Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)

  “And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me” —

  That is Jesus.

  But then Jesus was not quite a man.

  He was the Son of Man

  Filius Meus, O remorseless logic

  Out of His own mouth.

  I, Matthew, being a man

  Cannot be lifted up, the Paraclete

  To draw all men unto me,

  Seeing I am on a par with all men.

  I, on the other hand,

  Am drawn to the Uplifted, as all men are drawn,

  To the Son of Man

  Filius Meus.

  Wilt thou lift me up, Son of Man?

  How my heart beats!

  I am man.

  I am man, and therefore my heart beats, and throws

  the dark blood from side to side

  All the time I am lifted up.

  Yes, even during my uplifting.

  And if it ceased?

  If it ceased, I should be no longer man

  As I am, if my heart in uplifting ceased to beat, to toss the

  dark blood from side to side, causing my myriad secret

  streams.

  After the cessation

  I might be a soul in bliss, an angel, approximating to the

  Uplifted;

  But that is another matter;

  I am Matthew, the man,

  And I am not that other angelic matter.

  So I will be lifted up, Saviour,

  But put me down again in time, Master,

  Before my heart stops beating, and I become what I am not.

  Put me down again on the earth, Jesus, on the brown soil

  Where flowers sprout in the acrid humus, and fade into

  humus again.

  Where beasts drop their unlicked young, and pasture, and

  drop their droppings among the turf.

  Where the adder darts horizontal.

  Down on the damp, unceasing ground, where my feet belong

  And even my heart, Lord, forever, after all uplifting:

  The crumbling, damp, fresh land, life horizontal and ceaseless.

  Matthew I am, the man.

  And I take the wings of the morning, to Thee, Crucified,

  Glorified.

  But while flowers club their petals at evening

  And rabbits make pills among the short grass

  And long snakes quickly glide into the dark hole in the

  wall, hearing man approach,

  I must be put down, Lord, in the afternoon,

  And at evening I must leave off my wings of the spirit

  As I leave off my braces

  And I must resume my nakedness like a fish, sinking down

  the dark reversion of night

  Like a fish seeking the bottom, Jesus,

  ICTHUS

  Face downwards

  Veering slowly

  Down between the steep slopes of darkness, fucus-dark,

  seaweed-fringed valleys of the waters under the sea

  Over the edge of the soundless cataract

  Into the fathomless, bottomless pit

  Where my soul falls in the last throes of bottomless convulsion,

  and is fallen

  Utterly beyond Thee, Dove of the Spirit;

  Beyond everything, except itself.

  Nay, Son of Man, I have been lifted up.

  To Thee I rose like a rocket ending in mid-heaven.

  But even Thou, Son of Man, canst not quaff out the dregs

  of terrestrial manhood!

  They fall back from Thee.

  They fall back, and like a dripping of quicksilver taking the

  downward track.

  Break into drops, burn into drops of blood, and dropping,

  dropping take wing

  Membraned, blood-veined wings.

  On fans of unsuspected tissue, like bats

  They thread and thrill and flicker ever downward

  To the dark zenith of Thine antipodes

  Jesus Uplifted.

  Bat-winged heart of man

  Reversed flame

  Shuddering a strange way down the bottomless pit

  To the great depths of its reversed zenith.

  Afterwards, afterwards

  Morning comes, and I shake the dews of night from the

  wings of my spirit

  And mount like a lark, Beloved.

  But remember, Saviour,

  That my heart which like a lark at heaven’s gate singing,

  hovers morning-bright to Thee,

  Throws still the dark blood back and forth

  In the avenues where the bat hangs sleeping, upside-down

  And to me undeniable, Jesus.

  Listen, Paraclete.

  I can no more deny the bat-wings of my fathom-flickering

  spirit of darkness

  Than the wings of the Morning and Thee, Thou Glorified.

  I am Matthew, the Man:

  It is understood.

  And Thou art Jesus, Son of Man

  Drawing all men unto Thee, but bound to release them

  when the hour strikes.

  I have been, and I have returned.

  I have mounted up on the wings of the morning, and I

  have dredged down to the zenith’s reversal.

  Which is my way, being man.

  Gods may stay in mid-heaven, the Son of Man has climbed

  to the Whitsun zenith,

  But I, Matthew, being a man

  Am a traveller back and forth.

  So be it.

  ST MARK

  THERE was a lion in Judah

  Which whelped, and was Mark.

  But winged.

  A lion with wings.

  At least at Venice.

  Even as late as Daniele Manin.

  Why should he have wings?

  Is he to be a bird also?

  Or a spirit?

  Or a winged thought?

  Or a soaring consciousness?

  Evidently he is all that

  The lion of the spirit.

  Ah, Lamb of God

  Would a wingless lion lie down before Thee, as this

  winged lion lies?

  The lion of the spirit.

  Once he lay in the mouth of a cave

  And sunned his whiskers,

  And lashed his tail slowly, slowly

  Thinking of voluptuousness

  Even of blood.

  But later, in the sun of the afternoon

  Having tasted all there was to taste, and having slept his fill

  He fell to frowning, as he lay with his head on his paws

  And the sun coming in through the narrowest fibril of a

  slit in his eyes.

  So, nine-tenths asleep, motionless, bored, and statically

  angry.

  He saw in a shaft of light a lamb on a pinnacle, balancing a

  flag on its paw.

  And he was thoroughly startled.

  Going out to investigate

  He found the lamb beyond him, on the inaccessible pinnacle

  of light.

  So he put his paw to his nose, and pondered.

  “Guard my sheep,” came the silvery voice from the

  pinnacle,

  “And I will give thee the wings of the morning.”

  So the lion of the senses thought it was worth it.

  Hence he became a curly sheep-dog with dangerous pro —

  pensities

  As Carpaccio will tell you:

  Ramping round, guarding the flock of mankind,

  Sharpening his teeth on the wolves,

  Ramping up through the air like a kestrel

  And lashing his tail above the world

  And enjoying the sensation of heaven and righteousness and

  voluptuous wrath.

  There is a new sweetness in his voluptuously licking his paw

  Now that it is a weapon of heaven.

  There is a new ecstasy in his roar of desirous love


  Now that it sounds self-conscious through the unlimited sky.

  He is well aware of himself

  And he cherishes voluptuous delights, and thinks about

  them

  And ceases to be a blood-thirsty king of beasts

  And becomes the faithful sheep-dog of the Shepherd, think —

  ing of his voluptuous pleasures of chasing the sheep to

  the fold

  And increasing the flock, and perhaps giving a real nip here

  and there, a real pinch, but always well meant.

  And somewhere there is a lioness

  The she-mate.

  Whelps play between the paws of the lion

  The she-mate purrs

  Their castle is impregnable, their cave,

  The sun comes in their lair, they are well-off

  A well-to-do family.

  Then the proud lion stalks abroad, alone

  And roars to announce himself to the wolves

  And also to encourage the red-cross Lamb

  And also to ensure a goodly increase in the world.

  Look at him, with his paw on the world

  At Venice and elsewhere.

  Going blind at last.

  ST LUKE

  A WALL, a bastion,

  A living forehead with its slow whorl of hair

  And a bull’s large, sombre, glancing eye

  And glistening, adhesive muzzle

  With cavernous nostrils where the winds run hot

  Snorting defiance

  Or greedily snuffling behind the cows.

  Horns

  The golden horns of power,

  Power to kill, power to create

  Such as Moses had, and God,

  Head-power.

  Shall great wings flame from his shoulder-sockets

  Assyrian-wise?

  It would be no wonder.

  Knowing the thunder of his heart

  The massive thunder of his dew-lapped chest

  Deep and reverberating,

  It would be no wonder if great wings, like flame, fanned

  out from the furnace-cracks of his shoulder-sockets.

  Thud! Thud! Thud!

  And the roar of black bull’s blood in the mighty passages of

  his chest.

  Ah, the dewlap swings pendulous with excess.

  The great, roaring weight above

  Like a furnace dripping a molten drip.

  The urge, the massive, burning ache

  Of the bull’s breast.

  The open furnace-doors of his nostrils.

  For what does he ache, and groan?

  In his breast a wall?

  Nay, once it was also a fortress wall, and the weight of a

  vast battery.

  But now it is a burning hearthstone only,

  Massive old altar of his own burnt offering.

  It was always an altar of burnt offering

  His own black blood poured out like a sheet of flame over

  his fecundating herd

  As he gave himself forth.

  But also it was a fiery fortress frowning shaggily on the world

  And announcing battle ready.

  Since the Lamb bewitched him with that red-struck flag

  His fortress is dismantled

  His fires of wrath are banked down

  His horns turn away from the enemy.

  He serves the Son of Man.

  And hear him bellow, after many years, the bull that serves

  the Son of Man.

  Moaning, booing, roaring hollow

  Constrained to pour forth all his fire down the narrow sluice

  of procreation

  Through such narrow loins, too narrow.

  Is he not over-charged by the dammed-up pressure of his

  own massive black blood

  Luke, the Bull, the father of substance, the Providence Bull,

  after two thousand years?

  Is he not over-full of offering, a vast, vast offer of himself

  Which must be poured through so small a vent?

  Too small a vent.

  Let him remember his horns, then.

  Seal up his forehead once more to a bastion,

  Let it know nothing.

  Let him charge like a mighty catapult on the red-cross flag,

  let him roar out challenge on the world

  And throwing himself upon it, throw off the madness of his

  blood.

  Let it be war.

  And so it is war.

  The bull of the proletariat has got his head down.

  ST JOHN

  JOHN, oh John,

  Thou honourable bird

  Sun-peering eagle.

  Taking a bird’s-eye view

  Even of Calvary and Resurrection

  Not to speak of Babylon’s whoredom.

  High over the mild effulgence of the dove

  Hung all the time, did we but know it, the all-knowing

  shadow

  Of John’s great gold-barred eagle.

  John knew all about it

  Even the very beginning.

  “In the beginning was the Word

  And the Word was God

  And the Word was with God.”

  Having been to school

  John knew the whole proposition.

  As for innocent Jesus

  He was one of Nature’s phenomena, no doubt.

  Oh that mind-soaring eagle of an Evangelist

  Staring creation out of countenance

  And telling it off

  As an eagle staring down on the Sun!

  The Logos, the Logos!

  “In the beginning was the Word.”

  Is there not a great Mind pre-ordaining?

  Does not a supreme Intellect ideally procreate the Universe?

  Is not each soul a vivid thought in the great consciousness

  stream of God?

  Put salt on his tail

  The sly bird of John.

  Proud intellect, high-soaring Mind

  Like a king eagle, bird of the most High, sweeping the

  round of heaven

  And casting the cycles of creation

  On two wings, like a pair of compasses;

  Jesus’ pale and lambent dove, cooing in the lower boughs

  On sufferance.

  In the beginning was the Word, of course.

  And the word was the first offspring of the almighty Johannine

  mind,

  Chick of the intellectual eagle.

  Yet put salt on the tail of the Johannine bird

  Put salt on its tail

  John’s eagle.

  Shoo it down out of the empyrean

  Of the all-seeing, all-fore-ordaining ideal.

  Make it roost on bird-spattered, rocky Patmos

  And let it moult there, among the stones of the bitter sea.

  For the almighty eagle of the fore-ordaining Mind

  Is looking rather shabby and island-bound these days:

  Moulting, and rather naked about the rump, and down in

  the beak,

  Rather dirty, on dung-whitened Patmos.

  From which we are led to assume

  That the old bird is weary, and almost willing

  That a new chick should chip the extensive shell

  Of the mundane egg.

  The poor old golden eagle of the creative spirit

  Moulting and moping and waiting, willing at last

  For the fire to burn it up, feathers and all

  So that a new conception of the beginning and end

  Can rise from the ashes.

  Ah Phoenix, Phoenix

  John’s Eagle!

  You are only known to us now as the badge of an insurance

  Company.

  Phoenix, Phoenix

  The nest is in flames

  Feathers are singeing.

  Ash flutters flocculent, like down on a blue, wan fledgeling.

  San Gervasio.


  CREATURES

  THE MOSQUITO

  WHEN did you start your tricks

  Monsieur?

  What do you stand on such high legs for?

  Why this length of shredded shank

  You exaltation?

  Is it so that you shall lift your centre of gravity upwards

  And weigh no more than air as you alight upon me,

  Stand upon me weightless, you phantom?

  I heard a woman call you the Winged Victory

  In sluggish Venice.

  You turn your head towards your tail, and smile.

  How can you put so much devilry

  Into that translucent phantom shred

  Of a frail corpus?

  Queer, with your thin wings and your streaming legs

  How you sail like a heron, or a dull clot of air,

  A nothingness.

  Yet what an aura surrounds you;

  Your evil little aura, prowling, and casting a numbness on

  my mind.

  That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic:

  Invisibility, and the anaesthetic power

  To deaden my attention in your direction.

  But I know your game now, streaky sorcerer.

  Queer, how you stalk and prowl the air

  In circles and evasions, enveloping me,

  Ghoul on wings

  Winged Victory.

  Settle, and stand on long thin shanks

  Eyeing me sideways, and cunningly conscious that I am aware,

  You speck.

  I hate the way you lurch off sideways into air

  Having read my thoughts against you.

  Come then, let us play at unawares,

  And see who wins in this sly game of bluff.

  Man or mosquito.