David Herbert Richards Lawrence

The chime of the bells, and the church clock striking eight
Solemnly and distinctly cries down the babel of children still playing in the hay.
The church draws nearer upon us, gentle and great
In shadow, covering us up with her grey.

Like drowsy children the houses fall asleep
Under the fleece of shadow, as in between
Tall and dark the church moves, anxious to keep
Their sleeping, cover them soft unseen.

Hardly a murmur comes from the sleeping brood,
I wish the church had covered me up with the rest
In the home-place. Why is it she should exclude
Me so distinctly from sleeping with those I love best?

Out of the darkness, fretted sometimes in its sleeping,
Jets of sparks in fountains of blue come leaping
To sight, revealing a secret, numberless secrets keeping.

Sometimes the darkness trapped within a wheel
Runs into speed like a dream, the blue of the steel
Showing the rocking darkness now a-reel.

And out of the invisible, streams of bright blue drops
Rain from the showery heavens, and bright blue crops
Surge from the under-dark to their ladder-tops.

And all the manifold blue and joyous eyes,
The rainbow arching over in the skies,
New sparks of wonder opening in surprise.

All these pure things come foam and spray of the sea
Of Darkness abundant, which shaken mysteriously,
Breaks into dazzle of living, as dolphins that leap from the sea
Of...

In another country, black poplars shake themselves over a pond,
And rooks and the rising smoke-waves scatter and wheel from the works beyond;
The air is dark with north and with sulphur, the grass is a darker green,
And people darkly invested with purple move palpable through the scene.

Soundlessly down across the counties, out of the resonant gloom
That wraps the north in stupor and purple travels the deep, slow boom
Of the man-life north-imprisoned, shut in the hum of the purpled steel
As it spins to sleep on its motion, drugged dense in the sleep of the wheel.

Out of the sleep, from the gloom of motion, soundlessly, somnambule
Moans and booms the soul of a people imprisoned, asleep in the rule
Of the strong machine that runs mesmeric, booming the spell of its word
Upon ...

AH, my darling, when over the purple horizon shall loom
The shrouded mother of a new idea, men hide their faces,
Cry out and fend her off, as she seeks her procreant groom,
Wounding themselves against her, denying her fecund embraces.

I have fetched the tears up out of the little wells,
Scooped them up with small, iron words,
Dripping over the runnels.

The harsh, cold wind of my words drove on, and still
I watched the tears on the guilty cheek of the boys
Glitter and spill.

Cringing Pity, and Love, white-handed, came
Hovering about the Judgment which stood in my eyes,
Whirling a flame.


The tears are dry, and the cheeks' young fruits are fresh
With laughter, and clear the exonerated eyes, since pain
Beat through the flesh.

The Angel of Judgment has departed again to the Nearness.
Desolate I am as a church whose lights are put out.
And night enters in drearness.

The fire rose up in the bush and blazed apace,
The thorn-leaves crackled and twisted and sweated...

You, you are all unloving, loveless, you;
Restless and lonely, shaken by your own moods,
You are celibate and single, scorning a comrade even,
Threshing your own passions with no woman for the threshing-floor,
Finishing your dreams for your own sake only,
Playing your great game around the world, alone,
Without playmate, or helpmate, having no one to cherish,
No one to comfort, and refusing any comforter.

Not like the earth, the spouse all full of increase
Moiled over with the rearing of her many-mouthed young;
You are single, you are fruitless, phosphorescent, cold and callous,
Naked of worship, of love or of adornment,
Scorning the panacea even of labour,
Sworn to a high and splendid purposelessness
Of brooding and delighting in the secret of life's goings,

My little love, my darling,
You were a doorway to me;
You let me out of the confines
Into this strange countrie,
Where people are crowded like thistles,
Yet are shapely and comely to see.

My little love, my dearest
Twice have you issued me,
Once from your womb, sweet mother,
Once from myself, to be
Free of all hearts, my darling,
Of each heart's home-life free.

And so, my love, my mother,
I shall always be true to you;
Twice I am born, my dearest,
To life, and to death, in you;
And this is the life hereafter
Wherein I am true.

I kiss you good-bye, my darling,
Our ways are different now;
You are a seed in the night-time,
I am a man, to plough
The difficult glebe of the future
For God to endow.

I ki...

THE quick sparks on the gorse bushes are leaping,
Little jets of sunlight-texture imitating flame;
Above them, exultant, the pee-wits are sweeping:
They are lords of the desolate wastes of sadness their screamings proclaim.

Rabbits, handfuls of brown earth, lie
Low-rounded on the mournful grass they have bitten down to the quick.
Are they asleep? - Are they alive? - Now see, when I
Move my arms the hill bursts and heaves under their spurting kick.

The common flaunts bravely; but below, from the rushes
Crowds of glittering king-cups surge to challenge the blossoming bushes;
There the lazy streamlet pushes
Its curious course mildly; here it wakes again, leaps, laughs, and gushes.

Into a deep pond, an old sheep-dip,
Dark, overgrown with willows, cool, with the...

Last night a thief came to me
    And struck at me with something dark.
I cried, but no one could hear me,
    I lay dumb and stark.

When I awoke this morning
    I could find no trace;
Perhaps 'twas a dream of warning,
    For I've lost my peace.

THE SUN SHINES,
The coltsfoot flowers along the railway banks
Shine like flat coin which Jove in thanks
Strews each side the lines.

A steeple
In purple elms, daffodils
Sparkle beneath; luminous hills
Beyond - and no people.

England, Oh Danaë
To this spring of cosmic gold
That falls on your lap of mould!
What then are we?

What are we
Clay-coloured, who roll in fatigue
As the train falls league by league
From our destiny?

A hand is over my face,
A cold hand. I peep between the fingers
To watch the world that lingers
Behind, yet keeps pace.

Always there, as I peep
Between the fingers that cover my face!
Which then is it that falls from its place
And rolls down the steep?

Is it the train

        On he goes, the little one,
        Bud of the universe,
        Pediment of life.

        Setting off somewhere, apparently.
        Whither away, brisk egg?

        His mother deposited him on the soil as if he were no more than droppings,
        And now he scuffles tinily past her as if she were an old rusty tin.

        A mere obstacle,
        He veers round the slow great mound of her.

        Tortoises always foresee obstacles.

        It is no use my saying to him in an emotional voice:
        "This is your Mother, she laid you when you were an egg."

        He does not even trouble to answer:    "Woman, what have I to do with thee?"
        He wearily looks the other way,
        And she even more wearily looks anot...

        Making his advances
        He does not look at her, nor sniff at her,
        No, not even sniff at her, his nose is blank.

        Only he senses the vulnerable folds of skin
        That work beneath her while she sprawls along
        In her ungainly pace,
        Her folds of skin that work and row
        Beneath    the    earth-soiled    hovel    in    which    she moves.

        And so he strains beneath her housey walls
        And catches her trouser-legs in his beak
        Suddenly, or her skinny limb,
        And strange and grimly drags at her
        Like a dog,
        Only agelessly silent, with a reptile's awful persistency.

        Grim, gruesome gallantry, to which he is doomed.
        Dragged out of an eternity of sil...

        I thought he was dumb,
        I said he was dumb,
        Yet I've heard him cry.

        First faint scream,
        Out of life's unfathomable dawn,
        Far off, so far, like a madness, under the horizon's dawning rim,
        Far, far off, far scream.

        Tortoise in extremis.

        Why were we crucified into sex?

        Why were we not left rounded off, and finished in ourselves,
        As we began,
        As he certainly began, so perfectly alone?

        A far, was-it-audible scream,
        Or did it sound on the plasm direct?

        Worse than the cry of the new-born,
        A scream,
        A yell,
        A shout,
        A pæan,
        A death-agony,
        A b...

        Along the back of the baby tortoise
        The scales are locked in an arch like a bridge,
        Scale-lapping, like a lobster's sections
        Or a bee's.

        Then crossways down his sides
        Tiger-stripes and wasp-bands.
        Five, and five again, and five again,
        And round the edges twenty-five little ones,
        The sections of the baby tortoise shell.

        Four, and a keystone;
        Four, and a keystone;
        Four, and a keystone;
        Then twenty-four, and a tiny little keystone.

        It needed Pythagoras    to see life placing her counters on the living back
        Of the baby tortoise;
        Life establishing the first eternal mathematical tablet,
        Not in stone, like the Judea...

LONDON
Used to wear her lights splendidly,
Flinging her shawl-fringe over the River,
Tassels in abandon.

And up in the sky
A two-eyed clock, like an owl
Solemnly used to approve, chime, chiming,
Approval, goggle-eyed fowl.

There are no gleams on the River,
No goggling clock;
No sound from St. Stephen's;
No lamp-fringed frock.

Instead,
Darkness, and skin-wrapped
Fleet, hurrying limbs,
Soft-footed dead.

London
Original, wolf-wrapped
In pelts of wolves, all her luminous
Garments gone.

London, with hair
Like a forest darkness, like a marsh
Of rushes, ere the Romans
Broke in her lair.

It is well
That London, lair of sudden
Male and female darknesses
Has broken her spell.

The moon is broken in twain, and half a moon
Before me lies on the still, pale floor of the sky;
The other half of the broken coin of troth
Is buried away in the dark, where the still dead lie.
They buried her half in the grave when they laid her away;
I had pushed it gently in among the thick of her hair
Where it gathered towards the plait, on that very last day;
And like a moon in secret it is shining there.

My half shines in the sky, for a general sign
Of the troth with the dead I pledged myself to keep;
Turning its broken edge to the dark, it shines indeed
Like the sign of a lover who turns to the dark of sleep.
Against my heart the inviolate sleep breaks still
In darkened waves whose breaking echoes o'er
The wondering world of my wakeful day, till I'm lost

Round the house were lilacs and strawberries
    And foal-foots spangling the paths,
And far away on the sand-hills, dewberries
    Caught dust from the sea's long swaths.

Up the wolds the woods were walking,
    And nuts fell out of their hair.
At the gate the nets hung, balking
    The star-lit rush of a hare.

In the autumn fields, the stubble
    Tinkled the music of gleaning.
At a mother's knees, the trouble
    Lost all its meaning.

Yea, what good beginnings
    To this sad end!
Have we had our innings?
    God forfend!

I

Into the shadow-white chamber silts the white
Flux of another dawn. The wind that all night
Long has waited restless, suddenly wafts
A whirl like snow from the plum-trees and the pear,
Till petals heaped between the window-shafts
    In a drift die there.

A nurse in white, at the dawning, flower-foamed pane
Draws down the blinds, whose shadows scarcely stain
The white rugs on the floor, nor the silent bed
That rides the room like a frozen berg, its crest
Finally ridged with the austere line of the dead
    Stretched out at rest.

Less than a year the fourfold feet had pressed
The peaceful floor, when fell the sword on their rest.
Yet soon, too soon, she had him home again
With wounds between them, and suffering like a guest
That will no...