Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence, page 851
of the people!
When a saviour has saved a people
they find he has sold them to his father.
They say: We are saved but we are starving.
He says: The sooner will you eat imaginary cake in the
mansions of my father.
They say: Can’t we have a loaf of common bread?
He says: No, you must go to heaven, and eat the most
marvellous cake. —
Or Napoleon says: Since I have saved you from the ci-devants,
you are my property, be prepared to die for me, and to work for
me. —
Or later republicans say: You are saved,
therefore you are savings, our capital
with which we shall do big business. —
Or Lenin says: You are saved, but you are saved wholesale.
You are no longer men, that is bourgeois;
you are items in the soviet state,
and each item will get its ration,
but it is the soviet state alone which counts
the items are of small importance,
the state having saved them all. —
And so it goes on, with the saving of the people.
God of justice, when wilt thou teach them to save themselves?
A Living
A man should never earn his living
if he earns his life he’ll be lovely.
A bird picks up its seeds or little snails
between heedless earth and heaven
in heedlessness.
But, the plucky little sport, it gives to life
song, and chirruping, gay feathers, fluff-shadowed warmth
and all the unspeakable charm of birds hopping and fluttering
and being birds.
And we, we get it all from them for nothing.
When I Went to the Film
When I went to the film, and saw all the black-and-white
feelings that nobody felt,
and heard the audience sighing and sobbing with all the
emotions they none of them felt,
and saw them cuddling with rising passions they none of them
for a moment felt,
and caught them moaning from close-up kisses, black-and —
white kisses that could not be felt,
it was like being in heaven, which I am sure has a white
atmosphere
upon which shadows of people, pure personalities
are cast in black and white, and move
in flat ecstasy, supremely unfelt,
and heavenly.
When I Went to the Circus
When I went to the circus that had pitched on the waste lot
it was full of uneasy people
frightened of the bare earth and the temporary canvas
and the smell of horses and other beasts
instead of merely the smell of man.
Monkeys rode rather grey and wizened
on curly plump piebald ponies
and the children uttered a little cry —
and dogs jumped through hoops and turned somersaults
and then the geese scuttled in in a little flock
and round the ring they went to the sound of the whip
then doubled, and back, with a funny up-flutter of wings
and the children suddenly shouted out.
Then came the hush again, like a hush of fear.
The tight-rope lady, pink and blonde and nude-looking with a few
gold spangles
footed cautiously out on the rope, turned prettily, spun round
bowed, and lifted her foot in her hand, smiled, swung her parasol
to another balance, tripped round, poised, and slowly sank
her handsome thighs down, down, till she slept her splendid body
on the rope.
When she rose, tilting her parasol, and smiled at the cautious
people
they cheered, but nervously.
The trapeze man, slim and beautiful and like a fish in the air
swung great curves through the upper space, and came down
like a star.
— And the people applauded, with hollow, frightened applause.
The elephants, huge and grey, loomed their curved bulk through
the dusk
and sat up, taking strange postures, showing the pink soles of
their feet
and curling their precious live trunks like ammonites
and moving always with soft slow precision
as when a great ship moves to anchor.
The people watched and wondered, and seemed to resent the
mystery that lies in beasts.
Horses, gay horses, swirling round and plaiting
in a long line, their heads laid over each other’s necks;
they were happy, they enjoyed it;
all the creatures seemed to enjoy the game
in the circus, with their circus people.
But the audience, compelled to wonder
compelled to admire the bright rhythms of moving bodies
flesh flamey and a little heroic, even in a tumbling clown,
they were not really happy.
There was no gushing response, as there is at the film.
When modem people see the carnal body dauntless and
flickering gay
playing among the elements neatly, beyond competition
and displaying no personality,
modem people are depressed.
Modem people feel themselves at a disadvantage.
They know they have no bodies that could play among the
elements.
They have only their personalities, that are best seen flat, on the
film,
flat personalities in two dimensions, imponderable and touchless.
And they grudge the circus people the swooping gay weight of limbs
that flower in mere movement,
and they grudge them the immediate, physical understanding they
have with their circus beasts,
and they grudge them their circus life altogether.
Yet the strange, almost frightened shout of delight that comes now
and then from the children
shows that the children vaguely know how cheated they are of
their birthright
in the bright wild circus flesh.
The Noble Englishman
I know a noble Englishman
who is sure he is a gentleman,
that sort —
This moderately young gentleman
is very normal, as becomes an Englishman,
rather proud of being a bit of a Don Juan
you know —
But one of his beloveds, looking a little peaked
towards the end of her particular affair with him
said: Ronald, you know, is like most Englishmen,
by instinct he’s a sodomist
but he’s frightened to know it
so he takes it out on women.
Oh come! said I. That Don Juan of a Ronald! —
Exactly, she said. Don Juan was another of them, in love with
himself
and taking it out on women. —
Even that isn’t sodomitical, said I.
But if a man is in love with himself, isn’t that the meanest form
of homosexuality? she said.
You’ve no idea, when men are in love with themselves, how they
wreak all their spite on women,
pretending to love them.
Ronald, she resumed, doesn’t like women, just acutely dislikes
them.
He might possibly like men, if he weren’t too frightened and
egoistic.
So he very cleverly tortures women, with his sort of love.
He’s instinctively frightfully clever.
He can be so gentle, so gentle
so delicate in his love-making.
Even now, the thought of it bewilders me: such gentleness!
Yet I know he does it deliberately, as cautiously and deliberately
as when he shaves himself.
Then more than that, he makes a woman feel he is serving her
really living in her service, and serving her
as no man ever served before.
And then, suddenly, when she’s feeling all lovely about it
suddenly the ground goes from under her feet, and she clutches
in mid-air,
but horrible, as if your heart would wrench out; —
while he stands aside watching with a superior little grin
like some malicious indecent little boy.
— No, don’t talk to me about the love of Englishmen!
Things Men Have Made
Things men have made with wakened hands, and put soft life into
are awake through years with transferred touch, and go on glowing
for long years.
And for this reason, some old things are lovely
warm still with the life of forgotten men who made them.
Things Made by Iron
Things made by iron and handled by steel
are bom dead, they are shrouds, they soak life out of us.
Till after a long time, when they are old and have steeped in our life
they begin to be soothed and soothing; then we throw them away.
New Houses, New Clothes
New houses, new furniture, new streets, new clothes, new sheets
everything new and machine-made sucks life out of us
and makes us cold, makes us lifeless
the more we have.
Whatever Man Makes
Whatever man makes and makes it live
lives because of the life put into it.
A yard of India muslin is alive with Hindu life.
And a Navajo woman, weaving her rug in the pattern of her dream
must run the pattern out in a little break at the end
so that her soul can come out, back to her.
But in the odd pattern, like snake-marks on the sand
it leaves its trail.
We are Transmitters
As we live, we are transmitters of life.
And when we fail to transmit life, life fails to flow through us.
That is part of the mystery of sex, it is a flow onwards.
Sexless people transmit nothing.
And if, as we work, we can transmit life into our work,
life, still more life, rushes into us to compensate, to be ready
and we ripple with life through the days.
Even if it is a woman making an apple dumpling, or a man a stool,
if life goes into the pudding, good is the pudding
good is the stool,
content is the woman, with fresh life rippling in her,
content is the man.
Give, and it shall be given unto you
is still the truth about life.
But giving life is not so easy.
It doesn’t mean handing it out to some mean fool, or letting the
living dead eat you up.
It means kindling the life-quality where it was not,
even if it’s only in the whiteness of a washed pocket-handkerchief.
Let Us be Men
For God’s sake, let us be men
not monkeys minding machines
or sitting with our tails curled
while the machine amuses us, the radio or film or
gramophone.
Monkeys with a bland grin on our faces. —
All That We Have is Life
All that we have, while we live, is life;
And if you don’t live during your life, you are a piece of dung.
And work is life, and life is lived in work
unless you’re a wage-slave.
While a wage-slave works, he leaves life aside
and stands there a piece of dung.
Men should refuse to be lifelessly at work.
Men should refuse to be heaps of wage-earning dung.
Men should refuse to work at all, as wage-slaves.
Men should demand to work for themselves, of themselves, and
put their life in it.
For if a man has no life in his work, he is mostly a heap of dung.
Work
There is no point in work
unless it absorbs you
like an absorbing game.
If it doesn’t absorb you
if it’s never any fun,
don’t do it.
When a man goes out into his work
he is alive like a tree in spring
he is living, not merely working.
When the Hindus weave thin wool into long, long lengths of
stuff
with their thin dark hands and their wide dark eyes and their
still souls absorbed
they are like slender trees putting forth leaves, a long white web
of living leaf,
the tissue they weave,
and they clothe themselves in white as a tree clothes itself
in its own foliage.
As with cloth, so with houses, ships, shoes, wagons or cups or
loaves
men might put them forth as a snail its shell, as a bird that
leans
its breast against its nest, to make it round,
as the turnip models his round root, as the bush makes flowers
and gooseberries,
putting them forth, not manufacturing them,
and cities might be as once they were, bowers grown out from
the busy bodies of people.
And so it will be again, men will smash the machines.
At last, for the sake of clothing himself in his own leaf-like cloth
tissued from his life,
and dwelling in his own bowery house, like a beaver’s nibbled
mansion
and drinking from cups that came off his fingers like flowers off
their five-fold stem,
he will cancel the machines we have got.
Why — ?
Why have money?
why have a financial system to strangle us all in its octopus
arms?
why have industry?
why have the industrial system?
why have machines, that we only have to serve?
why have a soviet, that only wants to screw us all in as parts of
the machine?
why have working classes at all, as if men were only embodied
jobs?
why not have men as men, and the work as merely part of the
game of life?
True, we’ve got all these things
industrial and financial systems, machines and soviets, working
classes.
But why go on having them, if they belittle us?
Why should we be belittled any longer?
Moon Memory
When the moon falls on a man’s blood
white and slippery, as on the black water in a port
shaking asunder, and flicking at his ribs —
then the noisy, dirty day-world
exists no more, nor ever truly existed;
but instead
this wet white gleam
twitches, and ebbs hitting, washing inwardly, silverily against
his ribs,
on his soul that is dark ocean within him.
And under the flicking of the white whiplash of the moon
sea-beasts immersed lean sideways and flash bright
in pure brilliance of anger, sea-immersed anger
at the thrashy, motor-driven transit of dirty day
that has left scum on the sea, even in the night.
What is He?
What is he?
— A man, of course.
Yes, but what does he do?
— He lives and is a man.
Oh, quite! But he must work. He must have a job of some sort.
-Why?
Because obviously he’s not one of the leisured classes.
— I don’t know. He has lots of leisure. And he makes quite
beautiful chairs. —
There you are then! He’s a cabinet maker.
— No, no!
Anyhow a carpenter and joiner.
— Not at all.
But you said so.
— What did I say?
That he made chairs, and was a joiner and carpenter.
— I said he made chairs, but I did not say he was a carpenter.
All right then, he’s just an amateur.
— Perhaps! Would you say a thrush was a professional flautist
or just an amateur? —
I’d say it was just a bird
— And I say he is just a man.
All right! You always did quibble.
O! Start a Revolution
O! start a revolution, somebody!
not to get the money
but to lose it all for ever.
O! start a revolution, somebody!
not to install the working classes
but to abolish the working classes for ever
and have a world of men.
There is Rain in Me
There is rain in me,
running down, running down, trickling
away from memory.
There is ocean in me,
swaying, swaying, O so deep
so fathomlessly black
and spurting suddenly up, snow-white, like snow-leopards
rearing
high and clawing with rage at the cliffs of the soul
then disappearing back with a hiss
