Pansies

Front matter

Poems

D H. LAWRENCE

P A N S I E S

Two Performing Elephants

On her knees, in utmost caution all agog, and curling up her trunk she edges through without upsetting him. Triumph! the ancient, pig-tailed monster!

When her trick is to climb over him with what shadow-like slow carefulness she skims him, sensitive as shadows from the ages gone and perished in touching him, and planting her round feet.

While the wispy, modern children, half-afraid watch silent. The looming of the hoary, far-gone ages is too much for them.

To Let Go or to Hold on—?

and go forth to change the world? gather his will and his energy together and fling himself in effort after effort upon the world, to bring a change to pass?

Tell me first, O tell me, will the dark flood of our day's annihilation swim deeper, deeper, till it leaves no peak emerging? Shall we be lost, all of us and gone like weed, like weed, like eggs of fishes, like sperm of whales, like germs of the great dead past into which the creative future shall blow strange, unknown forms?

Are we nothing, already, but the lapsing of a great dead past? Is the best that we are but sperm, loose sperm, like the sperm of fishes that drifts upon time and chaos, till some unknown future takes it up and is fecund with a new Day of new creatures? different from us.

Or is our shattered Argosy, our leaking ark at this moment scraping tardy Ararat? Have we got to get down and clear away the debris

Of a swamped civilisation, and start a new world of man that will blossom forth the whole of human nature?

Must we hold on, hold on and go ahead with what is human nature and make a new job of the human world?

Or can we let it go? O, can we let it go, and leave it to some nature that is more than human to use the sperm of what's worth while in us and thus eliminate us? Is the time come for humans now to begin to disappear, leaving it to the vast revolutions of creative chaos to bring forth creatures that are an improvement on humans, as the horse was an improvement on the ichthyosaurus? Must we hold on? Or can we now let go?

Dr is it even possible we must do both?

How Beastly the Bourgeois is—

Presentable, eminently presentable— shall I make you a present of him?

Isn't he handsome? isn't he healthy? Isn't he a fine specimen? doesn't he look the fresh clean englishman, outside? Isn't it god's own image? tramping his thirty miles a day after partridges, or a little rubber bail? wouldn't you like to be like that, well off, and quite the thing?

Oh, but wait! Let him meet a new emotion, let him be faced with another man's need, let him come home to a bit of moral difficulty, let life face him with a new demand on his understanding and then watch him go soggy, like a wet meringue. Watch him turn into a mess, either a fool or a bully. Just watch the display of him, confronted with a new demand on his intelligence, a new life-demand.

How beastly the bourgeois is specially the male of the species—

Nicely groomed, like a mushroom standing there so sleek and erect and eyeable— and like a fungus, living on the remains of bygone life sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life than his own.

And even so, he's stale, he's been there too long. Touch him, and you'll find he's all gone inside just like an old mushroom, all wormy inside, and hollow under a smooth skin and an upright appearance.

Full of seething, wormy, hollow feelings rather nasty— How beastly the bourgeois is!

Standing in their thousands, these appearances, in damp England what a pity they can't all be kicked over like sickening toadstools, and left to melt back, swiftly into the soil of England.

Worm Either Way

I booze and fornicate and use foul language and despise your honest man.—

But why should the worm that has turned protest so much? The bonnie bonnie bourgeois goes a-whoring up back streets just the same The busy busy bourgeois imbibes his little share just the same if not more. The pretty pretty bourgeois pinks his language just as pink if not pinker, and in private boasts his exploits even louder, if you ask me, than the other. While as to honesty, Oh look where the money lies!

So I can't see where the worm that has turned puts anything over the worm that is too cunning to turn. On the contrary, he merely gives himself away. The turned worm shouts: I bravely booze! the other says: Have one with me!

The turned worm boasts: I copulate! the unturned says: You look it. You're a d b b p bb, says the worm that's turned. Quite! says the other. Cuckoo!

Swan

as the vast white bird furrows our feartherless women with unknown shocks and stamps his black marsh-feet on their white and marshy flesh.

Give Us Gods

shelving substance on to the woman, Madonna mia! shabby virgin! nor gusty Jove, with his eye on immortal tarts, nor even the musical, suave young fellow wooing boys and beauty.

Give us gods give us something else—

Beyond the great bull that bellowed through space, and got his throat cut. Beyond even that eagle, that phœnix, hanging over the gold egg of all things, further still, before the curled horns of the ram stepped forth or the stout swart beetle rolled the globe of dung in which man should hatch, or even the sly gold serpent fatherly lifted his head off the earth to think—

Give us gods before these— Thou shalt have other gods before these.

Where the waters end in marshes swims the wild swan

sweeps the high goose above the mists honking in the gloom the honk of procreation from such throats.

Mists where the electron behaves and misbehaves as it will, where the forces tie themselves up into knots of atoms and come untied; mists of mistiness complicated into knots and clots that barge about and bump on one another and explode into more mist, or don't, mist of energy most scientific— But give us gods!

Look then where the father of all things swims in a mist of atoms electrons and energies, quantums and relativities mists, wreathing mists, like a wild swan, or a goose, whose honk goes through my bladder.

And in the dark unscientific I feel the drum-winds of his wings and the drip of his cold, webbed feet, mud-black

brush over my face as he goes to seek the women in the dark, our women, our weird women whom he treads with dreams and thrusts that make them cry in their sleep.

Gods, do you ask for gods? Where there is woman there is swan.

Do you think, scientific man, you'll be father of your own babies? Don't imagine it. There'll be babies born that are cygnets, O my soul! young wild swans! And babies of women will come out young wild geese, O my heart! the geese that saved Rome, and will lose London.

Won't it be Strange—?

or the round, wild vivid eye of a wild-goose staring out of fathomless skies and seas? or when it utters that undaunted little bird-cry of one who will settle on ice-bergs, and honk across the Nile?—

And when the father says: This is none of mine! Woman, where got you this little beast?— will there be a whistle of wings in the air, and an icy draught? will the singing of swans, high up, high up, invisible break the drums of his ears and leave him forever listening for the answer?

Spiral Flame

Sum ergo non cogito. But when our eagerness leaves us, we are godless and full of thought.

We have worn out the gods, and they us. That pale one, filled with renunciation and pain and white love has worn us weary of renunciation and love and even pain. That strong one, ruling the universe with a rod of iron has sickened us thoroughly with rods of iron and rulers and strong men. The All-wise has tired us of wisdom. The weeping mother of god, inconsolable over her son makes us prefer to be womanless, rather than be wept over. And that poor late makeshift, Aphrodite emerging in a bathing-suit from our modern sea-side foam has successfully killed all desire in us whatsoever.

Yet, O my young men, there is a vivifier. There is a swan-like flame that curls round the centre of space and flutters at the core of the atom,

there is a spiral flame-tip that can lick our little atoms into fusion. so we roar up like bonfires of vitality and fuse in a broad hard flame of many men in a oneness.

O pillars of flame by night, O my young men spinning and dancing like flamey fire-spouts in the dark ahead of the multitude! O ruddy god in our veins, O fiery god in our genitals! O rippling hard fire of courage, O fusing of hot trust when the fire reaches us, O my young men!

And the same flame that fills us with life, it will dance and burn the house down, all the fittings and elaborate furnishings and all the people that go with the fittings and the furnishings, the upholstered dead that sit in deep arm-chairs.

Let the Dead Bury Their Dead—

leave them to one another, don't serve them.

The dead in their nasty dead hands have heaps of money, don't take it.

The dead in their seething minds have phosphorescent teeming white words of putrescent wisdom and sapience that subtly stinks; don't ever believe them.

The dead are in myriads, they seem mighty. They make trains chuff, motor-cars titter, ships lurch, mills grind on and on, and keep you in millions at the mills, sightless pale slaves, pretending these are the mills of God.

It is the great lie of the dead. The mills of industry are not the mills of God. And the mills of God grind otherwise, with the winds of life for the mill-stones. Trust the mills of God, though they grind exceeding small. But as for the mills of men don't be harnessed to them.

The dead give ships and engines, cinema, radio and gramophone, they send aeroplanes across the sky, and they say: Now, behold, you are living the great life! While you listen in, while you watch the film, while you drive the car, while you read about the air-ship crossing the wild Atlantic behold, you are living the great life, the stupendous life!l—

As you know, it is a complete lie. You are all going dead and corpse-pale listening in to the lie. Spit it out.

O cease to listen to the living dead. They are only greedy for your life! O cease to labour for the gold-toothed dead, they are so greedy, yet so helpless if not worked for. Don't ever be kind to the smiling, tooth-mouthed dead don't ever be kind to the dead it is pandering to corpses, the repulsive, living fat dead.

Bury a man gently if he has lain down and died. But with the walking and talking and conventionally persuasive dead with bank accounts and insurance policies don't sympathise, or you taint the unborn babes.

When Wilt Thou Teach the People—?

Or Napoleon says: Since I have saved you from the ci-devants, you are my property, be prepared to die for me, and to work for me.—

Or later republicans say: You are saved, therefore you are our savings, our capital with which we shall do big business.—

Or Lenin says: You are saved, but you are saved wholesale. You are no longer men, that is bourgeois; you are items in the soviet state, and each item will get its ration, but it is the soviet state alone which counts the items are of small importance, the state having saved them all.—

And so it goes on, with the saving of the people. God of justice, when wilt thou teach them to save themselves?

A Living

A bird picks up its seeds or little snails between heedless earth and heaven in heedlessness.

But, the plucky little sport, it gives to life song, and chirruping, gay feathers, fluff-shadowed warmth and all the unspeakable charm of birds hopping and fluttering and being birds. —And we, we get it all from them for nothing.

When I Went to the Film—

upon which shadows of people, pure personalities are cast in black and white, and move in flat ecstasy, supremely unfelt, and heavenly.

When I Went to the Circus—

and the children suddenly shouted out. Then came the hush again, like a hush of fear.

The tight-rope lady, pink and blonde and nude-looking, with a few gold spangles footed cautiously out on the rope, turned prettily, spun round bowed, and lifted her foot in her hand, smiled, swung her parasol to another balance, tripped round, poised, and slowly sank her handsome thighs down, down, till she slept her splendid body on the rope. When she rose, tilting her parasol, and smiled at the cautious people they cheered, but nervously.

The trapeze man, slim and beautiful and like a fish in the air swung great curves through the upper space, and came down like a star —And the people applauded, with hollow, frightened applause.

The elephants, huge and grey, loomed their curved bulk through the dusk

and sat up, taking strange postures, showing the pink soles of their feet and curling their precious live trunks like ammonites and moving always with soft slow precision as when a great ship moves to anchor. The people watched and wondered, and seemed to resent the mystery that lies in beasts.

Horse, gay horses, swirling round and plaiting in a long line, their heads laid over each other's necks; they were happy, they enjoyed it; all the creatures seemed to enjoy the game in the circus, with their circus people.

But the audience, compelled to wonder compelled to admire the bright rhythms of moving bodies compelled to see the delicate skill of flickering human bodies flesh flamey and a little heroic, even in a tumbling clown, they were not really happy. There was no gushing response, as there is at the film.

When modern people see the carnal body dauntless and flickering gay

playing among the elements neatly, beyond competition and displaying no personality, modern people are depressed.

Modern people feel themselves at a disadvantage. They know they have no bodies that could play among the elements. They have only their personalities, that are best seen flat, on the film, flat personalities in two dimensions, imponderable and touchless.

And they grudge the circus people the swooping gay weight of limbs that flower in mere movement, and they grudge them the immediate, physical understanding they have with their circus beasts, and they grudge them their circus-life altogether.

Yet the strange, almost frightened shout of delight that comes now and then from the children shows that the children vaguely know how cheated they are of their birthright in the bright wild circus flesh.

We are Transmitters—

That is part of the mystery of sex, it is a flow onwards. Sexless people transmit nothing.

And if, as we work, we can transmit life into our work, life, still more life, rushes into us to compensate, to be ready and we ripple with life through the days.

Even if it is a woman making an apple dumpling, or a man a stool, if life goes into the pudding, good is the pudding good is the stool, content is the woman, with fresh life rippling in to her, content is the man.

Give, and it shall be given unto you is still the truth about life. But giving life is not so easy. It doesn't mean handing it out to some mean fool, or letting the living dead eat you up. It means kindling the life-quality where it was not, even if it's only in the whiteness of a washed pocket-handkerchief.

Let Us Be Men—

while the machine amuses us, the radio or film or gramophone.

Monkeys with a bland grin on our faces.—

Work

and they clothe themselves in white as a tree clothes itself in its own foliage.

As with cloth, so with houses, ships, shoes, wagons or cups or loaves men might put them forth as a snail its shell, as a bird that leans its breast against its nest, to make it round, as the turnip models his round root, as the bush makes flowers and gooseberries, putting them forth, not manufacturing them, and cities might be as once they were, bowers grown out from the busy bodies of people. And so it will be again, men will smash the machines.

At last, for the sake of clothing himself in his own leaf-like cloth tissued from his life, and dwelling in his own bowery house, like a beaver's nibbled mansion and drinking from cups that came off his fingers like flowers off their five-fold stem, he will cancel the machines we have got.

What Is He?

Yes, but what does he do? —He lives and is a man. Oh quite! But he must work. He must have a job of some sort. —Why? Because obviously he's not one of the leisured classes. —I don't know. He has lots of leisure. And he makes quite beautiful chairs.— There you are then! He's a cabinet maker. —No no! Anyhow a carpenter and joiner. —Not at all. But you said so. —What did I say? That he made chairs, and was a joiner and carpenter. —I said he made chairs, but I did not say he was a carpenter. All right then, he's just an amateur. —Perhaps! Would you say a thrush was a professional flautist, or just an amateur?— I'd say it was just a bird. —And I say he is just a man. All right! You always did quibble.

Moon Memory

sea-beasts immersed lean sideways and flash bright in pure brilliance of anger, sea-immersed anger at the trashy, motor-driven transit of dirty day that has left scum on the sea, even in the night.

Desire Goes Down Into the Sea—

All day long I feel the tide rocking, rocking though it strikes no shore in me.

Only mid-ocean.—

Fight! O My Young Men—

Open your half-dead eyes you half-alive young, look round and realise the muck from which you've sprung.

The money-muck, you simple flowers of your forefathers' muck-heap; and the money-muck-worms, the extant powers that have got you in keep.

Old money-worms, young money-worms money-worm professors spinning a glamour round money, and clergymen lifting a bank-book to bless us!

In the odour of lucrative sanctity stand they—and god, how they stink! Rise then, my young men, rise at them! Or if you can't rise, just think—

Think of the world that you're stifling in, think what a world it might be! Think of the rubbish you're trifling in with enfeebled vitality!

And then, if you amount to a hill o' beans start in and bust it all; money, hypocrisy, greed, machines that have ground you so small.

Don'ts—

Nor a dear little home, with its cost, its cost that you have to pay, earning your living while your life is lost and dull death comes in a day.

Don't be sucked in by the su-superior, don't swallow the culture bait, don't drink, don't drink and get beerier and beerier, do learn to discriminate.

Do hold yourself together, and fight with a hit-hit here and a hit-hit there, and a comfortable feeling at night that you've let in a little air.

A little fresh air in the money sty, knocked a little hole in the holy prison, done your own little bit, made your own little try that the risen Christ should be risen.

The Risen Lord

The risen lord, the risen lord has opened his eyes afresh, and sees strange looks on the faces of men all held in leash.

And he says: I never have seen them before, these people of flesh; these are no spirits caught and sore in the physical mesh.

They are substance itself, that flows in thick flame of flesh forever travelling like the flame of a candle, slow and quick fluttering and softly unravelling.

It moves, it ripples, and all the time it changes, and with it change moods, thoughts, desires, and deeds that chime with the rippling fleshly change.

I never saw them, how they must soften themselves with oil, and lard their guts with a certain fat, and often laugh, and laugh hard.

If they didn't, if they did not soften themselves with oil, and lard their guts with a certain fat, and often laugh, and laugh hard

they would not be men, and they must be men, they are their own flesh.—I lay in the tomb and was not; I have risen again to look the other way.

Lo! I am flesh, and the blood that races is me in the narrows of my wrists. Lo, I see fear in the twisted faces of men, they clench fear in their fists!

Lo! on the other side the grave I have conquered the fear of death, but the fear of life is still here; I am brave yet I fear my own breath.

Now I must conquer the fear of life, the knock of the blood in my wrists, the breath that rushes through my nose, the strife of desires in the loins' dark twists.

What do you want, wild loins? and what do you want, warm heart? and what wide eyes and wondering spirit?—not death, no not death for your lot!

They ask, and they must be answered; they are, and they shall be, to the end. Lo! there is woman, and her way is a strange way, I must follow also her trend.

I died, and death is neuter; it speaks not, it gives No answer; man rises again with mouth and loins and needs, he lives again man among men.

So it is, so it will be, for ever and ever. And still the great needs of men will clamour forth from the flesh, and never can denial deny them again.

The Secret Waters—

The fountains of peace, the fountains of peace well softly up for a new increase, but they bubble under the heavy wall of this house of life that encloses us all.

They bubble under the heavy wall that was once a house, and is now a prison, and never a one among us all knows that the waters have risen.

None of us knows, O none of us knows the welling of peace when it rises and flows in secret under the sickening wall of the prison house that encloses us all.

And we shall not know, we shall not know till the secret waters overflow and loosen the brick and the hard cement of the walls within which our lives are spent.

Till the walls begin to loosen and crack, to gape, and our house is going to wrack and ruin above us, and the crash of release is death to us all, in the marshes of peace.

Beware, O My Dear Young Men—

the dirty mind like a urinal again or a dung squirt; and I thought you wanted life and experience, dear young men!

All this obscenity is just mental, mental, mental, it's the village-idiot mind playing with muck; and I thought you young gents experimental were out to find new life for yourselves and your women, complimental.

But if obscene village idiots you want to be, then be it. But don't imagine you'll get satisfactory experience from it; can't you see it? the idiot with his chin all wet goggling obscenities! If that's you and your fate, why then, dree it.

Obscenity

the guts and the stones and the womb, rots them down, leaves a rind of maquillage and pose and malice to shame the brutes.

Sex Isn't Sin—

duller than your grandmothers. But leave that aside. Let's be honest at last about sex, or show at least that we've tried.

Sex isn't sin, it's a delicate flow between women and men, and the sin is to damage the flow, force it or dirty it or suppress it again.

Sex isn't something you've got to play with; sex is you. It's the flow of your life, it's your moving self, and you are due to be true to the nature of it, its reserve, its sensitive pride that it always has to begin with, and by which you ought to abide.

Know yourself, O know yourself, that you are mortal; and know the sensitive delicacy of your sex, in its ebbing to and fro, and the mortal reserve of your sex, as it stays in your depths below.

And don't, with the nasty, prying mind, drag it out from its deeps

and finger it and force it, and shatter the rhythm it keeps when it's left alone, as it stirs and rouses and sleeps.

O know yourself, O know your sex! You must know, there is no escape. You must know sex in order to save it, your deepest self, from the rape of the itching mind and the mental self, with its pruriency always agape.

The Elephant is Slow to Mate—

and sleep in massive silence, and wake together, without a word.

So slowly the great hot elephant hearts grow full of desire, and the great beasts mate in secret at last, hiding their fire.

Oldest they are and the wisest of beasts so they know at last how to wait for the loneliest of feasts for the full repast.

They do not snatch, they do not tear; their massive blood moves as the moon-tides, near, more near till they touch in flood.

Sex and Trust—

or the experience amounts to nothing, mere evacuation-lust.

Noli Me Tangere—

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

O leave me clean from mental fingering from the cold copulation of the will, from all the white, self-conscious lechery the modern mind calls love!

From all the mental poetry of deliberate love-making, from all the false felicity of deliberate 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—

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—

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 now 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—

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 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. To-day, 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.

Climb Down, O Lordly mind—

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.

Jealousy

The jealousy of an ego-bound woman is a fearful thing to behold. The ego revealed in all its monstrous inhumanity.

Fidelity

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 longer that it seems to last forever. 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 æons to make a sapphire, æons for it to pass away.