Of something gone wrong in the middle.
All this philanthropy and benevolence on other people’s
behalf
Just a bad smell.
Yet, America,
Your elvishness.
Your New England uncanniness,
Your western brutal faery quality.
My soul is half-cajoled, half-cajoled.
Something in you which carries me beyond
Yankee, Yankee,
What we call human.
Carries me where I want to be carried . . .
Or don’t I?
What does it matter
What we call human, and what we don’t call human?
The rose would smell as sweet.
And to be limited by a mere word is to be less than a
hopping flea, which hops over such an obstruction at
first jump.
Your horrible, skeleton, aureoled ideal.
Your weird bright motor-productive mechanism,
Two spectres.
But moreover
A dark, unfathomed will, that is not un-Jewish;
A set, stoic endurance, non-European;
An ultimate desperateness, un-African;
A deliberate generosity, non-Oriental.
The strange, unaccustomed geste of your demonish
New World nature
Glimpsed now and then.
Nobody knows you.
You don’t know yourself.
And I, who am half in love with you,
What am I in love with?
My own imaginings?
Say it is not so.
Say, through the branches
America, America
Of all your machines,
Say, in the deep sockets of your idealistic skull,
Dark, aboriginal eyes
Stoic, able to wait through ages
Glancing.
Say, in the sound of all your machines
And white words, white-wash American,
Deep pulsing of a strange heart
New throb, like a stirring under the false dawn that
precedes the real.
Nascent American
Demonish, lurking among the undergrowth
Of many-stemmed machines and chimneys that smoke
like pine-trees.
Dark, elvish,
Modern, unissued, uncanny America,
Your nascent demon people
Lurking among the deeps of your industrial thicket
Allure me till I am beside myself,
A nympholepht.
“These States!” as Whitman said,
Whatever he meant.
Baden-Baden.
PEACE
PEACE is written on the doorstep
In lava.
Peace, black peace congealed.
My heart will know no peace
Till the hill bursts.
Brilliant, intolerable lava
Brilliant as a powerful burning-glass
Walking like a royal snake down the mountain to —
wards the sea.
Forests, cities, bridges
Gone again in the bright trail of lava.
Naxos thousands of feet below the olive-roots,
And now the olive leaves thousands of feet below the
lava fire.
Peace congealed in black lava on the doorstep.
Within, white-hot lava, never at peace
Till it burst forth blinding, withering the earth;
To set again into rock
Grey-black rock.
Call it Peace?
Taormina.
TREES
CYPRESSES
TUSCAN cypresses,
What is it?
Folded in like a dark thought
For which the language is lost,
Tuscan cypresses,
Is there a great secret?
Are our words no good?
The undeliverable secret,
Dead with a dead race and a dead speech, and yet
Darkly monumental in you,
Etruscan cypresses.
Ah, how I admire your fidelity,
Dark cypresses,
Is it the secret of the long-nosed Etruscans?
The long-nosed, sensitive-footed, subtly-smiling
Etruscans,
Who made so little noise outside the cypress groves?
Among the sinuous, flame-tall cypresses
That swayed their length of darkness all around
Etruscan-dusky, wavering men of old Etruria:
Naked except for fanciful long shoes,
Going with insidious, half-smiling quietness
And some of Africa’s imperturbable sang-froid
About a forgotten business.
What business, then?
Nay, tongues are dead, and words are hollow as hollow
seed-pods,
Having shed their sound and finished all their echoing
Etruscan syllables,
That had the telling.
Yet more I see you darkly concentrate,
Tuscan cypresses,
On one old thought:
On one old slim imperishable thought, while you remain
Etruscan cypresses;
Dusky, slim marrow-thought of slender, flickering men of
Etruria,
Whom Rome called vicious.
Vicious, dark cypresses:
Vicious, you supple, brooding, softly-swaying pillars of dark
flame.
Monumental to a dead, dead race
Embalmed in you!
Were they then vicious, the slender, tender-footed,
Long-nosed men of Etruria?
Or was their way only evasive and different, dark, like cypress —
trees in a wind?
They are dead, with all their vices,
And all that is left
Is the shadowy monomania of some cypresses
And tombs.
The smile, the subtle Etruscan smile still lurking
Within the tombs,
Etruscan cypresses.
He laughs longest who laughs last;
Nay, Leonardo only bungled the pure Etruscan smile.
What would I not give
To bring back the rare and orchid-like
Evil-yclept Etruscan?
For as to the evil
We have only Roman word for it,
Which I, being a little weary of Roman virtue,
Don’t hang much weight on.
For oh, I know, in the dust where we have buried
The silenced races and all their abominations,
We have buried so much of the delicate magic of life.
There in the deeps
That churn the frankincense and ooze the myrrh,
Cypress shadowy,
Such an aroma of lost human life!
They say the fit survive,
But I invoke the spirits of the lost.
Those that have not survived, the darkly lost.
To bring their meaning back into life again.
Which they have taken away
And wrapt inviolable in soft cypress-trees,
Etruscan cypresses.
Evil, what is evil?
There is only one evil, to deny life
As Rome denied Etruria
And mechanical America Montezuma still.
Fiesole.
BARE FIG-TREES
FIG-TREES, weird fig-trees
Made of thick smooth silver,
Made of sweet, untarnished silver in the sea-southern air —
I say untarnished, but I mean opaque —
Thick, smooth-fleshed silver, dull only as human limbs are
dull
With the life-lustre,
Nude with the dim light of full, healthy life
That is always half-dark,
And suave like passion-flower petals,
Like passion-flowers,
With
the half-secret gleam of a passion-flower hanging from
the rock.
Great, complicated, nude fig-tree, stemless flower-mesh,
Flowerily naked in flesh, and giving off hues of life.
Rather like an octopus, but strange and sweet-myriad-limbed
octopus;
Like a nude, like a rock-living, sweet-fleshed sea-anemone,
Flourishing from the rock in a mysterious arrogance.
Let me sit down beneath the many-branching candelabrum
That lives upon this rock
And laugh at Time, and laugh at dull Eternity,
And make a joke of stale Infinity,
Within the flesh-scent of this wicked tree,
That has kept so many secrets up its sleeve,
And has been laughing through so many ages
At man and his uncomfortablenesses,
And his attempt to assure himself that what is so is not so,
Up its sleeve.
Let me sit down beneath this many-branching candelabrum,
The Jewish seven-branched, tallow-stinking candlestick
kicked over the cliff
And all its tallow righteousness got rid of,
And let me notice it behave itself.
And watch it putting forth each time to heaven,
Each time straight to heaven,
With marvellous naked assurance each single twig,
Each one setting off straight to the sky
As if it were the leader, the main-stem, the forerunner,
Intent to hold the candle of the sun upon its socket-tip,
It alone.
Every young twig
No sooner issued sideways from the thigh of his predecessor
Than off he starts without a qualm
To hold the one and only lighted candle of the sun in his
socket-tip.
He casually gives birth to another young bud from his thigh,
Which at once sets off to be the one and only,
And hold the lighted candle of the sun.
Oh many-branching candelabrum, oh strange up-starting fig —
tree,
Oh weird Demos, where every twig is the arch twig,
Each imperiously over-equal to each, equality over-reaching
itself
Like the snakes on Medusa’s head,
Oh naked fig-tree!
Still, no doubt every one of you can be the sun-socket as
well as every other of you.
Demos, Demos, Demos!
Demon, too,
Wicked fig-tree, equality puzzle, with your self-conscious
secret fruits.
Taormina.
BARE ALMOND-TREES
WET almond-trees, in the rain,
Like iron sticking grimly out of earth;
Black almond trunks, in the rain,
Like iron implements twisted, hideous, out of the earth,
Out of the deep, soft fledge of Sicilian winter-green,
Earth-grass uneatable,
Almond trunks curving blackly, iron-dark, climbing the
slopes.
Almond-tree, beneath the terrace rail,
Black, rusted, iron trunk,
You have welded your thin stems finer,
Like steel, like sensitive steel in the air,
Grey, lavender, sensitive steel, curving thinly and brittly up
in a parabola.
What are you doing in the December rain?
Have you a strange electric sensitiveness in your steel tips?
Do you feel the air for electric influences
Like some strange magnetic apparatus?
Do you take in messages, in some strange code,
From heaven’s wolfish, wandering electricity, that prowls so
constantly round Etna?
Do you take the whisper of sulphur from the air?
Do you hear the chemical accents of the sun?
Do you telephone the roar of the waters over the earth?
And from all this, do you make calculations?
Sicily, December’s Sicily in a mass of rain
With iron branching blackly, rusted like old, twisted
implements
And brandishing and stooping over earth’s wintry fledge,
climbing the slopes
Of uneatable soft green!
Taormina.
TROPIC
SUN, dark sun
Sun of black void heat
Sun of the torrid mid-day’s horrific darkness.
Behold my hair twisting and going black.
Behold my eyes turn tawny yellow
Negroid;
See the milk of northern spume
Coagulating and going black in my veins
Aromatic as frankincense.
Columns dark and soft
Sunblack men
Soft shafts, sunbreathing mouths
Eyes of yellow, golden sand
As frictional, as perilous, explosive as brimstone.
Rock, waves of dark heat;
Waves of dark heat, rock, sway upwards
Waver perpendicular.
What is the horizontal rolling of water
Compared to the flood of black heat that rolls upward
past my eyes?
Taormina.
SOUTHERN NIGHT
COME up, thou red thing.
Come up, and be called a moon.
The mosquitoes are biting to-night
Like memories.
Memories, northern memories,
Bitter-stinging white world that bore us
Subsiding into this night.
Call it moonrise
This red anathema?
Rise, thou red thing,
Unfold slowly upwards, blood-dark;
Burst the night’s membrane of tranquil stars
Finally.
Maculate
The red Macula.
Taormina.
FLOWERS
ALMOND BLOSSOM
EVEN iron can put forth,
Even iron.
This is the iron age,
But let us take heart
Seeing iron break and bud,
Seeing rusty iron puff with clouds of blossom.
The almond-tree,
December’s bare iron hooks sticking out of earth.
The almond-tree,
That knows the deadliest poison, like a snake
In supreme bitterness.
Upon the iron, and upon the steel,
Odd flakes as if of snow, odd bits of snow,
Odd crumbs of melting snow.
But you mistake, it is not from the sky;
From out the iron, and from out the steel,
Flying not down from heaven, but storming up,
Strange storming up from the dense under-earth
Along the iron, to the living steel
In rose-hot tips, and flakes of rose-pale snow
Setting supreme annunciation to the world.
Nay, what a heart of delicate super-faith,
Iron-breaking,
The rusty swords of almond-trees.
Trees suffer, like races, down the long ages.
They wander and are exiled, they live in exile through long
ages
Like drawn blades never sheathed, hacked and gone black,
The alien trees in alien lands: and yet
The heart of blossom,
The unquenchable heart of blossom!
Look at the many-cicatrised frail vine, none more scarred
and frail.
Yet see him fling himself abroad in fresh abandon
From the small wound-stump.
Even the wilful, obstinate, gummy fig-tree
Can be kept down, but he’ll burst like a polyp into prolixity.
And the almond-tree, in exile, in the iron age!
This is the ancient southern earth whence the vases were
baked, amphoras, craters, cantharus, oenoch
oe, and open —
hearted cylix.
Bristling now with the iron of almond-trees
Iron, but unforgotten,
Iron, dawn-hearted,
Ever-beating dawn-heart, enveloped in iron against the exile,
against the ages.
See it come forth in blossom
From the snow-remembering heart
In long-nighted January,
In the long dark nights of the evening star, and Sirius, and
the Etna snow-wind through the long night.
Sweating his drops of blood through the long-nighted
Gethsemane
Into blossom, into pride, into honey-triumph, into most
exquisite splendour.
Oh, give me the tree of life in blossom
And the Cross sprouting its superb and fearless flowers!
Something must be reassuring to the almond, in the
evening star, and the snow-wind, and the long, long,
nights,
Some memory of far, sun-gentler lands,
So that the faith in his heart smiles again
And his blood ripples with that untellable delight of once —
more-vindicated faith,
And the Gethsemane blood at the iron pores unfolds,
unfolds,
Pearls itself into tenderness of bud
And in a great and sacred forthcoming steps forth, steps out
in one stride
A naked tree of blossom, like a bridegroom bathing in dew,
divested of cover,
Frail-naked, utterly uncovered
To the green night-baying of the dog-star, Etna’s snow-edged
wind
And January’s loud-seeming sun.
Think of it, from the iron fastness
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 839