Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated), page 867
It makes me realise the delicious pleasure of the moon
that she has in travelling by herself: throughout time,
or the splendid growing of an ash-tree
alone, on a hill-side in the north, humming in the wind.
REFUSED FRIENDSHIP
HE said to me: Your life will be so much the poorer
since you refuse my friendship.
But I, honestly, don’t know what he means.
I can’t see that I refuse anything.
I like him. What else is there?
FUTURE RELATIONSHIPS
THE world is moving, moving still, towards further democracy.
But not a democracy of idea or ideal, nor of property, nor
even of the emotion of brotherhood.
But a democracy of men, a democracy of touch.
FUTURE RELIGION
THE future of religion is in the mystery of touch.
The mind is touchless, so is the will, so is the spirit.
First come the death, then the pure aloneness, which is permanent
then the resurrection into touch.
FUTURE STATES
ONCE men touch one another, then the modern industrial
form of machine civilisation will melt away
and universalism and cosmopolitanism will cease
the great movement of centralising into oneness will stop
and there will be a vivid recoil into separateness
many vivid small states, like a kaleidoscope, all colours
and all the differences given expression.
FUTURE WAR
AFTER our industrial civilisation has broken, and the
civilisation of touch has begun
war will cease, there will be no more wars.
The heart of man, in so far as it is budding, is budding warless
and budding towards infinite variety, variegation
and where there is infinite variety, there is no interest in war.
Oneness makes war, and the obsession of oneness.
SIGNS OF THE TIMES
IF you want to get a glimpse of future possibilities
look at the young men under thirty.
Those that are fresh and alive are the same in every country,
a certain carelessness, a certain tenderness, a certain instinctive contempt
for old values and old people:
a certain warlessness even moneylessness,
a waiting for the proper touch, not for any word or deed.
INITIATION DEGREES
No man, unless he has died, and learned to be alone
will ever come into touch.
UNHAPPY SOULS
THE unhappy souls are those that can’t die and become silent
but must ever struggle on to assert themselves.
FULL LIFE
A MAN can’t fully live unless he dies and ceases to care
ceases to care.
PEOPLE WHO CARE
PEOPLE who care, who care, who care
and who dare not die for fear they should be nothing at all
probably are nothing at all.
NON-EXISTENCE
WE don’t exist unless we are deeply and sensually in touch
with that which can be touched but not known.
ALL-KNOWING
ALL that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed waste —
paper baskets
unless we are in touch with that which laughs at all our knowing.
SALVATION
THE only salvation is to realise that we know nothing about it
and there is nothing to save
and nothing to do
and effort is the ruin of all things.
Then, if we realise that we never were lost, we realise we
couldn’t be saved.
For you can’t save that which was never lost
at the worst, you can only save it up
and once you realise that you never were lost
you realise the fatuity of saving up against possible loss.
The one thing easiest to lose is savings.
OLD ARCHANGELS
AND so the official archangels
Orthodox Michael, and that whispering Gabriel
have had their term of office, they must go.
It is Lucifer’s turn, the turn of the Son of the Morning
to sway the earth of men
the Morning Star.
LUCIFER
ANGELS are bright still, though the brightest fell.
But tell me, tell me, how do you know
that he lost any of his brightness in falling?
He only fell out of your ken, you orthodox angels,
you dull angels, tarnished with centuries of conventionality.
THE MILL OF GOD
WHY seek to alter people, why not leave them alone?
The mills of God will grind them small, anyhow, there is escape.
The heavens are the nether mill-stone and our heavy earth
rolls round and round, grinding exceeding small.
MULTITUDES
THE multitudes are like droppings of birds, like dung of sea —
fowl that have flown away,
Oh they are grist for the mills of God, their bones ground down
to fertilise the roots of unknown men who are still to come
in fresh fields.
FALLEN LEAVES
THERE is the organic connection, like leaves that belong to a tree
and there is the mechanical connection, like leaves that are cast
to the earth.
Winds of heaven fan the leaves of the tree like flames and tunes,
but winds of heaven are mills of God to the fallen leaves
grinding them small to humus, on earth’s nether mill-stone.
THE DIFFERENCE
PEOPLE are like leaves, fluttering and gay on the bush of the globe,
or they are like leaves, rustling thick, in crowds on the floor of
the earth.
And the thick, fallen crowds crackle and crumble under the
milling of the winds,
the winds of change that will not be still
the breath of life.
But the living leaves in the breath of the wind are more lively
they glisten and shake.
THE BREATH OF LIFE
THE breath of life and the sharp winds of change are the same thing.
But people who are fallen from the organic connection with the cosmos
feel the winds of change grind them down.
VENGEANCE IS MINE
VENGEANCE is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay.
And the stiff-necked people, and the self-willed people, and
self-important ones, the self-righteous, self-absorbed
all of them who wind their energy round the idea of themselves
and so strangle off their connection with the ceaseless tree of life,
and fall into sharp, self-centred self-assertion, sharp or soft,
they fall victim at once to the Vengeance of the unforgiving god
as their nerves are stretched till they twangle and snap
and irritation seethes secretly through their guts, as their tissue disintegrates
and flames of katabolistic energy alternate
with ashes of utter boredom, ennui, and disgust.
It is the Vengeance of the Lord, long and unremitting
till the soul of the stiff-necked is ground to dust, to fertilising meal
with which to manure afresh the roots of the tree of life.
And so the Lord of Vengeance pays back, repays life
for the defection of the self-centred ones.
ASTRONOMICAL CHANGES
DAWN is NO longer in the house of the Fish
Pisces, oh Fish, Jesus of the watery way,
your two thousand years are up.
And the foot of the Cross no longer is planted in the place of
the birth of the Sun.
The whole great heavens have shifted over, and slowly pushed aside
the Cross, the Virgin, Pisces, the Sacred Fish
that casts its sperm upon the waters, and knows no intercourse;
pushed them all aside, discarded them, make way now for
something else.
Even the Pole itself has departed now from the Pole Star
and pivots on the invisible,
while the Pole Star lies aside, like an old axle taken from the wheel.
FATALITY
No one, not even God, can put back a leaf on to a tree
once it has fallen off.
And no one, not God nor Christ nor any other
can put back a human life into connection with the living cosmos
once the connection has been broken
and the person has become finally self-centred.
Death alone, through the long process of disintegration
can melt the detached life back
through the dark Hades at the roots of the tree
into the circulating sap, once more, of the tree of life.
FREE WILL
THE human will is free, ultimately, to choose one of two things:
either to stay connected with the tree of life, and submit
the human will to the flush of the vaster impulsion of the tree;
or else to sever the connection, to become self-centred, self-willed self-motived
and subject, really, to the draught of every motor-car or the
kicking tread of every passer-by.
IN A SPANISH TRAM-CAR
SHE fanned herself with a violet fan
and looked sulky, under the thick straight brows.
The wisp of modern black mantilla
made her half Madonna, half Astarte.
Suddenly her yellow-brown eyes looked with a flare into mine;
— we could sin together! —
The spark fell and kindled instantly on my blood,
then died out almost as swiftly.
She can keep her sin
She can sin with some thick-set Spaniard.
Sin doesn’t interest me.
SPANISH PRIVILEGE
THE inward cocky assertiveness of the Spaniard seems to say:
God is supreme,
but He can’t stop me from sinning against Him if I want to,
and when I want to, I’m going to;
though you bloody outsiders had better not try it on.
So they go on sinning, though sin is obsolete,
and nobody but themselves is interested.
AT THE BANK IN SPAIN
EVEN the old priest, in his long black robe and silvery hair
came to the counter with his hat off, humble at the shrine,
and was immensely flattered when one of the fat little clerks
of the bank
shook hands with him.
THE SPANISH WIFE
WHEN I saw her straying a little dazed through her untidy house
I realised the secret joy her young Spanish husband had
in frustrating her, just inwardly frustrating her,
this foreign woman of the wealthy north.
THE PAINTER’S WIFE
SHE was tangled up in her own self-conceit, a woman,
and her passion could only flare through the meshes
towards other women, in communion;
the presence of a man made her recoil
and burn blue and cold, like the flame in a miner’s lamp
when the after-damp is around it.
Yet she seemed to know nothing about it
and devoted herself to her husband
and made him paint her nude, time after time,
and each time it came out the same, a horrible sexless, lifeless abstraction
of the female form, technically “ beautiful,” actually a white
machine drawing, more null than death.
And she was so pleased with it, she thought one day it would
be recognised as “ great.”
And he thought so too.
Nobody else did.
MODERN PROBLEMS
THE worst of it is
When a woman can only love, flamily, those of her own sex
she has a secret, almost ecstatised hatred of maleness in any man
that she exudes like pearly white poison gas,
and men often succumb like white mice in a laboratory,
around her,
specimens to be anatomised.
DOMINANT WOMAN
DOMINANT women are as a rule so subtly and fiendishly domineering
that the young of their own sex revolt against them at last,
and turn once more to men to save them, Perseus, St George
from the dragon of the modern female.
MEN AND WOMEN
ALL this talk of equality between the sexes is merely an
expression of sex-hate.
Men and women should learn tenderness to each other
and to leave one another alone.
THE SCIENTIFIC DOCTOR
WHEN I went to the scientific doctor
I realised what a lust there was in him to wreak his so-called
science on me
and reduce me to the level of a thing.
So I said: Good-morning! and left him.
HEALING
I AM not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.
And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that
I am ill.
I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self
and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time
can help
and patience, and a certain difficult repentance
long, difficult repentance, realisation of life’s mistake, and the
freeing oneself
from the endless repetition of the mistake
which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.
EN MASSE
TO-DAY, society has sanctified
the sin against the Holy Ghost,
and all are encouraged into the sin
so that all may be lost together, en masse, the great word of
our civilisation.
GOD AND THE HOLY GHOST
THERE is no sinning against God, what does God care about sin!
But there is sinning against the Holy Ghost, since the Holy
Ghost is with us
in the flesh, is part of our consciousness.
The Holy Ghost is the deepest part of our own consciousness
wherein we know ourself for what we are
and know our dependence on the creative beyond.
So if we go counter to our own deepest consciousness
naturally we destroy the most essential self in us,
and once done, there is no remedy, no salvation for this,
nonentity is our portion.
HUMILITY
NOWADAYS, to talk of humility is a sin against the Holy
Ghost
It is a sneaking evasion of the responsibility
of our own consciousness.
PROPER PRIDE
EVERYTHING that lives has its own proper pride
as a columbine flower has, or even a starling walking and
looking around.
And the base things like hyaenas or bed-bugs have least pride
of being,
they are humble with a creeping humility, being parasites or
carrion creatures.
HUMILITY MONGERS
WHEN I hear a man spouting about humility to-day
I know he is either a bed-bug, battening on sleeping people
or a hyaena, eating corpses.
TENDER REVERENCE
To be humble before other men is degrading, I am humble
before no man
and I want no man to be humble before me.
But when I see the life-spirit fluttering and struggling in a man
I want to show always the human tender reverence.
ABSOLUTE REVERENCE
I FEEL absolute reverence to nobody and to nothing human
neither to persons nor things nor ideas, ideals nor religions nor institutions,
to these things I feel only respect, and a tinge of reverence
when I see the fluttering of pure life in them.
But to something unseen, unknown, creative
from which I feel I am a derivative
I feel absolute reverence. Say no more!
BELIEF
FOREVER nameless
Forever unknown
Forever unconceived
Forever unrepresented
yet forever felt in the soul.
BELLS
THE Mohammedans say that the sound of bells
especially big ones, is obscene.
That hard clapper striking in a hard mouth
and resounding after with a long hiss of insistence is obscene.
Yet bells call the Christians to God
especially clapper bells, hard tongues wagging in hard mouths,
metal hitting on metal, to enforce our attention,
and bring us to God.
The soft thudding of drums
of finger or fist or soft-skinned sticks upon the stretched
membrane of sound
