Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)

  It makes me realise the delicious pleasure of the moon

  that she has in travelling by herself: throughout time,

  or the splendid growing of an ash-tree

  alone, on a hill-side in the north, humming in the wind.

  REFUSED FRIENDSHIP

  HE said to me: Your life will be so much the poorer

  since you refuse my friendship.

  But I, honestly, don’t know what he means.

  I can’t see that I refuse anything.

  I like him. What else is there?

  FUTURE RELATIONSHIPS

  THE world is moving, moving still, towards further democracy.

  But not a democracy of idea or ideal, nor of property, nor

  even of the emotion of brotherhood.

  But a democracy of men, a democracy of touch.

  FUTURE RELIGION

  THE future of religion is in the mystery of touch.

  The mind is touchless, so is the will, so is the spirit.

  First come the death, then the pure aloneness, which is permanent

  then the resurrection into touch.

  FUTURE STATES

  ONCE men touch one another, then the modern industrial

  form of machine civilisation will melt away

  and universalism and cosmopolitanism will cease

  the great movement of centralising into oneness will stop

  and there will be a vivid recoil into separateness

  many vivid small states, like a kaleidoscope, all colours

  and all the differences given expression.

  FUTURE WAR

  AFTER our industrial civilisation has broken, and the

  civilisation of touch has begun

  war will cease, there will be no more wars.

  The heart of man, in so far as it is budding, is budding warless

  and budding towards infinite variety, variegation

  and where there is infinite variety, there is no interest in war.

  Oneness makes war, and the obsession of oneness.

  SIGNS OF THE TIMES

  IF you want to get a glimpse of future possibilities

  look at the young men under thirty.

  Those that are fresh and alive are the same in every country,

  a certain carelessness, a certain tenderness, a certain instinctive contempt

  for old values and old people:

  a certain warlessness even moneylessness,

  a waiting for the proper touch, not for any word or deed.

  INITIATION DEGREES

  No man, unless he has died, and learned to be alone

  will ever come into touch.

  UNHAPPY SOULS

  THE unhappy souls are those that can’t die and become silent

  but must ever struggle on to assert themselves.

  FULL LIFE

  A MAN can’t fully live unless he dies and ceases to care

  ceases to care.

  PEOPLE WHO CARE

  PEOPLE who care, who care, who care

  and who dare not die for fear they should be nothing at all

  probably are nothing at all.

  NON-EXISTENCE

  WE don’t exist unless we are deeply and sensually in touch

  with that which can be touched but not known.

  ALL-KNOWING

  ALL that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed waste —

  paper baskets

  unless we are in touch with that which laughs at all our knowing.

  SALVATION

  THE only salvation is to realise that we know nothing about it

  and there is nothing to save

  and nothing to do

  and effort is the ruin of all things.

  Then, if we realise that we never were lost, we realise we

  couldn’t be saved.

  For you can’t save that which was never lost

  at the worst, you can only save it up

  and once you realise that you never were lost

  you realise the fatuity of saving up against possible loss.

  The one thing easiest to lose is savings.

  OLD ARCHANGELS

  AND so the official archangels

  Orthodox Michael, and that whispering Gabriel

  have had their term of office, they must go.

  It is Lucifer’s turn, the turn of the Son of the Morning

  to sway the earth of men

  the Morning Star.

  LUCIFER

  ANGELS are bright still, though the brightest fell.

  But tell me, tell me, how do you know

  that he lost any of his brightness in falling?

  He only fell out of your ken, you orthodox angels,

  you dull angels, tarnished with centuries of conventionality.

  THE MILL OF GOD

  WHY seek to alter people, why not leave them alone?

  The mills of God will grind them small, anyhow, there is escape.

  The heavens are the nether mill-stone and our heavy earth

  rolls round and round, grinding exceeding small.

  MULTITUDES

  THE multitudes are like droppings of birds, like dung of sea —

  fowl that have flown away,

  Oh they are grist for the mills of God, their bones ground down

  to fertilise the roots of unknown men who are still to come

  in fresh fields.

  FALLEN LEAVES

  THERE is the organic connection, like leaves that belong to a tree

  and there is the mechanical connection, like leaves that are cast

  to the earth.

  Winds of heaven fan the leaves of the tree like flames and tunes,

  but winds of heaven are mills of God to the fallen leaves

  grinding them small to humus, on earth’s nether mill-stone.

  THE DIFFERENCE

  PEOPLE are like leaves, fluttering and gay on the bush of the globe,

  or they are like leaves, rustling thick, in crowds on the floor of

  the earth.

  And the thick, fallen crowds crackle and crumble under the

  milling of the winds,

  the winds of change that will not be still

  the breath of life.

  But the living leaves in the breath of the wind are more lively

  they glisten and shake.

  THE BREATH OF LIFE

  THE breath of life and the sharp winds of change are the same thing.

  But people who are fallen from the organic connection with the cosmos

  feel the winds of change grind them down.

  VENGEANCE IS MINE

  VENGEANCE is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay.

  And the stiff-necked people, and the self-willed people, and

  self-important ones, the self-righteous, self-absorbed

  all of them who wind their energy round the idea of themselves

  and so strangle off their connection with the ceaseless tree of life,

  and fall into sharp, self-centred self-assertion, sharp or soft,

  they fall victim at once to the Vengeance of the unforgiving god

  as their nerves are stretched till they twangle and snap

  and irritation seethes secretly through their guts, as their tissue disintegrates

  and flames of katabolistic energy alternate

  with ashes of utter boredom, ennui, and disgust.

  It is the Vengeance of the Lord, long and unremitting

  till the soul of the stiff-necked is ground to dust, to fertilising meal

  with which to manure afresh the roots of the tree of life.

  And so the Lord of Vengeance pays back, repays life

  for the defection of the self-centred ones.

  ASTRONOMICAL CHANGES

  DAWN is NO longer in the house of the Fish

  Pisces, oh Fish, Jesus of the watery way,

  your two thousand years are up.

  And the foot of the Cross no longer is planted in the place of

&
nbsp; the birth of the Sun.

  The whole great heavens have shifted over, and slowly pushed aside

  the Cross, the Virgin, Pisces, the Sacred Fish

  that casts its sperm upon the waters, and knows no intercourse;

  pushed them all aside, discarded them, make way now for

  something else.

  Even the Pole itself has departed now from the Pole Star

  and pivots on the invisible,

  while the Pole Star lies aside, like an old axle taken from the wheel.

  FATALITY

  No one, not even God, can put back a leaf on to a tree

  once it has fallen off.

  And no one, not God nor Christ nor any other

  can put back a human life into connection with the living cosmos

  once the connection has been broken

  and the person has become finally self-centred.

  Death alone, through the long process of disintegration

  can melt the detached life back

  through the dark Hades at the roots of the tree

  into the circulating sap, once more, of the tree of life.

  FREE WILL

  THE human will is free, ultimately, to choose one of two things:

  either to stay connected with the tree of life, and submit

  the human will to the flush of the vaster impulsion of the tree;

  or else to sever the connection, to become self-centred, self-willed self-motived

  and subject, really, to the draught of every motor-car or the

  kicking tread of every passer-by.

  IN A SPANISH TRAM-CAR

  SHE fanned herself with a violet fan

  and looked sulky, under the thick straight brows.

  The wisp of modern black mantilla

  made her half Madonna, half Astarte.

  Suddenly her yellow-brown eyes looked with a flare into mine;

  — we could sin together! —

  The spark fell and kindled instantly on my blood,

  then died out almost as swiftly.

  She can keep her sin

  She can sin with some thick-set Spaniard.

  Sin doesn’t interest me.

  SPANISH PRIVILEGE

  THE inward cocky assertiveness of the Spaniard seems to say:

  God is supreme,

  but He can’t stop me from sinning against Him if I want to,

  and when I want to, I’m going to;

  though you bloody outsiders had better not try it on.

  So they go on sinning, though sin is obsolete,

  and nobody but themselves is interested.

  AT THE BANK IN SPAIN

  EVEN the old priest, in his long black robe and silvery hair

  came to the counter with his hat off, humble at the shrine,

  and was immensely flattered when one of the fat little clerks

  of the bank

  shook hands with him.

  THE SPANISH WIFE

  WHEN I saw her straying a little dazed through her untidy house

  I realised the secret joy her young Spanish husband had

  in frustrating her, just inwardly frustrating her,

  this foreign woman of the wealthy north.

  THE PAINTER’S WIFE

  SHE was tangled up in her own self-conceit, a woman,

  and her passion could only flare through the meshes

  towards other women, in communion;

  the presence of a man made her recoil

  and burn blue and cold, like the flame in a miner’s lamp

  when the after-damp is around it.

  Yet she seemed to know nothing about it

  and devoted herself to her husband

  and made him paint her nude, time after time,

  and each time it came out the same, a horrible sexless, lifeless abstraction

  of the female form, technically “ beautiful,” actually a white

  machine drawing, more null than death.

  And she was so pleased with it, she thought one day it would

  be recognised as “ great.”

  And he thought so too.

  Nobody else did.

  MODERN PROBLEMS

  THE worst of it is

  When a woman can only love, flamily, those of her own sex

  she has a secret, almost ecstatised hatred of maleness in any man

  that she exudes like pearly white poison gas,

  and men often succumb like white mice in a laboratory,

  around her,

  specimens to be anatomised.

  DOMINANT WOMAN

  DOMINANT women are as a rule so subtly and fiendishly domineering

  that the young of their own sex revolt against them at last,

  and turn once more to men to save them, Perseus, St George

  from the dragon of the modern female.

  MEN AND WOMEN

  ALL this talk of equality between the sexes is merely an

  expression of sex-hate.

  Men and women should learn tenderness to each other

  and to leave one another alone.

  THE SCIENTIFIC DOCTOR

  WHEN I went to the scientific doctor

  I realised what a lust there was in him to wreak his so-called

  science on me

  and reduce me to the level of a thing.

  So I said: Good-morning! and left him.

  HEALING

  I AM not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.

  And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that

  I am ill.

  I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self

  and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time

  can help

  and patience, and a certain difficult repentance

  long, difficult repentance, realisation of life’s mistake, and the

  freeing oneself

  from the endless repetition of the mistake

  which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.

  EN MASSE

  TO-DAY, society has sanctified

  the sin against the Holy Ghost,

  and all are encouraged into the sin

  so that all may be lost together, en masse, the great word of

  our civilisation.

  GOD AND THE HOLY GHOST

  THERE is no sinning against God, what does God care about sin!

  But there is sinning against the Holy Ghost, since the Holy

  Ghost is with us

  in the flesh, is part of our consciousness.

  The Holy Ghost is the deepest part of our own consciousness

  wherein we know ourself for what we are

  and know our dependence on the creative beyond.

  So if we go counter to our own deepest consciousness

  naturally we destroy the most essential self in us,

  and once done, there is no remedy, no salvation for this,

  nonentity is our portion.

  HUMILITY

  NOWADAYS, to talk of humility is a sin against the Holy

  Ghost

  It is a sneaking evasion of the responsibility

  of our own consciousness.

  PROPER PRIDE

  EVERYTHING that lives has its own proper pride

  as a columbine flower has, or even a starling walking and

  looking around.

  And the base things like hyaenas or bed-bugs have least pride

  of being,

  they are humble with a creeping humility, being parasites or

  carrion creatures.

  HUMILITY MONGERS

  WHEN I hear a man spouting about humility to-day

  I know he is either a bed-bug, battening on sleeping people

  or a hyaena, eating corpses.

  TENDER REVERENCE

  To be humble before other men is degrading, I am humble

  before no man

  and I want no man to be humble before me.

  But when I se
e the life-spirit fluttering and struggling in a man

  I want to show always the human tender reverence.

  ABSOLUTE REVERENCE

  I FEEL absolute reverence to nobody and to nothing human

  neither to persons nor things nor ideas, ideals nor religions nor institutions,

  to these things I feel only respect, and a tinge of reverence

  when I see the fluttering of pure life in them.

  But to something unseen, unknown, creative

  from which I feel I am a derivative

  I feel absolute reverence. Say no more!

  BELIEF

  FOREVER nameless

  Forever unknown

  Forever unconceived

  Forever unrepresented

  yet forever felt in the soul.

  BELLS

  THE Mohammedans say that the sound of bells

  especially big ones, is obscene.

  That hard clapper striking in a hard mouth

  and resounding after with a long hiss of insistence is obscene.

  Yet bells call the Christians to God

  especially clapper bells, hard tongues wagging in hard mouths,

  metal hitting on metal, to enforce our attention,

  and bring us to God.

  The soft thudding of drums

  of finger or fist or soft-skinned sticks upon the stretched

  membrane of sound