Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated), page 870
and then the heavens cackle with uncouth sounds.
And the rain won’t come, the rain refuses to come!
This is the electricity that man is supposed to have mastered
chained, subjugated to his use!
supposed to!
REVOLUTION AS SUCH!
CURIOUSLY enough, actual revolutions are made by robots,
living people never make revolutions,
they can’t, life means too much to them.
ROBOT FEELINGS
IT is curious, too, that though the modern man in the street
is a robot, and incapable of love
he is capable of an endless, grinding, nihilistic hate:
that is the only strong feeling he is capable of;
and therein lies the danger of robot-democracy and all the
men in the street,
they move in a great grind of hate, slowly but inevitably.
REAL DEMOCRACY
IF the robot can recognise the clean flame of life
in men who have never fallen in life
then he repents, and his will breaks, and a great love of life
brings him to his knees, in homage and pure passion of service.
Then he receives the kiss of reconciliation
and ceases to be a robot, and becomes a servant of life
serving with delight and with reverence those men whose flame
of life undimmed delights him, so even he is lit up.
ROBOT-DEMOCRACY
IN a robot-democracy, nobody is willing to serve
even work is unwilling, the worker is unwilling, unwilling.
The great grind of unwillingness, the slow undergrind of hate
and democracy is ground into dust
then the mill-stones burst with the internal heat of their own friction.
WORSHIP
ALL men are worshippers
unless they have fallen, and become robots.
All men worship the wonder of life
until they collapse into egoism, the mechanical, self-centred
system of the robot.
But even in pristine men, there is the difference:
some men can see life clean and flickering all around,
and some can only see what they are shown.
Some men look straight into the eyes of the gods
and some men can see no gods, they only know
the gods are there because of the gleam on the faces of the
men who see.
Most men, even unfallen, can only live
by the transmitted gleam from the faces of vivider men
who look into the eyes of the gods.
And worship is the joy of the gleam from the eyes of the gods,
and the robot is denial of the same,
even the denial that there is any gleam.
CLASSES
THERE are two classes of men;
those that look into the eyes of the gods, and these are few,
and those that look into the eyes of the few other men
to see the gleam of the gods there, reflected in the human eyes.
All other class is artificial.
There is, however, the vast third homogeneous amorphous
class of anarchy
the robots, those who deny the gleam.
DEMOCRACY IS SERVICE
DEMOCRACY is service, but not the service of demos.
Democracy is demos serving life
and demos serves life as it gleams on the face of the few,
and the few look into the eyes of the gods, and serve the sheer gods.
FALSE DEMOCRACY AND REAL
IF man only looks to man, and no one sees beyond
then all is lost, the robot supervenes.
The few must look into the eyes of the gods, and obey the look
in the eyes of the gods:
and the many must obey the few that look into the eyes of the gods;
and the stream is towards the gods, not backwards, towards man.
SERVICE
AH yes, men must learn to serve
not for money, but for life.
Ah yes, men must learn to obey
not a boss, but the gleam of life on the face of a man
who has looked into the eyes of the gods.
Man is only perfectly human
when he looks beyond humanity.
WHAT ARE THE GODS?
WHAT are the gods, then, what are the gods?
The gods are nameless and imageless
yet looking in a great full lime-tree of summer
I suddenly saw deep into the eyes of gods:
it is enough.
THE GODS! THE GODS!
PEOPLE were bathing and posturing themselves on the beach
and all was dreary, great robot limbs, robot breasts
robot voices, robot even the gay umbrellas.
But a woman, shy and alone, was washing herself under a tap
and the glimmer of the presence of the gods was like lilies,
and like water-lilies.
NAME THE GODS!
I REFUSE to name the gods, because they have no name.
I refuse to describe the gods, because they have no form nor
shape nor substance.
Ah, but the simple ask for images!
Then for a time at least, they must do without.
But all the time I see the gods:
the man who is moving the tall white corn,
suddenly, it curves, as it yields, the white wheat
and sinks down with a swift rustle, and a strange, falling flatness,
ah! the gods, the swaying body of god!
ah the fallen stillness of god, autumnus, and it is only July
the pale-gold flesh of Priapus dropping asleep.
THERE ARE NO GODS
THERE are no gods, and you can please yourself
have a game of tennis, go out in the car, do some shopping,
sit and talk, talk, talk
with a cigarette browning your fingers.
There are no gods, and you can please yourself —
go and please yourself —
But leave me alone, leave me alone, to myself!
and then in the room, whose is the presence
that makes the air so still and lovely to me?
Who is it that softly touches the sides of my breast
and touches me over the heart
so that my heart beats soothed, soothed, soothed and at peace?
Who is it smooths the bed-sheets like the cool
smooth ocean when the fishes rest on edge
in their own dream?
Who is it that clasps and kneads my naked feet, till they unfold,
till all is well, till all is utterly well? the lotus-lilies of the feet!
I tell you, it is no woman, it is no man, for I am alone.
And I fall asleep with the gods, the gods
that are not, or that are
according to the soul’s desire,
like a pool into which we plunge, or do not plunge.
FOOD OF THE NORTH
THE food of the north tastes too much of the fat of the pig
fat of the pig!
Take me south again, to the olive trees
and oil me with the lymph of the silvery trees
oil me with the lymph of trees
not with the fat of the pig.
RETORT TO WHITMAN
AND whoever walks a mile full of false sympathy
walks to the funeral of the whole human race.
RETORT TO JESUS
AND whoever forces himself to love anybody
begets a murderer in his own body.
THE DEEPEST SENSUALITY
THE profoundest of all sensualities
is the sense of truth
and the next deepest sensual experience
is the sense of justice.
SENSE OF TRUTH
You must fuse mind and wit with all the senses
before you can feel truth.
And if you can’t feel truth you can’t have any other
satisfactory sensual experience.
SATISFACTION
THE profound sensual experience of truth: Yea, this
alone satisfies us, in the end.
VIBRATION OF JUSTICE
THE profound and thrilling vibration of justice, sense of
ultimate justice
makes the heart suddenly quiver with love.
LIES
LIES are not a question of false fact
but of false feeling and perverted justice.
POISON
WHAT has killed mankind — for the bulk of mankind is dead —
is lies:
the nasty lying pretence of seeming to feel what we don’t feel.
COMMANDMENTS
WHEN Jesus commanded us to love our neighbour
he forced us to live a great lie, or to disobey:
for we can’t love anybody, neighbour or no neighbour, to order,
and faked love has rotted our marrow.
EMOTIONAL LIES
You hear a woman say: I love my husband dearly —
and you look in her eyes and see it is a lie.
Even it is a trick: but she is not ashamed.
LAUGHTER
LISTEN to people laughing
and you will hear what liars they are
or cowards.
DRAWING-ROOM
You sit talking in all earnestness to a woman,
hearing her talk, that is:
and you know all the while
that every syllable, every accent, every intonation and every
cadence is a lie:
yet you go on talking, in all earnestness.
CABBAGE-ROSES
You may smell the breath of the gods in the common roses,
and feel the splendour of the gods go through you, even as you
see the green-fly on the stems,
in the summer morning:
or you may not.
If you don’t then don’t pretend you do —
but if you don’t you are suffering from an amnesia
of the senses:
you are like to die of malnutrition of the senses:
and your sensual atrophy
will at last send you insane.
COLD BLOOD
IN cold blood, I cannot feel goddesses in the summer evening
trafficking mysteriously through the air.
But what right has my blood to be cold
before I am dead?
If I cut my finger, my blood is hot, not cold.
And even in cold blood I know this:
I am more alive, more aware and more wise
when my blood is kindled:
and when, in the summer evening
I feel goddesses trafficking mysteriously through the air.
SUNSET
THERE is a band of dull gold in the west, and say what you like
again and again some god of evening leans out of it
and shares being with me, silkily
all of twilight.
LISTEN TO THE BAND!
THERE is a band playing in the early night,
but it is only unhappy men making a noise
to drown their inner cacophony: and ours.
A little moon, quite still, leans and sings to herself
through the night
and the music of men is like a mouse gnawing,
gnawing in a wooden trap, trapped in.
THE HUMAN FACE
HARDLY ever, now, has a human face
the baffling light or the strange still gleam of the gods
within it, upon it.
Even from the face of the children, now,
that spangled glisten is gone, that at-oneness without after- thought,
and they are bridled with cunning, and bitted
with knowledge of things that shall never be admitted,
even the fact of birth: even little children.
Holbein and Titian and Tintoret could never paint faces, now:
because those faces were windows to the strange horizons, even
Henry VIII.;
whereas faces now are only human grimaces,
with eyes like the interiors of stuffy rooms, furnished.
PORTRAITS
PORTRAITS are now supremely uninteresting
because all the faces contain sets of emotional and mental furniture
all more or less alike,
as all drawing-rooms are, arranged!
FURNITURE
SOME women live for the idiotic furniture of their houses,
some men live for the conceited furniture of their minds,
some only live for their emotional furnishing — —
and it all amounts to the same thing, furniture,
usually in “ suites.”
CHILDREN SINGING IN SCHOOL
CLASS-CHILDHEN are singing in school
and what an awful concatenation of sounds it is!
They have no song in their souls, none in their spirits,
none in their little throats or class-room bodies
only they are made to utter these cog-wheel sounds
which are meant to be the old folk-song: Strawberry Fair!
KEEP IT UP
PEOPLE go on singing when they have no song in them.
People go on talking when they have nothing to say.
People go on walking when they have nowhere to go.
People keep it up, because they daren’t stop.
So here we go round the mulberry bush,
mulberry bush, mulberry bush!
Here we go round the mulberry bush
never having seen a mulberry bush in our lives.
RACE AND BATTLE
TH E race is not to the swift
but to those that can sit still
and let the waves go over them.
The battle is not to the strong
but to the frail, who know best
how to efface themselves
to save the streaked pansy of the heart from being trampled
to mud.
NOTHING TO SAVE
THERE is nothing to save, now all is lost,
but a tiny core of stillness in the heart
like the eye of a violet.
BRITISH SINCERITY
THEY tell me that these British moral birds
all the great jixery up in the fixery
are “ perfectly sincere “
and “ perfectly honest.”
If it is perfectly sincere to deny your own make-up
and perfectly honest to pretend to be unbegotten
may I ask you then, where insincerity and dishonesty begin.
The jixery perhaps never picked a man’s pocket
but my god, they sneak-thiefed his very genitals away from him:
going a bit further than his pocket, what?
And the poor man never knew he was jixed,
fixed, jixed, fixed!
He feels for his purse, and finds it there, and says
Oh my jixer, my fixer
oh he’s an honest man! anyhow!
Is British hypocrisy a form of softening of the brain?
Or what is it that my nation is suffering from?
THE ENGLISH ARE SO NICE!
THE English are so nice
so awfully nice
they are the nicest people in the world.
And what’s more, they’re very nice about being nice
about your being nice as well!
If you’re not nice they soon make you feel it.
Americans and French and Germans and so on
they’re all very well
but they’re not really nice, you know.
They’re not nice in our sense of the word, are they now?
That’s why one doesn’t have to take them seriously.
We must be nice to them, of course,
of course, naturally.
But it doesn’t really matter what you say to them,
they don’t really understand
you can just say anything to them:
be nice, you know, just nice
but you must never take them seriously, they wouldn’t understand,
just be nice, you know! oh, fairly nice,
not too nice of course, they take advantage
but nice enough, just nice enough
to let them feel they’re not quite as nice as they might be.
THE HILLS
I LIFT up mine eyes unto the hills
and there they are, but no strength comes from them to me.
Only from darkness
and ceasing to see
strength comes.
TOURISTS
THERE is nothing to look at any more,
everything has been seen to death.
SEEKERS
OH seekers, when you leave off seeking
you will realise there was never anything to seek
You were only seeking to lose something,
not to find something,
when you went forth so vigorously in search.
SEARCH FOR LOVE
THOSE that go searching for love
only make manifest their own lovelessness,
and the loveless never find love,
only the loving find love,
