secret.

That’s how women die too.

The year is fallen over-ripe, The year of our women. The year of our women is fallen over-ripe. The secret is laid bare. And rottenness soon sets in. The year of our women is fallen over-ripe.

When Eve once knew _in her mind_ that she was naked She quickly sewed fig-leaves, and sewed the same for the man. She’d been naked all her days before, But till then, till that apple of knowledge, she hadn’t had the fact on her mind.

She got the fact on her mind, and quickly sewed fig-leaves. And women have been sewing ever since. But now they stitch to adorn the bursten fig, not to cover it. They have their nakedness more than ever on their mind, And they won’t let us forget it.

Now, the secret Becomes an affirmation through moist, scarlet lips That laugh at the Lord’s indignation.

_What then, good Lord!_ cry the women. _We have kept our secret long enough._ _We are a ripe fig._ _Let us burst into affirmation._

They forget, ripe figs won’t keep. Ripe figs won’t keep.

Honey-white figs of the north, black figs with scarlet inside, of the south. Ripe figs won’t keep, won’t keep in any clime. What then, when women the world over have all bursten into affirmation? And bursten figs won’t keep? _San Gervasio._

GRAPES

So many fruits come from roses From the rose of all roses From the unfolded rose Rose of all the world.

Admit that apples and strawberries and peaches and pears and blackberries Are all Rosaceæ, Issue of the explicit rose, The open-countenanced, skyward-smiling rose.

What then of the vine? Oh, what of the tendrilled vine?

Ours is the universe of the unfolded rose, The explicit, The candid revelation.

But long ago, oh, long ago Before the rose began to simper supreme, Before the rose of all roses, rose of all the world, was even in bud, Before the glaciers were gathered up in a bunch out of the unsettled seas and winds, Or else before they had been let down again, in Noah’s flood, There was another world, a dusky, flowerless, tendrilled world And creatures webbed and marshy, And on the margin, men soft-footed and pristine, Still, and sensitive, and active, Audile, tactile sensitiveness as of a tendril which orientates and reaches out, Reaching out and grasping by an instinct more delicate than the moon’s as she feels for the tides.

Of which world, the vine was the invisible rose, Before petals spread, before colour made its disturbance, before eyes saw too much.

In a green, muddy, web-foot, unutterably songless world The vine was rose of all roses.

There were no poppies or carnations, Hardly a greenish lily, watery faint. Green, dim, invisible flourishing of vines Royally gesticulate.

Look now even now, how it keeps its power of invisibility Look how black, how blue-black, how globed in Egyptian darkness Dropping among his leaves, hangs the dark grape! See him there, the swart, so palpably invisible: Whom shall we ask about him?

The negro might know a little. When the vine was rose, Gods were dark-skinned. Bacchus is a dream’s dream. Once God was all negroid, as now he is fair. But it’s so long ago, the ancient Bushman has forgotten more utterly than we, who have never known.

For we are on the brink of re-remembrance. Which, I suppose, is why America has gone dry. Our pale day is sinking into twilight, And if we sip the wine, we find dreams coming upon us Out of the imminent night. Nay, we find ourselves crossing the fern-scented frontiers Of the world before the floods, where man was dark and evasive And the tiny vine-flower rose of all roses, perfumed, And all in naked communion communicating as now our clothed vision can never communicate. Vistas, down dark avenues As we sip the wine.

The grape is swart, the avenues dusky and tendrilled, subtly prehensile, But we, as we start awake, clutch at our vistas democratic, boulevards, tram-cars, policemen. Give us our own back Let us go to the soda-fountain, to get sober.

Soberness, sobriety. It is like the agonised perverseness of a child heavy with sleep, yet fighting, fighting to keep awake; Soberness, sobriety, with heavy eyes propped open.

Dusky are the avenues of wine, And we must cross the frontiers, though we will not, Of the lost, fern-scented world: Take the fern-seed on our lips, Close the eyes, and go Down the tendrilled avenues of wine and the otherworld. _San Gervasio._

THE REVOLUTIONARY

Look at them standing there in authority The pale-faces, As if it could have any effect any more.

Pale-face authority, Caryatids, Pillars of white bronze standing rigid, lest the skies fall.

What a job they’ve got to keep it up. Their poor, idealist foreheads naked capitals To the entablature of clouded heaven.

When the skies are going to fall, fall they will In a great chute and rush of débâcle downwards.

Oh and I wish the high and super-gothic heavens would come down now, The heavens above, that we yearn to and aspire to.

I do not yearn, nor aspire, for I am a blind Samson. And what is daylight to me that I should look skyward? Only I grope among you, pale-faces, caryatids, as among a forest of pillars that hold up the dome of high ideal heaven Which is my prison, And all these human pillars of loftiness, going stiff, metallic-stunned with the weight of their responsibility I stumble against them. Stumbling-blocks, painful ones.

To keep on holding up this ideal civilisation Must be excruciating: unless you stiffen into metal, when it is easier to stand stock rigid than to move.

This is why I tug at them, individually, with my arm round their waist The human pillars. They are not stronger than I am, blind Samson. The house sways.

I shall be so glad when it comes down. I am so tired of the limitations of their Infinite. I am so sick of the pretensions of the Spirit. I am so weary of pale-face importance.

Am I not blind, at the round-turning mill? Then why should I fear their pale faces? Or love the effulgence of their holy light, The sun of their righteousness?

To me, all faces are dark, All lips are dusky and valved.

Save your lips, O pale-faces, Which are slips of metal, Like slits in an automatic-machine, you columns of give-and-take.

To me, the earth rolls ponderously, superbly Coming my way without forethought or afterthought. To me, men’s footfalls fall with a dull, soft rumble, ominous and lovely, Coming my way.

But not your foot-falls, pale-faces, They are a clicketing of bits of disjointed metal Working in motion.

To me, men are palpable, invisible nearnesses in the dark Sending out magnetic vibrations of warning, pitch-dark throbs of invitation.

But you, pale-faces, You are painful, harsh-surfaced pillars that give off nothing except rigidity, And I jut against you if I try to move, for you are everywhere, and I am blind, Sightless among all your visuality, You staring caryatids.

See if I don’t bring you down, and all your high opinion And all your ponderous roofed-in erection of right and wrong Your particular heavens, With a smash.

See if your skies aren’t falling! And my head, at least, is thick enough to stand it, the smash.

See if I don’t move under a dark and nude, vast heaven When your world is in ruins, under your fallen skies. Caryatids, pale-faces. See if I am not Lord of the dark and moving hosts Before I die. _Florence._

THE EVENING LAND

Oh America The sun sets in you. Are you the grave of our day?

Shall I come to you, the open tomb of my race?

I would come, if I felt my hour had struck. I would rather you came to me.

For that matter Mahomet never went to any mountain Save it had first approached him and cajoled his soul.

You have cajoled the souls of millions of us America, Why won’t you cajole my soul? I wish you would.

I confess I am afraid of you.

The catastrophe of your exaggerate love, You who never find yourself in love But only lose yourself further, decomposing.

You who never recover from out of the orgasm of loving Your pristine, isolate integrity, lost æons ago. Your singleness within the universe.

You who in loving break down And break further and further down Your bounds of isolation, But who never rise, resurrected, from this grave of mingling, In a new proud singleness, America.

Your more-than-European idealism, Like a be-aureoled bleached skeleton hovering Its cage-ribs in the social heaven, beneficent.

And then your single resurrection Into machine-uprisen perfect man.

Even the winged skeleton of your bleached ideal Is not so frightening as that clean smooth Automaton of your uprisen self, Machine American.

Do you wonder that I am afraid to come And answer the first machine-cut question from the lips of your iron men? Put the first cents into metallic fingers of your officers And sit beside the steel-straight arms of your fair women American?

This may be a withering tree, this Europe, But here, even a customs-official is still vulnerable.

I am so terrified, America, Of the iron click of your human contact. And after this The winding-sheet of your self-less ideal love. Boundless love Like a poison gas.

Does no one realise that love should be intense, individual, Not boundless. This boundless love is like the bad smell Of something gone wrong in the middle. All this philanthropy and benevolence on other people’s behalf Just a bad smell.

Yet, America, Your elvishness, Your New England uncanniness, Your western brutal faery quality.

My soul is half-cajoled, half-cajoled.

Something in you which carries me beyond Yankee, Yankee, What we call human. Carries me where I want to be carried ... Or don’t I?

What does it matter What we call human, and what we don’t call human? The rose would smell as sweet. And to be limited by a mere word is to be less than a hopping flea, which hops over such an obstruction at first jump.

Your horrible, skeleton, aureoled ideal, Your weird bright motor-productive mechanism, Two spectres.

But moreover A dark, unfathomed will, that is not un-Jewish; A set, stoic endurance, non-European; An ultimate desperateness, un-African; A deliberate generosity, non-Oriental.

The strange, unaccustomed geste of your demonish New World nature Glimpsed now and then.

Nobody knows you. You don’t know yourself. And I, who am half in love with you, What am I in love with? My own imaginings?

Say it is not so.

Say, through the branches America, America Of all your machines, Say, in the deep sockets of your idealistic skull, Dark, aboriginal eyes Stoic, able to wait through ages Glancing.

Say, in the sound of all your machines And white words, white-wash American, Deep pulsing of a strange heart New throb, like a stirring under the false dawn that precedes the real.

Nascent American Demonish, lurking among the undergrowth Of many-stemmed machines and chimneys that smoke like pine-trees.

Dark, elvish, Modern, unissued, uncanny America, Your nascent demon people Lurking among the deeps of your industrial thicket Allure me till I am beside myself, A nympholepht.

“These States!” as Whitman said, Whatever he meant. _Baden-Baden._

PEACE

Peace is written on the doorstep In lava.

Peace, black peace congealed. My heart will know no peace Till the hill bursts.

Brilliant, intolerable lava Brilliant as a powerful burning-glass Walking like a royal snake down the mountain towards the sea.

Forests, cities, bridges Gone again in the bright trail of lava. Naxos thousands of feet below the olive-roots, And now the olive leaves thousands of feet below the lava fire.

Peace congealed in black lava on the doorstep. Within, white-hot lava, never at peace Till it burst forth blinding, withering the earth; To set again into rock Grey-black rock.

Call it Peace? _Taormina._

TREES

CYPRESSES

Tuscan cypresses, What is it?

Folded in like a dark thought For which the language is lost, Tuscan cypresses, Is there a great secret? Are our words no good?

The undeliverable secret, Dead with a dead race and a dead speech, and yet Darkly monumental in you, Etruscan cypresses.

Ah, how I admire your fidelity, Dark cypresses,

Is it the secret of the long-nosed Etruscans? The long-nosed, sensitive-footed, subtly-smiling Etruscans, Who made so little noise outside the cypress groves?