Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence, page 853
without ever having felt sorry for itself.
New Moon
The new moon, of no importance
lingers behind as the yellow sun glares and is gone beyond
the sea’s edge;
earth smokes blue;
the new moon, in cool height above the blushes,
brings a fresh fragrance of heaven to our senses.
Spray
It is a wonder foam is so beautiful.
A wave bursts in anger on a rock, broken up
in wild white sibilant spray
and falls back, drawing in its breath with rage,
with frustration how beautiful!
Seaweed
Sea-weed sways and sways and swirls
as if swaying were its form of stillness;
and if it flushes against fierce rock
it slips over it as shadows do, without hurting itself.
My Enemy
If it is a question of him or me
then down with him!
If he is not with me but against me,
if his presence and his breath are poison to me,
then, if he comes near me
down with him.
Down with him
to the pit of annihilation.
But if he stays far from me, and does not touch me,
he is no longer my concern, he ceases to be my enemy.
Touch
Since we have become so cerebral
we can’t bear to touch or be touched.
Since we are so cerebral
we are humanly out of touch.
And so we must remain.
For if, cerebrally, we force ourselves into touch, into contact
physical and fleshly,
we violate ourselves,
we become vicious.
Noli Me Tangere
Noli me tangere, touch me not!
O you creatures of mind, don’t touch me!
O you with mental fingers, O never put your hand on me!
O you with mental bodies, stay a little distance from me!
And let us, if you will, talk and mingle
in mental contact, gay and sad.
But only that.
O don’t confuse
the body into it, let us stay apart.
Great is my need to be chaste
and apart, in this cerebral age.
Great is my need to be untouched
untouched.
Noli me tangere!
Chastity
Chastity, beloved chastity
O beloved chastity
how infinitely dear to me
chastity, beloved chastity!
That my body need not be
fingered by the mind,
or prostituted by the dree
contact of cerebral flesh —
O leave me clean from mental fingering
from the cold copulation of the will,
from all the white, self-conscious lechery
the modem mind calls love!
From all the mental poetry
of deliberate love-making,
from all the false felicity
of deliberately taking
the body of another unto mine,
O God deliver me!
leave me alone, let me be!
Chastity, dearer far to me
than any contact that can be
in this mind-mischievous age!
Let Us Talk, Let Us Laugh
Let us talk, let us laugh, let us tell
all kinds of things to one another;
men and women, let us be
gay and amusing together, and free
from airs and from false modesty.
But at the same time, don’t let’s think,
that this quite real intimacy
of talk and thought and me-and-thee
means anything further and physical.
Nay, on the very contrary
all this talking intimacy
is only real and right if we
keep ourselves separate physically
and quite apart.
To proceed from mental intimacy
to physical, is just messy,
and really, a nasty violation,
and the ruin of any decent relation
between us —
Touch Comes
Touch comes when the white mind sleeps
and only then.
Touch comes slowly, if ever; it seeps
slowly up in the blood of men
and women.
Soft slow sympathy
of the blood in me, of the blood in thee
rises and flushes insidiously
over the conscious personality
of each of us, and covers us
with a soft one warmth, and a generous
kindled togetherness, so we go
into each other as tides flow
under a moon they do not know.
Personalities exist apart;
and personal intimacy has no heart.
Touch is of the blood
uncontaminated, the unmental flood.
When again in us
the soft blood softly flows together
towards touch, then this delirious
day of the mental welter and blether
will be passing away, we shall cease to fuss.
Leave Sex Alone
Leave sex alone, leave sex alone, let it die right away,
let it die right away, till it rises of itself again.
Meanwhile, if we must, let us think about it, and talk about it
straight to the very end,
since the need is on us.
But while we think of it, and while we talk of it
let us leave it alone, physically, keep apart.
For while we have sex in the mind, we truly have none in the
body.
Sex is a state of grace
and you’ll have to wait.
You’ll even have to repent.
And in some strange and silent way
you’ll have to pray to the far-off gods
to grant it you.
At present sex is the mind’s preoccupation,
and in the body we can only mentally fornicate.
Today, we’ve got no sex.
We have only cerebral excitations.
The mind will have to glut itself,
and the ego will have to burst like the swollen frog,
and then perhaps we shall know true sex, in ourselves.
The Mess of Love
We’ve made a great mess of love
since we made an ideal of it.
The moment I swear to love a woman, a certain woman, all my life
that moment I begin to hate her.
The moment I even say to a woman: I love you! —
my love dies down considerably.
The moment love is an understood thing between us, we are sure
of it,
it’s a cold egg, it isn’t love any more.
Love is like a flower, it must flower and fade;
if it doesn’t fade, it is not a flower,
it’s either an artificial rag blossom, or an immortelle, for the
cemetery.
The moment the mind interferes with love, or the will fixes on it,
or the personality assumes it as an attribute, or the ego takes
possession of it
it is not love any more, it’s just a mess.
And we’ve made a great mess of love, mind-perverted, will —
perverted, ego-perverted love.
Climb Down, O Lordly Mind
Climb down, O lordly mind!
O — eagle of the mind, alas, you are more like a buzzard.
Come down now, from your pre-eminence, O mind, O lofty spirit!
Your hour has struck
your unique day is over.
Absolutism is finished, in the human consciousness too.
A man is many things, he is not only a mind.
But in his consciousness, he is two-fold at least;
he is cerebral, intellectual, mental, spiritual,
but also he is instinctive, intuitive, and in touch.
The mind that needs to know all things
must needs at last come to know its own limits,
even its own nullity, beyond a certain point.
Know thyself, and that thou art mortal,
and therefore, that thou art forever unknowable;
the mind can never reach thee.
Thou art like the moon,
and the white mind shines on one side of thee
but the other side is dark forever,
and the dark moon draws the tides also.
Thou art like the day
but thou art also like the night,
and thy darkness is forever invisible,
for the strongest light throws also the darkest shadow.
The blood knows in darkness, and forever dark,
in touch, by intuition, instinctively,
The blood also knows religiously,
and of this, the mind is incapable,
The mind is non-religious.
To my dark heart, gods are.
In my dark heart, love is and is not.
But to my white mind
gods and love alike are but an idea
a kind of fiction.
Man is an alternating consciousness.
Man is an alternating consciousness.
Only that exists which exists in my own consciousness.
Cogito, ergo sum.
Only that exists which exists dynamically and unmentalised, in
my blood.
Non cogito, ergo sum.
I am, I do not think I am.
Ego-Bound
As a plant becomes pot-bound
man becomes ego-bound
enclosed in his own limited mental consciousness.
Then he can’t feel any more
or love, or rejoice or even grieve any more,
he is ego-bound,
pot-bound
in the pot of his own conceit
and he can only slowly die.
Unless he is a sturdy plant.
Then he can burst the pot,
shell off his ego
and get his roots in earth again,
raw earth.
Jealousy
The jealousy of an ego-bound woman
is hideous and fearful,
it is so much stronger than her love could ever be.
The jealousy of an ego-bound woman
is a fearful thing to behold.
The ego revealed in all its monstrous inhumanity.
Ego-Bound Women
Ego-bound women are often lesbian,
perhaps always.
Perhaps the ego-bound can only love their own kind,
if they can love at all.
And of all passions
the lesbian passion is the most appalling,
a frenzy of tortured possession
and a million frenzies of tortured jealousy.
Possessive, possessive, possessive!
gentle woman gone mad
with possessive vindictiveness.
But the real fault lies in the ego-bound condition of
mankind
Individuals must go mad.
Fidelity
Fidelity and love are two different things, like a flower and a gem.
And love, like a flower, will fade, will change into something else
or it would not be flowery.
O — flowers they fade because they are moving swiftly; a little torrent of life
leaps up to the summit of the stem, gleams, turns over round the bend
of the parabola of curved flight,
sinks, and is gone, like a comet curving into the invisible.
O — flowers, they are all the time travelling
like comets, and they come into our ken
for a day, for two days, and withdraw, slowly vanish again.
And we, we must take them on the wing, and let them go.
Embalmed flowers are not flowers, immortelles are not flowers;
flowers are just a motion, a swift motion, a coloured gesture;
that is their loveliness. And that is love.
But a gem is different. It lasts so much longer than we do
so much much much much longer
that it seems to last for ever.
Yet we know it is flowing away
as flowers are, and we are, only slower.
The wonderful slow flowing of the sapphire!
All flows, and every flow is related to every other flow.
Flowers and sapphires and us, diversely streaming.
In the old days, when sapphires were breathed upon and brought forth
during the wild orgasms of chaos
time was much slower, when the rocks came forth.
It took aeons to make a sapphire, aeons for it to pass away.
And a flower it takes a summer.
And man and woman are like the earth, that brings forth flowers
in summer, and love, but underneath is rock.
Older than flowers, older than ferns, older than foraminiferae, older than plasm altogether is the soul of a man underneath.
And when, throughout all the wild orgasms of love
slowly a gem forms, in the ancient, once-more-molten rocks
of two human hearts, two ancient rocks, a man’s heart and a woman’s,
that is the crystal of peace, the slow hard jewel of trust,
the sapphire of fidelity.
The gem of mutual peace emerging from the wild chaos of love.
Know Deeply, Know Thyself More Deeply
Go deeper than love, for the soul has greater depths,
love is like the grass, but the heart is deep wild rock,
molten, yet dense and permanent.
Go down to your deep old heart, woman, and lose sight of yourself.
And lose sight of me, the me whom you turbulently loved.
Let us lose sight of ourselves, and break the mirrors.
For the fierce curve of our lives is moving again to the depths
out of sight, in the deep dark living heart.
But say, in the dark wild metal of your heart
is there a gem, which came into being between us?
is there a sapphire of mutual trust, a blue spark?
Is there a ruby of fused being, mine and yours, an inward glint?
If there is not, O then leave me, go away.
For I cannot be bullied back into the appearances of love,
any more than August can be bullied to look like March.
Love out of season, especially at the end of the season,
is merely ridiculous.
If you insist on it, I insist on departure.
Have you no deep old heart of wild womanhood,
self-forgetful and gemmed with experience,
and swinging in a strange unison of power
with the heart of the man you are supposed to have loved?
If you have not, go away.
If you can only sit with a mirror in your hand, an ageing woman
posing on and on as a lover,
in love with a self that now is shallow and withered,
your own self - that has passed like a last summer’s flower —
then go away —
I — do not want a woman whom age cannot wither.
She is a made-up lie, a dyed immortelle
of infinite staleness.
All I Ask
All I ask of a woman is that she shall feel gently towards me
when my heart feels kindly towards her,
and there shall be the soft, soft tremor as of unheard bells
between us.
It is all I ask.
I — am so tired of violent women lashing out and insisting
on being loved, when there is no love in them.
The Universe Flows
The universe flows in infinite wild streams, related
in rhythms too big and too small for us to know,
since man is just middling, and his comprehension just middling.
If once, for a second, the universe ceased to flow
of course it would cease to exist.
The thought is unthinkable, anyhow.
Only man tries not to flow,
repeats himself over and over in mechanical monotony of conceit
and hence is a mess.
If only Cleopatra had left off being so Cleopatra-ish
— she was it too long —
if only she had gone down to a deeper self in herself
as time went on,
Anthony might have made a splendid thing of the East,
she might have saved herself the asp
and him from sticking himself like a pig
and us from the dreary inheritance of Roman stupidity.
Underneath
Below what we think we are
we are something else,
we are almost anything.
Below the grass and trees
and streets and houses and even seas
is rock; and below the rock, the rock
is we know not what,
the hot wild core of the earth, heavier than we can even imagine.
Pivotal core of the soul, heavier than iron
so ponderously central;
heavier and hotter than anything known;
