an’ makin’ us come uncurled.
And then when you’re gettin’ nicely on
an’ life seems to begin,
that little bleeder comes bustin’ in
with: Hello boy! what about sin?
An’ then he leads you by the nose
after a lot o’ women
as strips you stark as a monkey nut
an’ leaves you never a trimmin’.
An’ then somebody has ter marry you
to put him through’is paces;
then when John Thomas don’t worry you,
it’s your wife, wi’ her airs an’ graces.
I think of all the little brutes
as ever was invented
that little cod’s the holy worst.
I’ve chucked him, I’ve repented.
The Young and Their Moral Guardians
O — the stale old dogs who pretend to guard
the morals of the masses,
how smelly they make the great back-yard,
wetting after everyone that passes.
If a man goes by who doesn’t give
a damn for their dirty kennels,
how they rush out and want to rive
him to pieces, the good-hearted spaniels!
And the young, the modem and jaunty young,
how scared they all are, even now
of the yellow dogs, how they slink away
in silence from the great bow-wow!
When a low bull-mongrel starts declaiming,
there’s not a young man in the whole
of England with the guts to turn round on him, aiming
a good kick at his dirty old hole.
When I Read Shakespeare
When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder
that such trivial people should muse and thunder
in such lovely language.
Lear, the old buffer, you wonder his daughters
didn’t treat him rougher,
the old chough, the old chuffer!
And Hamlet, how boring, how boring to live with,
so mean and self-conscious, blowing and snoring
his wonderful speeches, full of other folk’s whoring!
And Macbeth and his Lady, who should have been choring,
such suburban ambition, so messily goring
old Duncan with daggers!
How boring, how small Shakespeare’s people are!
Yet the language so lovely! like the dyes from gas-tar.
Salt of the Earth
Slowly the salt of the earth becomes salt of the sea.
Slowly the raindrops of appreciation
carry the salt of the earth, the wisdom of wise men, the gifts of
the great
down to the ocean of the afterwards, where it remains as brine
in which to pickle the younger generations
who would be so much better without pickling.
Slowly the salt of the earth becomes salt of the sea.
Fresh Water
They say it is very difficult
to distil sea-water into sweet.
Perhaps that’s why it is so difficult
to get a refreshing drink out of old wisdom,
old truth, old teaching of any sort.
Peace and War
People always make war when they say they love peace.
The loud love of peace makes one quiver more than any battle cry.
Why should one love peace? it is so obviously vile to make war.
Loud peace propaganda makes war seem imminent.
It is a form of war, even, self-assertion and being wise for other
people.
Let people be wise for themselves. And anyhow
nobody can be wise except on rare occasions, like getting married
or dying.
It’s bad taste to be wise all the time, like being at a perpetual funeral.
For everyday use, give me somebody whimsical, with not too much
purpose in life,
then we shan’t have war, and we needn’t talk about peace.
Many Mansions
When a bird flips his tail in getting his balance on a tree
he feels much gayer than if somebody had left him a fortune
or than if he’d just built himself a nest with a bathroom —
Why can’t people be gay like that?
Glory
Glory is of the sun, too, and the sun of suns,
and down the shafts of his splendid pinions
run tiny rivers of peace.
Most of his time, the tiger pads and slouches in a burning peace.
And the small hawk high up turns round on the slow pivot of peace.
Peace comes from behind the sun, with the peregrine falcon, and
the owl.
Yet all these drink blood.
Woe
Woe, woe to the world!
For we’re all self-consciously aware of ourselves
yet not sufficiently conscious to be able to forget ourselves
and be whimsically at home in ourselves.
So everybody makes an assertion of himself,
and every self-assertion clashes on every other.
Attila
I would call Attila, on his little horse
a man of peace.
For after all, he helped to smash a lot of old Roman lies,
the lies, the treachery, the slippery cultured squalor of that
sneaking court of Ravenna.
And after all, lying and base hypocrisy and treachery
are much more hellishly peaceless than a little straightforward
bloodshed
which may occasionally be a preliminary to the peace that
passes understanding.
So that I would call Attila, on his little horse
a man of peace.
What Would You Fight For?
I am not sure I would always fight for my life.
Life might not be worth fighting for.
I am not sure I would always fight for my wife.
A wife isn’t always worth fighting for.
Nor my children, nor my country, nor my fellow men.
It all depends whether I found them worth fighting for.
The only thing men invariably fight for
is their money. But I doubt if I’d fight for mine, anyhow, not to
shed a lot of blood over it.
Yet one thing I do fight for, tooth and nail, all the time.
And that is my bit of inward peace, where I am at one with myself.
And I must say, I am often worsted.
Choice
I would rather sit still in a state of peace on a stone
than ride in the motor-car of a multi-millionaire
and feel the peacelessness of the multi-millionaire
poisoning me.
Riches
When I wish I was rich, then I know I am ill.
Because, to tell the truth, I have enough as I am.
So when I catch myself thinking: Ah, if I was rich!
I say to myself: Hello! I’m not well. My vitality is low.
Poverty
The only people I ever heard talk about My Lady Poverty
were rich people, or people who imagined themselves rich.
St Francis himself was a rich and spoiled young man.
Being bom among the working people
I know that poverty is a hard old hag,
and a monster, when you’re pinched for actual necessities.
And whoever says she isn’t, is a liar.
I don’t want to be poor, it means I am pinched.
But neither do I want to be rich.
When I look at this pine tree near the sea,
that grows out of rock, and plumes forth, plumes forth,
I see it has a natural abundance.
With its roots it has a grand grip on its daily bread,
and its plumes look like green cups he
ld up to sun and air
and full of wine.
I want to be like that, to have a natural abundance
and plume forth, and be splendid.
Noble
I know I am noble with the nobility of the sun.
A certain peace, a certain grace.
I would say the same if I were a chaffinch or a tree.
Wealth
Peace I have from the core of the atom, from the core of space,
and grace, if I don’t lose it, from the same place.
And I look shabby, yet my roots go beyond my knowing,
deep beyond the world of man.
And where my little leaves flutter highest
there are no people, nor ever will be.
Yet my roots are in a woman too.
And my leaves are green with the breath of human experience.
Tolerance
One can be tolerant with a bore
and suffer fools, though not gladly
— why should a man pretend to be glad about his sufferings?
But it is hard to be tolerant with the smarties,
or to put up with the clever mess-makers,
or to endure the jazzy person;
one can’t stand peaceless people any more.
Compari
I would like a few men to be at peace with.
Not friends, necessarily, they talk so much.
Nor yet comrades, for I don’t belong to any cause.
Nor yet ‘brothers’, it’s so conceited.
Nor pals, they’re such a nuisance.
But men to be at peace with.
Sick
I am sick, because I have given myself away.
I have given myself to the people when they came
so cultured, even bringing little gifts,
so they pecked a shred of my life, and flew off with a croak
of sneaking exultance.
So now I have lost too much, and am sick.
I am trying now to learn never
to give of my life to the dead,
never, not the tiniest shred.
Dead People
When people are dead and peaceless
they hate life, they only like carrion.
When people are dead and peaceless
they hate happiness in others
with thin, screaming hatred,
as the vulture that screams high up, almost inaudible,
hovering to peck out the eyes of the still-living creature.
Cerebral Emotions
I am sick of people’s cerebral emotions
that are bom in their minds and forced down by the will
on to their poor, deranged bodies.
People feeling things they intend to feel, they mean to feel,
they will feel,
just because they don’t feel them.
For, of course, if you really feel something
you don’t have to assert that you feel it.
Wellsian Futures
When men are made in bottles
and emerge as squeaky globules with no bodies to speak of,
and therefore nothing to have feelings with,
they will still squeak intensely about their feelings
and be prepared to kill you if you say they’ve got none.
To Women, as Far as I’m Concerned
The feelings I don’t have I don’t have.
The feelings I don’t have I won’t say I have.
The feelings you say you have, you don’t have.
The feelings you would like us both to have, we neither of
us have.
The feelings people ought to have, they never have.
If people say they’ve got feelings, you may be pretty sure they
haven’t got them.
So if you want either of us to feel anything at all
you’d better abandon all idea of feelings altogether.
Blank
At present I am a blank, and I admit it.
In feeling I am just a blank.
My mind is fairly nimble, and is not blank.
My body likes its dinner and the warm sun, but otherwise is blank.
My soul is almost blank, my spirits quite.
I have a certain amount of money, so my anxieties are blank.
And I can’t do anything about it, even there I am blank.
So I am just going to go on being a blank, till something nudges
me from within,
and makes me know I am not blank any longer.
Elderly Discontented Women
Elderly discontented women ask for intimate companionship,
by which they mean more talk, talk, talk
especially about themselves and their own feelings.
Elderly discontented women are so full of themselves
they have high blood pressure and almost burst.
It is as if modem women had all got themselves on the brain
and that sent the blood rushing to the surface of the body
and driving them around in frenzied energy
stampeding over everybody,
while their hearts become absolutely empty,
and their voices are like screwdrivers
as they try to screw everybody else down with their will.
Old People
Nowadays everybody wants to be young,
so much so, that even the young are old with the effort of being
young.
As for those over fifty, either they rush forward in self-assertion
fearful to behold,
or they bear everybody a grim and grisly grudge
because of their own fifty or sixty or seventy or eighty summers.
As if it’s my fault that the old girl is seventy-seven!
The Grudge of the Old
The old ones want to be young, and they aren’t young,
and it rankles, they ache when they see the young,
and they can’t help wanting to spite it on them venomously.
The old ones say to themselves: We are not going to be old,
we are not going to make way, we are not going to die,
we are going to stay on and on and on and on
and make the young look after us
till they are old. We are stronger than the young.
We have more energy, and our grip on life is harder.
Let us triumph, and let the young be listless
with their puny youth.
We are younger even now than the young, we can put their youth
in the shade.
And it is true.
And they do it.
And so it goes on.
Beautiful Old Age
It ought to be lovely to be old
to be full of the peace that comes of experience
and wrinkled ripe fulfilment.
The wrinkled smile of completeness that follows a life
lived undaunted and unsoured with accepted lies.
If people lived without accepting lies
they would ripen like apples, and be scented like pippins
in their old age.
Soothing, old people should be, like apples
when one is tired of love.
Fragrant like yellowing leaves, and dim with the soft
stillness and satisfaction of autumn.
And a girl should say:
It must be wonderful to live and grow old.
Look at my mother, how rich and still she is!
And a young man should think: By Jove,
my father has faced all weathers, but it’s been a life!
Courage
What makes people unsatisfied
is that they accept lies.
If people had courage, and refused lies
and found out what they really felt and really meant
and acted on it,
they would distil the essential oil out of every experience
and like hazel nuts in autumn, at last
be sweet and sound.
And the young among the old
would be as in the hazel woods of September
nutting, gathering nuts of ripe experience.
As it is, all that the old can offer
is sour, bitter fruit, cankered by lies.
Desire is Dead
Desire may be dead
and still a man can be
a meeting place for sun and rain,
wonder outwaiting pain
as in a wintry tree.
When the Ripe Fruit Falls
When the ripe fruit falls
its sweetness distils and trickles away into the veins of the earth.
When fulfilled people die
the essential oil of their experience enters
the veins of living space, and adds a glisten
to the atom, to the body of immortal chaos.
For space is alive
and it stirs like a swan
whose feathers glisten
silky with oil of distilled experience.
Elemental
Why don’t people leave off being lovable
or thinking they are lovable, or wanting to be lovable,
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 855