know me, turns her head and ignores me vulgarly with
a wooden blank on her face.
What do I care for her, the ugly female, standing up there
with her long tangled sides like an old rug thrown
over a fence.
But she puts her nose down shrewdly enough when the knot
is untied,
And jumps staccato to earth, a sharp, dry jump, still ignor —
ing me,
Pretending to look round the stall.
Come on, you, crapa! I’m not your servant!
She turns her head away with an obtuse, female sort of
deafness, bête.
And then invariably she crouches her rear and makes
water.
That being her way of answer, if I speak to her. — Self —
conscious!
Le bestie non parlano, poverine!
She was bought at Giardini fair, on the sands, for six
hundred lire.
An obstinate old witch, almost jerking the rope from my
hands to eat the acanthus, or bite at the almond buds,
and make me wait.
Yet the moment I hate her she trips mild and smug like a
woman going to mass.
The moment I really detest her.
Queer it is, suddenly, in the garden
To catch sight of her standing like some huge, ghoulish
grey bird in the air, on the bough of the leaning
almond-tree,
Straight as a board on the bough, looking down like
some hairy horrid God the Father in a William Blake
imagination.
Come down, crapa, out of that almond tree!
Instead of which she strangely rears on her perch in the
air, vast beast.
And strangely paws the air, delicate,
And reaches her black-striped face up like a snake, far up,
Subtly, to the twigs overhead, far up, vast beast,
And snaps them sharp, with a little twist of her anaconda
head;
All her great hairy-shaggy belly open against the morning.
At seasons she curls back her tail like a green leaf in the fire,
Or like a lifted hand, hailing at her wrong end.
And having exposed the pink place of her nakedness, fixedly,
She trots on blithe toes,
And if you look at her, she looks back with a cold, sardonic
stare.
Sardonic, sardonyx, rock of cold fire.
See me? She says, That’s me!
That’s her.
Then she leaps the rocks like a quick rock.
Her back-bone sharp as a rock,
Sheer will.
Along which ridge of libidinous magnetism
Defiant, curling the leaf of her tail as if she were curling
her lip behind her at all life.
Libidinous desire runs back and forth, asserting itself in that
little lifted bare hand.
Yet she has such adorable spurty kids, like spurts of black
ink.
And in a month again is as if she had never had them.
And when the billy goat mounts her
She is brittle as brimstone.
While his slitted eyes squint back to the roots of his ears.
Taormina.
ELEPHANT
YOU go down shade to the river, where naked men sit on
flat brown rocks, to watch the ferry, in the sun;
And you cross the ferry with the naked people, go up the
tropical lane
Through the palm-trees and past hollow paddy-fields where
naked men are threshing rice
And the monolithic water-buffaloes, like old, muddy stones
with hair on them, are being idle;
And through the shadow of bread-fruit trees, with their dark
green, glossy, fanged leaves
Very handsome, and some pure yellow fanged leaves;
Out into the open, where the path runs on the top of a dyke
between paddy-fields:
And there, of course, you meet a huge and mud-grey
elephant advancing his frontal bone, his trunk curled
round a log of wood:
So you step down the bank, to make way.
Shuffle, shuffle, and his little wicked eye has seen you as he
advances above you,
The slow beast curiously spreading his round feet for the
dust.
And the slim naked man slips down, and the beast deposits
the lump of wood, carefully.
The keeper hooks the vast knee, the creature salaams.
White man, you are saluted.
Pay a few cents.
But the best is the Pera-hera, at midnight, under the tropical
stars,
With a pale little wisp of a Prince of Wales, diffident, up in
a small pagoda on the temple side
And white people in evening dress buzzing and crowding the
stand upon the grass below and opposite:
And at last the Pera-hera procession, flambeaux aloft in the
tropical night, of blazing cocoa-nut,
Naked dark men beneath,
And the huge frontal of three great elephants stepping forth
to the tom-tom’s beat, in the torch-light,
Slowly sailing in gorgeous apparel through the flame-light,
in front of a towering, grimacing white image of wood.
The elephant bells striking slow, tong-tong, tong-tong,
To music and queer chanting
Enormous shadow-processions filing on in the flare of fire
In the fume of cocoa-nut oil, in the sweating tropical night,
In the noise of the tom-toms and singers;
Elephants after elephants curl their trunks, vast shadows,
and some cry out
As they approach and salaam, under the dripping fire of the
torches
That pale fragment of a Prince up there, whose motto is
Ich dien.
Pale, dispirited Prince, with his chin on his hands, his nerves
tired out,
Watching and hardly seeing the trunk-curl approach and
clumsy, knee-lifting salaam
Of the hugest, oldest of beasts in the night and the fire-flare
below.
He is royalty, pale and dejected fragment up aloft.
And down below huge homage of shadowy beasts; bare —
foot and trunk-lipped in the night.
Chieftains, three of them abreast, on foot
Strut like peg-tops, wound around with hundreds of yards
of fine linen.
They glimmer with tissue of gold, and golden threads on a
jacket of velvet,
And their faces are dark, and fat, and important.
They are royalty, dark-faced royalty, showing the conscious
whites of their eyes
And stepping in homage, stubborn, to that nervous pale lad
up there.
More elephants, tong, tong-tong, loom up,
Huge, more tassels swinging, more dripping fire of new
cocoa-nut cressets
High, high flambeaux, smoking of the east;
And scarlet hot embers of torches knocked out of the sockets
among bare feet of elephants and men on the path in
the dark.
And devil dancers luminous with sweat, dancing on to the
shudder of drums.
Tom-toms, weird music of the devil, voices of men from the
jungle singing;
Endless, under the Prince.
Towards the tail of the everlasting procession
In the long hot night, mere dancers from insignificant
villages,
And smaller, more frightened elephants.
Men-peasan
ts from jungle villages dancing and running with
sweat and laughing,
Naked dark men with ornaments on, on their naked arms
and their naked breasts, the grooved loins
Gleaming like metal with running sweat as they suddenly
turn, feet apart,
And dance, and dance, forever dance, with breath half
sobbing in dark, sweat-shining breasts,
And lustrous great tropical eyes unveiled now, gleaming a
kind of laugh,
A naked, gleaming dark laugh, like a secret out in the dark,
And flare of a tropical energy, tireless, afire in the dark, slim
limbs and breasts,
Perpetual, fire-laughing motion, among the slow shuffle
Of elephants.
The hot dark blood of itself a-laughing, wet, half-devilish,
men all motion
Approaching under that small pavilion, and tropical eyes
dilated look up
Inevitably look up
To the Prince
To that tired remnant of royalty up there
Whose motto is Ich dien.
As if the homage of the kindled blood of the east
Went up in wavelets to him, from the breasts and eyes of
jungle torch-men,
And he couldn’t take it.
What would they do, those jungle men running with sweat,
with the strange dark laugh in their eyes, glancing up,
And the sparse-haired elephants slowly following,
If they knew that his motto was Ich dien?
And that he meant it.
They begin to understand
The rickshaw boys begin to understand
And then the devil comes into their faces,
But a different sort, a cold, rebellious, jeering devil.
In elephants and the east are two devils, in all men maybe.
The mystery of the dark mountain of blood, reeking in
homage, in lust, in rage,
And passive with everlasting patience,
Then the little, cunning pig-devil of the elephant’s lurking
eyes, the unbeliever.
We dodged, when the Pera-hera was finished, under the
hanging, hairy pigs’ tails
And the flat, flaccid mountains of the elephants’ standing
haunches,
Vast-blooded beasts,
Myself so little dodging rather scared against the eternal
wrinkled pillars of their legs, as they were being dis —
mantled;
Then I knew they were dejected, having come to hear the
repeated
Royal summons: Dien! Ihr!
Serve!
Serve, vast mountainous blood, in submission and splendour, serve
royalty.
Instead of which, the silent, fatal emission from that pale,
shattered boy up there:
Ich dien.
That’s why the night fell in frustration.
That’s why, as the elephants ponderously, with unseeming
swiftness, galloped uphill in the night, going back to
the jungle villages,
As the elephant bells sounded tong-tong-tong, bell of the
temple of blood in the night, swift-striking,
And the crowd like a field of rice in the dark gave way like
liquid to the dark
Looming gallop of the beasts,
It was as if the great bare bulks of elephants in the obscure
light went over the hill-brow swiftly, with their tails
between their legs, in haste to get away,
Their bells sounding frustrate and sinister.
And all the dark-faced, cotton-wrapped people, more
numerous and whispering than grains of rice in a rice —
field at night,
All the dark-faced, cotton-wrapped people, a countless host
on the shores of the lake, like thick wild rice by the
water’s edge,
Waiting for the fireworks of the after-show,
As the rockets went up, and the glare passed over countless
faces, dark as black rice growing,
Showing a glint of teeth, and glancing tropical eyes aroused
in the night,
There was the faintest twist of mockery in every face, across
the hiss of wonders as the rocket burst
High, high up, in flakes, shimmering flakes of blue fire,
above the palm-trees of the islet in the lake,
O faces upturned to the glare, O tropical wonder, wonder,
a miracle in heaven!
And the shadow of a jeer, of underneath disappointment, as
the rocket-coruscation died, and shadow was the same
as before.
They were foiled, the myriad whispering dark-faced cotton —
wrapped people.
They had come to see royalty,
To bow before royalty, in the land of elephants, bow deep,
bow deep.
Bow deep, for it’s good as a draught of cool water to bow
very, very low to the royal.
And all there was to bow to, a weary, diffident boy whose
motto is Ich dien.
I serve! I serve! in all the weary iron of his mien — ‘Tis I who
serve!
Drudge to the public.
I wish they had given the three feathers to me;
That I had been he in the pavilion, as in a pepper-box aloft
and alone
To stand and hold feathers, three feathers above the world,
And say to them: Dien! Ihr! Dient!
Omnes, vos omnes, servite.
Serve me, I am meet to be served.
Being royal of the gods.
And to the elephants:
First great beasts of the earth
A prince has come back to you,
Blood-mountains.
Crook the knee and be glad.
Kandy.
KANGAROO
IN the northern hemisphere
Life seems to leap at the air, or skim under the wind
Like stags on rocky ground, or pawing horses, or springy
scut-tailed rabbits.
Or else rush horizontal to charge at the sky’s horizon,
Like bulls or bisons or wild pigs.
Or slip like water slippery towards its ends,
As foxes, stoats, and wolves, and prairie dogs.
Only mice, and moles, and rats, and badgers, and beavers,
and perhaps bears
Seem belly-plumbed to the earth’s mid-navel.
Or frogs that when they leap come flop, and flop to the
centre of the earth.
But the yellow antipodal Kangaroo, when she sits up,
Who can unseat her, like a liquid drop that is heavy, and
just touches earth.
The downward drip.
The down-urge.
So much denser than cold-blooded frogs.
Delicate mother Kangaroo
Sitting up there rabbit-wise, but huge, plumb-weighted,
And lifting her beautiful slender face, oh! so much more
gently and finely lined than a rabbit’s, or than a hare’s,
Lifting her face to nibble at a round white peppermint drop,
which she loves, sensitive mother Kangaroo.
Her sensitive, long, pure-bred face.
Her full antipodal eyes, so dark,
So big and quiet and remote, having watched so many empty
dawns in silent Australia.
Her little loose hands, and drooping Victorian shoulders.
And then her great weight below the waist, her vast pale belly
With a thin young yellow little paw hanging out, and
straggle of a long thin ear, like ribbon,
Like a funny trimming to the middle of her belly, thin little
Her belly, her big haunches
And in addition, the great muscular python-stretch of
her tail.
There, she shan’t have any more peppermint drops.
So she wistfully, sensitively sniffs the air, and then turns,
goes off in slow sad leaps
On the long flat skis of her legs,
Steered and propelled by that steel-strong snake of a tail.
Stops again, half turns, inquisitive to look back.
While something stirs quickly in her belly, and a lean little
face comes out, as from a window,
Peaked and a bit dismayed,
Only to disappear again quickly away from the sight of the
world, to snuggle down in the warmth,
Leaving the trail of a different paw hanging out.
Still she watches with eternal, cocked wistfulness!
How full her eyes are, like the full, fathomless, shining eyes
of an Australian black-boy
Who has been lost so many centuries on the margins of
existence!
She watches with insatiable wistfulness.
Untold centuries of watching for something to come,
For a new signal from life, in that silent lost land of the
South.
Where nothing bites but insects and snakes and the sun,
small life.
Where no bull roared, no cow ever lowed, no stag cried, no
leopard screeched, no lion coughed, no dog barked,
But all was silent save for parrots occasionally, in the
haunted blue bush.
Wistfully watching, with wonderful liquid eyes.
And all her weight, all her blood, dripping sack-wise down
towards the earth’s centre,
And the live little one taking in its paw at the door of her
belly.
Leap then, and come down on the line that draws to the
earth’s deep, heavy centre.
Sydney.
BIBBLES
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated) Page 846