Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated), page 850
leaving it to the vast revolutions of creative chaos
to bring forth creatures that are an improvement on humans,
as the horse was an improvement on the ichthyosaurus?
Must we hold on?
Or can we now let go?
Or is it even possible we must do both?
How Beastly the Bourgeois is
How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species —
Presentable, eminently presentable —
shall I make you a present of him?
Isn’t he handsome? Isn’t he healthy? Isn’t he a fine specimen?
Doesn’t he look the fresh clean Englishman, outside?
Isn’t it God’s own image? tramping his thirty miles a day
after partridges, or a little rubber ball?
wouldn’t you like to be like that, well off, and quite the thing?
Oh, but wait!
Let him meet a new emotion, let him be faced with another
man’s need,
let him come home to a bit of moral difficulty, let life face him
with a new demand on his understanding
and then watch him go soggy, like a wet meringue.
Watch him turn into a mess, either a fool or a bully.
Just watch the display of him, confronted with a new demand
on his intelligence,
a new life-demand.
How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species —
Nicely groomed, like a mushroom
standing there so sleek and erect and eyeable —
and like a fungus, living on the remains of bygone life
sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life than his own.
And even so, he’s stale, he’s been there too long.
Touch him, and you’ll find he’s all gone inside
Just like an old mushroom, all wormy inside, and hollow
under a smooth skin and an upright appearance.
Full of seething, wormy, hollow feelings
rather nasty —
How beastly the bourgeois is!
Standing in their thousands, these appearances, in damp
England
what a pity they can’t all be kicked over
like sickening toadstools, and left to melt back, swiftly
into the soil of England.
Worm Either Way
If you live along with all the other people
and are just like them and conform, and are nice
you’re just a worm —
and if you live with all the other people
and you don’t like them and won’t be like them and won’t
conform
then you’re just the worm that has turned,
in either case, a worm.
The conforming worm stays just inside the skin
respectably unseen, and cheerfully gnaws away at the heart of
life,
making it all rotten inside.
The unconforming worm - that is, the worm that has turned —
gnaws just the same, gnawing the substance out of life,
but he insists on gnawing a little hole in the social epidermis
and poking his head out and waving himself
and saying: Look at me, I am not respectable,
I do all the things the bourgeois daren’t do,
I booze and fornicate and use foul language and despise your
honest man —
But why should the worm that has turned protest so much?
The bonnie, bonnie bourgeois goes a-whoring up back streets
just the same.
The busy, busy bourgeois pinks his language just as pink
if not pinker
and in private boasts his exploits even louder, if you ask me,
than the other.
While as to honesty, Oh, look where the money lies!
So I can’t see where the worm that has turned puts anything
over
the worm that is too cunning to turn.
On the contrary, he merely gives himself away.
The turned worm shouts: I bravely booze!
The other says: What? cat-piss?
The turned worm boasts: I copulate!
the unturned says: You look it.
You’re a d — b — b — p — bb — , says the worm that’s turned.
Quite! says the other. Cuckoo!
Leda
Come not with kisses
not with caresses
of hands and lips and murmurings;
come with a hiss of wings
and sea-touch tip of a beak
and treading of wet, webbed, wave-working feet
into the marsh-soft belly.
Natural Complexion
But, you see, said the handsome young man with the chamois
gloves
to the woman rather older than himself,
if you don’t use rouge and a lipstick, in Paris,
they’ll take you for a woman of the people.
So spoke the British gentleman
pulling on his chamois gloves
and using his most melodious would-be-Oxford voice.
And the woman said: Dear me!
how rough that would be on you, darling!
Only, if you insist on pulling on those chamois gloves
I swear I’ll pull off my knickers, right in the Rue de la Paix.
The Oxford Voice
When you hear it languishing
and hooing and cooing and sidling through the front teeth,
the Oxford voice
or worse still
the would-be-Oxford voice
you don’t even laugh any more, you can’t.
For every blooming bird is an Oxford cuckoo nowadays,
you can’t sit on a bus nor in the tube
but it breathes gently and languishingly in the back of your neck.
And oh, so seductively superior, so seductively
self-effacingly
deprecatingly
superior. —
We wouldn’t insist on it for a moment
but we are
we are
you admit we are
superior. —
To be Superior
How nice it is to be superior!
Because really, it’s not use pretending, one is superior, isn’t one?
I mean people like you and me. —
Quite! I quite agree.
The trouble is, everybody thinks they’re just as superior
as we are; just as superior. —
That’s what’s so boring! people are so boring.
But they can’t really think it, do you think?
At the bottom, they must know we are really superior, don’t you think?
don’t you think, really, they know we’re their superiors? —
I couldn’t say.
I’ve never got to the bottom of superiority.
I should like to.
True Democracy
I — wish I was a gentleman
as full of wet as a watering-can
to pee in the eye of a policeman —
But my dear fellow, my dear fellow
can it be that you still don’t know
that every man, whether high or low
is a gentleman if he thinks himself so? —
He is an’ all, you bet’e is!
I — bet I am. - You can’old yer phiz
abaht it. - Yes, I’m a gent, an’ Liz
‘ere, she’s a lidy, aren’t yer, old quizz? —
Of course, I’m a lidy, what d’yer think?
You mind who yer sayin’ isn’t lidies!
All the Hinglish is gentlemen and lidies,
like the King an’ Queen, though they’re up just a wink. —
— Of course you are, but let me say
I’m American from New Orleans,
and in my country, just over the way,
we are all kings and queens! —
Swan
Far-off
at the core of space
at the quick of time
beats
and goes still
the great swan upon the waters of all endings
the swan within vast chaos, within the electron.
For us
no longer he swims calmly
nor clacks the forces furrowing a great gay trail,
of happy energy,
nor is he nesting passive upon the atoms,
nor flying north desolative icewards
to the sleep of ice,
nor feeding in the marshes,
nor honking horn-like into the twilight. —
But he stoops, now
in the dark
upon us;
he is treading our women
and we men are put out
as the vast white bird
furrows our featherless women
with unknown shocks
and stamps his black marsh-feet on their white and
marshy flesh.
Give Us Gods
Give us gods, Oh give them us!
Give us gods.
We are so tired of men
and motor-power. —
But not gods grey-bearded and dictatorial,
nor yet that pale young man afraid of fatherhood
shelving substance on to the woman, Madonna mia! shabby virgin!
nor gusty Jove, with his eye on immortal tarts,
nor even the musical, suave young fellow
wooing boys and beauty.
Give us gods
give us something else —
Beyond the great bull that bellowed through space, and got his
throat cut.
Beyond even that eagle, that phoenix, hanging over the gold egg of
all things,
further still, before the curled horns of the ram stepped forth
or the stout swart beetle rolled the globe of dung in which man
should hatch,
or even the sly gold serpent fatherly lifted his head off the earth to
think —
Give us gods before these —
Thou shalt have other gods before these.
Where the waters end in marshes
swims the wild swan
sweeps the high goose above the mists
honking in the gloom the honk of procreation from such throats.
Mists
where the electron behaves and misbehaves as it will,
where the forces tie themselves up into knots of atoms
and come untied;
mists
of mistiness complicated into knots and clots that barge about
and bump on one another and explode into more mist, or don’t
mist of energy most scientific —
But give us gods!
Look then
where the father of all things swims in a mist of atoms
electrons and energies, quantums and relativities
mists, wreathing mists,
like a wild swan, or a goose, whose honk goes through my bladder.
And in the dark unscientific I feel the drum-winds of his wings
and the drip of his cold, webbed feet, mud-black
brush over my face as he goes
to seek the women in the dark, our women, our weird women
whom he treads
with dreams and thrusts that make them cry in their sleep.
Gods, do you ask for gods?
Where there is woman there is swan.
Do you think, scientific man, you’ll be father of your own babies?
Don’t imagine it.
There’ll be babies bom that are cygnets, O my soul!
young wild swans!
And babies of women will come out young wild geese, O my heart!
the geese that saved Rome, and will lose London.
Won’t It be Strange — ?
Won’t it be strange, when the nurse brings the new-born infant
to the proud father, and shows its little, webbed greenish feet
made to smite the waters behind it?
or the round, wild vivid eye of a wild-goose staring
out of fathomless skies and seas?
or when it utters that undaunted little bird-cry
of one who will settle on icebergs, and honk across the Nile? —
And when the father says: This is none of mine!
Woman, where got you this little beast? —
will there be a whistle of wings in the air, and an icy draught?
will the singing of swans, high up, high up, invisible
break the drums of his ears
and leave him forever listening for the answer?
Spiral Flame
There have been so many gods
that now there are none.
When the One God made a monopoly of it
He wore us out, so now we are godless and unbelieving.
Yet, O my young men, there is a vivifier.
There is that which makes us eager.
While we are eager, we think nothing of it.
Sum, ergo non cogito.
But when our eagerness leaves us, we are godless and full of
thought.
We have worn out the gods, and they us.
That pale one, filled with renunciation and pain and white love
has worn us weary of renunciation and love and even pain.
That strong one, ruling the universe with a rod of iron
has sickened us thoroughly with rods of iron and rulers and
strong men.
The All-wise has tired us of wisdom.
The weeping mother of god, inconsolable over her son
makes us prefer to be womanless, rather than be wept over.
And that poor makeshift, Aphrodite emerging in a bathing suit
from our modem seaside foam
has successfully killed all desire in us whatsoever.
Yet, O my young men, there is a vivifier.
There is a swan-like flame that curls round the centre of space
and flutters at the core of the atom,
there is a spiral flame-tip that can lick our little atoms into fusion
so we roar up like bonfires of vitality
and fuse in a broad hard flame of many men in a oneness.
O — pillars of flame by night, O my young men
spinning and dancing like flamy fire-sprouts in the dark ahead of
the multitude!
O — ruddy god in our veins, O fiery god in our genitals!
O — rippling hard fire of courage, O fusing of hot trust
when the fire reaches us, O my young men!
And the same flame that fills us with life, it will dance and bum
the house down
all the fittings and elaborate furnishings
and all the people that go with the fittings and the furnishings,
the upholstered dead that sit in deep armchairs.
Let the Dead Bury Their Dead
Let the dead go bury their dead
don’t help them.
Let the dead look after the dead
leave them to one another,
don’t serve them.
The dead in their nasty dead hands
have heaps of money,
don’t take it.
The dead in their seething minds
have phosphorescent teeming white words
of putrescent wisdom and sapience that subtly stinks;
don’t ever believe them.
The dead are in myriads, they seem mighty.
They make trains chuff, motor-cars titter, ships lurch,
mills grind on and on,
and keep you in millions at the mills, sightless pale slaves,
pretending these are the mills of God.
It is the great lie of the dead.
The mills of industry are not the mills of God.
And the mills of God grind otherwise, with the winds of life for
the mill-stones.
Trust the mills of God, though they grind exceedingly small.
But as for the mills of men
don’t be harnessed to them.
The dead give ships and engines, cinema, radio and
gramophone,
they send aeroplanes across the sky,
and they say: Now, behold, you are living the great life!
While you listen in, while you watch the film, while you drive
the car,
While you read about the airship crossing the wild Atlantic
behold, you are living the great life, the stupendous life!
As you know, it is a complete lie.
You are all going dead and corpse-pale
listening in to the lie.
Spit it out.
O — cease to listen to the living dead
they are only greedy for your life!
O — cease to labour for the gold-toothed dead,
they are so greedy, yet so helpless if not worked for,
Don’t ever be kind to the smiling, tooth-mouthed dead
don’t ever be kind to the dead
it is pandering to corpses,
the repulsive, living fat dead.
Bury a man gently if he has lain down and died.
But with the walking and talking and conventionally
persuasive dead
with bank accounts and insurance policies
don’t sympathise, or you taint the unborn babes.
When Wilt Thou Teach the People — ?
When wilt thou teach the people
God of justice, to save themselves — ?
They have been saved so often
