Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated), page 858
is that they calmly assert: We only thrill to perversity, murder,
suicide, rape —
bragging a little, really,
and at the same time expect to go on calmly eating good dinners
for the next fifty years.
They say: Après moi le déluge! and calmly expect
that the deluge will never be turned on them, only after them.
Post me, nihil!61 - But perhaps, my dears,
nihil will come along and hit you on the head.
Why should the deluge wait while these young gentry go on eating
good dinners for fifty more long years?
Why should our Latter-Day sinners expect such a long smooth run
for their very paltry little bit of money?
If you are expecting a Second Advent in the shape of a deluge
you mustn’t expect it also to wait for your convenience.
What Matters
As one of our brightest young intellectuals said to me:
It’s not so much what we think,
or even what we like or dislike, or approve or disapprove that
matters so very much.
What matters is what we thrill to.
We are ultimately determined by what we thrill to.
And, of course, thrilling is like loving, you have no choice about it.
Pondering this new truth of the sensational young, I said
But what do you thrill to? Do you know?
I suppose, as a matter of fact, it’s getting a little difficult,
he replied, to thrill to anything.
A thrill rather easily exhausts itself - take even the war,
and look at the sodomitical and lesbian stuff - wearing rather thin.
Beauty, of course! Beauty is still a delicious escape.
And the pure intellect gives one a last, masturbating sense of
excited freedom!
But, of course, one knows that both beauty and pure intellect are
only escapes,
mild forms of cocaine; they’re not life, exactly.
No, when it comes to thrills, there are really very few.
Judging from the fiction it is possible to read, I should say rape
was rather thrilling
or being raped, either way, so long as it was consciously done,
and slightly subtle.
Yes, if it’s a keen match, rape is rather thrilling.
And then perhaps murder. That is to say
quite cold-blooded, intellectual murder, with a sufficient cool
motive
and a complete absence of consequence to the murderer.
I — should say that was rather thrilling,
rather thrilling to contemplate.
After that, of course, there’s suicide - certain aspects perhaps,
Yes, I should say the contemplation of clever suicide is rather
thrilling,
so long as the thing is done neatly, and the world is left looking
very fooled.
Quite thrilling, I should say, at least to contemplate.
For the rest - no! I should say life held very few further thrilling
possibilities.
So one of the brightest young intellectuals put it to me.
And I had to give him credit for his rather exhibitionist honesty.
And in the intervals of their thrills, I suppose
they must go on
they must go on scratching the eczema of their mental itch
with fingernails of septic criticising.
Fate and the Younger Generation
It is strange to think of the Annas, the Vronskys, the Pierres,
all the Tolstoyan lot
wiped out.
And the Alyoshas and Dmitris and Myshkins and
Stavrogins, the Dostoevsky lot
all wiped out.
And the Tchekov wimbly-wambly wet-legs all wiped out.
Gone! Dead, or wandering in exile with their feathers
plucked,
anyhow, gone from what they were, entirely.
Will the Proustian lot go next?
And then our English imitation intelligentsia?
Is it the Quos vult perdere Deus business?
Anyhow the Tolstoyan lot simply asked for extinction:
Eat me up, dear peasant! - So the peasant ate him.
And the Dostoevsky lot wallowed in the thought:
Let me sin my way to Jesus! So they sinned themselves off
the face of the earth.
And the Tchekov lot: I’m too weak and lovable to live! So
they went.
Now the Proustian lot: Dear darling death, let me wriggle
my way towards you
like the worm I am! So he wriggled and got there.
Finally our little lot: I don’t want to die, but by Jingo if I do!
— Well, it won’t matter so very much, either!
As for Me, I’m a Patriot
Whatever else they say of me
they’ll never be able to say
I was one of the little blighters
who so brilliantly betray
the tough old England that made us
and in them is rotting away.
I’d betray the middle classes
and money and industry
and the intellectual asses
and cash Christianity.
but not the England that made me
the stuff of a man,
the old England that doesn’t upbraid me,
nor put me under a ban.
The Rose of England
Oh the rose of England is a single rose
and damasked red and white!
But roses, if they’re fed too much,
change from being single and become gradually double,
and that’s what’s happened to the English rose.
The wild rose in a sheltered garden
when it need struggle no more
softly blows out its thin little male stamens
into broad sweet petals,
and through the centuries goes on and on
puffing its little male stamens out into sterile petal flames
till at last it’s a full, full rose, and has no male dust any more,
it propagates no more.
So it is with Englishmen.
They are all double roses
and their true maleness is gone.
Oh the rose of England is a single rose
and needs to be raised from seed.
England in 1929
England was always a country of men
and had a brave destiny, even when she went wrong.
Now it’s a country of frightened old mongrels
snapping out of fear,
and young wash-outs pretending to be in love with death
yet living on the fat of the land;
so, of course, the nation is swollen with insoluble problems
and like to become incurably diseased inside.
Liberty’s Old Story
Men fight for liberty, and win it with hard knocks.
Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools.
And their grandchildren are once more slaves.
New Brooms
New brooms sweep clean
but they often raise such a dust in the sweeping
that they choke the sweeper.
Police Spies
Start a system of official spying
and you’ve introduced anarchy into your country.
Now It’s Happened
One cannot now help thinking
how much better it would have been
If Vronsky and Anna Karenin
had stood up for themselves, and seen
Russia across her crisis,
instead of leaving it to Lenin.
The big, flamboyant Russia
might have been saved, if a pair
of rebels like Anna and Vronsky
had blasted the sickly air
of Dostoevsky and Tchekov,
and spy-government everywhere.
But Tolstoi was a traitor
to the Russia that needed him most,
the clumsy, bewildered Russia
so worried by the Holy Ghost.
He shifted his job on to the peasants
and landed them all on toast.
Dostoevsky, the Judas,
with his sham Christianity
epileptically ruined
the last bit of sanity
left in the hefty bodies
of the Russian nobility.
So our goody-good men betray us
and our sainty-saints let us down,
and a sickly people will slay us
if we touch the sob-stuff crown
of such martyrs; while Marxian tenets
naturally take hold of the town.
Too much of the humble Willy wet-leg
and the holy can’t-help-it touch,
till you’ve ruined a nation’s fibre
and they loathe all feeling as such,
and want to be cold and devilish hard
like machines - and you can’t wonder much —
Energetic Women
Why are women so energetic?
prancing their knees under their tiny skirts
like war-horses; or war-ponies at least?
Why are they so centrifugal?
Why are they so bursting, flinging themselves about?
Why, as they grow older, do they suffer from blood pressure?
Why are they never happy to be still?
Why did they cut off their long hair
which they could comb by the hour in luxurious quiet?
I suppose when the men all started being Willy wet-legs
they felt it was no longer any use being a linger-longer Lucy.
Film Passion
If all those females who so passionately loved
the film face of Rudolf Valentino
had had to take him for one night only, in the flesh,
how they’d have hated him!
Hated him just because he was a man
and flesh of a man.
For the luscious filmy imagination loathes the male substance
with deadly loathing.
All the women who adored the shadow of the man on the
screen
helped to kill him in the flesh.
Such adoration pierces the loins and perishes the man
worse than the evil eye.
Female Coercion
If men only fought outwards into the world
women might be devoted and gentle.
The fight’s got to go in some direction.
But when men turn Willy wet-legs
women start in to make changes;
only instead of changing things that might be changed
they want to change the man himself
and turn the poor silk glove into a lusty sow’s ear.
And the poor Willy wet-legs, the soft silk gloves,
how they hate the women’s efforts to turn them
into sow’s ears!
The modem Circe-dom!
Volcanic Venus
What has happened in the world?
the women are like little volcanoes
all more or less in eruption.
It is very unnerving, moving in a world of smouldering volcanoes.
It is rather agitating, sleeping with a little Vesuvius.
And exhausting, penetrating the lava-crater of a tiny Ixtaccihuatl
and never knowing when you’ll provoke an earthquake.
What Does She Want?
What does she want, volcanic Venus, as she goes fuming round?
What does she want?
She says she wants a lover, but don’t you believe her.
She’s seething like a volcano, and volcanoes don’t want lovers.
Besides, she’s had twenty lovers, only to find she didn’t really
want them.
So why should I, or you, be the twenty-first?
How are we going to appease her, maiden and mother
now a volcano of rage?
I tell you, the penis won’t do it.
She bites him in the neck and passes on.
Wonderful Spiritual Women
The wonderful thoughtful women who make such good
companions to a man are only sitting tight on the craters of their volcano
and spreading their skirts.
Or like the woman who sat down on a sleeping mastodon
thinking he was a little hill, and she murmured such beautiful
things
the men stood around like crocuses agape in the sun.
Then suddenly the mastodon rose with the wonderful lady
and trampled all the listeners to a smush.
Poor Bit of a Wench!
Will no one say hush! to thee
poor lass, poor bit of a wench?
Will never a man say: Come, my pigeon,
come an’ be still wi’ me, my own bit of a wench!
And would you peck out his eyes if he did?
What Ails Thee?
What ails thee then, woman, what ails thee?
doesn’t ter know?
If tha canna say’t, come then an’ scraight it out on my bosom!
Eh - Men doesna ha’e bosoms?’appen not, on’y tha knows what
I mean.
Come then, tha can scraight it out on my shirt-front
an’ tha’lt feel better.
- in the first place, I don’t scraight.
And if I did, I certainly couldn’t scraight it out.
And if I could, the last place I should choose
would be your shirt-front
or your manly bosom either.
So leave off trying putting the Robbie Bums touch over me
and kindly hand me the cigarettes
if you haven’t smoked them all,
which you’re much more likely to do
than to shelter anybody from the cau-auld blast.
It’s No Good!
It’s no good, the women are in eruption
and those that have been good so far
now begin to steam ominously,
and if they’re over forty-five, hurl great stones into the air
which are very likely to hit you on the head as you sit
on the very slopes of the matrimonial mountain
where you’ve sat peacefully all these years.
Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,
but the women are my favourite vessels of wrath.
Don’t Look at Me!
My dears, don’t look at me, I am merely terrified of you.
I don’t know what you want, but I certainly haven’t got it to
give you.
No, my poor little penis would be of no use to you
dear ladies, none whatsoever.
It’s something else you are after, if you could but formulate it.
As for bearing my children - why there
I wouldn’t insult you with the suggestion.
The son of man goes forth to war
no more, he sends his daughter
collecting foreskins.
But I consider I was sufficiently circumcised long ago.
My dears, if you want the skies to fall
they are established on the many pillars of the phallus,
so perhaps you’ll do it.
Ships in Bottles
O — ship in a bottle
with masts erect and spars all set and sails spread
how you remind me of my London friends,
O — ships in bottles!
Little fleets
that put to sea on certain evenings,
frigates, barks and pinnaces, yawls
all beautifully rigged and bottled up
that put to sea and sink Armadas
in a pub parlour, in literary London, on certain evenings.
O — small flotilla of sorry souls
sail on, over perilous seas of thought,
cast your little anchors in ports of eternity,
then weigh, and out to the infinities,
skirting the poles of being and of not-being.
Ah, in that parlour of the London pub
what dangers, ah, what dangers!
Caught between great icebergs of doubt
they are all but crushed
little ships.
Nipped upon the frozen floods of philosophic despair
high and dry.
Reeling in the black end of all beliefs
they sink.
Yet there they are, there they are,
little ships
safe inside their bottles!
Whelmed in profundities of profound conversation,
lost between great waves of ultimate ideas
they are - why there they are,
safe inside their bottles!
Safer than in the arms of Jesus!
Oh, safer than anything else is a well-corked, glassy ego,
and sounder than all insurance is a shiny mental conceit!
Sail, little ships in your glass bottles,
safe from every contact,
safe from all experience,
safe, above all, from life!
And let the nodding tempests of verbosity
weekly or twice-weekly whistle round your bottles.
Spread your small sails immune, little ships!
The storm is words, the bottles never break.
