and be a bit elemental instead?
Since man is made up of the elements
fire, and rain, and air, and live loam
and none of these is lovable
but elemental,
man is lop-sided on the side of the angels.
I wish men would get back their balance among the elements
and be a bit more fiery, as incapable of telling lies
as fire is.
I wish they’d be true to their own variation, as water is,
which goes through all the stages of steam and stream and ice
without losing its head.
I am sick of lovable people,
somehow they are a lie.
Fire
Fire is dearer to us than love or food,
hot, hurrying, yet it bums if you touch it.
What we ought to do
is not to add our love together, or our goodwill, or any of that,
for we’re sure to bring in a lot of lies,
but our fire, our elemental fire
so that it rushes up in a huge blaze like a phallus into hollow space
and fecundates the zenith and the nadir
and sends off millions of sparks of new atoms
and singes us, and bums the house down.
I Wish I Knew a Woman
I wish I knew a woman
who was like a red fire on the hearth
glowing after the day’s restless draughts.
So that one could draw near her
in the red stillness of the dusk
and really take delight in her
without having to make the polite effort of loving her
or the mental effort of making her acquaintance.
Without having to take a chill, talking to her.
Talk
I wish people, when you sit near them
wouldn’t think it necessary to make conversation
and send thin draughts of words
blowing down your neck and your ears
and giving you a cold in your inside.
The Effort of Love
I am worn out
with the effort of trying to love people
and not succeeding.
Now I’ve made up my mind
I love nobody, I am going to love nobody,
I’m not going to tell any lies about it
and it’s final.
If there’s a man here and there, or a woman
whom I can really like,
that’s quite enough for me.
And if by a miracle a woman happened to come along
who wanned the cockles of my heart
I’d rejoice over the woman and the wanned cockles of my heart
so long as it didn’t all fizzle out in talk.
Can’t he Borne
Any woman who says to me
— Do you really love me? —
earns my undying detestation.
Man Reaches a Point
I cannot help but be alone
for desire has died in me, silence has grown,
and nothing now reaches out to draw
other flesh to my own.
Grasshopper is a Burden
Desire has failed, desire has failed
and the critical grasshopper
has come down on the hearth in a burden of locusts
and stripped it bare.
Bas ta!
When a man can love no more
and feel no more
and desire has failed
and the heart is numb,
then all he can do
is to say: It is so!
I’ve got to put up with it
and wait.
This is a pause, how long a pause I know not,
in my very being.
Tragedy
Tragedy seems to me a loud noise
louder than is seemly.
Tragedy looks to me like man
in love with his own defeat.
Which is only a sloppy way of being in love with yourself.
I can’t very much care about the woes and tragedies
of Lear and Macbeth and Hamlet and Timon:
they cared so excessively themselves.
And when I think of the great tragedy of our material-mechanical
civilisation
crushing out the natural human life
then sometimes I feel defeated; and then again I know
my shabby little defeat would do neither me any good
nor anybody else.
After All the Tragedies are Over
After all the tragedies are over and worn out
and a man can no longer feel heroic about being a Hamlet —
When love is gone, and desire is dead, and tragedy has left the heart
then grief and pain go too, withdrawing
from the heart and leaving strange cold stretches of sand.
So a man no longer knows his own heart;
he might say into the twilight: What is it?
I am here, yet my heart is bare and utterly empty.
I have passed from existence, I feel nothing any more.
I am a nonentity.
Yet, when the time has come to be nothing, how good it is to be nothing!
a waste expanse of nothing, like wide foreshores where not a
ripple is left
and the sea is lost
in the lapse of the lowest of tides.
Ah, when I have seen myself left by life, left nothing!
Yet even waste, grey foreshores, sand, and sorry, far-out clay
are sea-bed still, through their hour of bare denuding.
It is the moon that turns the tides.
The beaches can do nothing about it.
Nullus
I know I am nothing.
Life has gone away, below my low-water mark.
I am aware I feel nothing, even at dawn.
The dawn comes up with a glitter and a blueness, and I say: How
lovely!
But I am a liar, I feel no loveliness, it is a mental remark, a cliché.
My whole consciousness is cliché
and I am null;
I exist as an organism
and a nullus.
But I can do nothing about it
except admit it and leave it to the moon.
There are said to be creative pauses,
pauses that are almost death, empty and dead as death, almost.
And in these awful pauses the evolutionary change takes place.
Perhaps it is so.
The tragedy is over, it has ceased to be tragic, the last pause is
upon us.
Pause, brethren, pause!
Dies Irae
Even the old emotions are finished,
we have worn them out.
And desire is dead.
And the end of all things is inside us.
Our epoch is over,
a cycle of evolution is finished,
our activity has lost its meaning,
we are ghosts, we are seed;
for our Word is dead
and we know not how to live wordless.
We live in a vast house
full of inordinate activities,
and the noise, and the stench, and the dreariness and lack of meaning
madden us, but we don’t know what to do.
All we can know, at this moment
is the fulfilment of nothingness.
Lo, I am nothing!
It is a consummation devoutly to be wished
in this world of mechanical self-assertion.
Dies Illa
Dies irae, dies illa
solvet saeclum in favilla —
Day of wrath, O day of warning!
Flame devours the world.
It does, even if we don’t see it.
For there are all sorts of flames:
slow, creeping cold ones
that bum inwardly
l
ike flickering cancers.
And the slow cold flames
may bum for long years
before they’ve eaten through the joists and the girders
and the house comes down, with a subsiding crash.
Stop It
The one thing the old will never understand
is that you can’t prevent change.
All flows, and even the old are rapidly flowing away.
And the young are flowing in the throes of a great alteration.
The Death of Our Era
Our era is dying
yet who has killed it?
Have we, who are it?
In the middle of voluted space
its knell has struck.
And in the middle of every atom, which is the same thing,
a tiny bell of conclusion has sounded.
The curfew of our great day
the passing-bell of our way of knowing
the knell of our bald-headed consciousness
the tocsin of this our civilisation.
Who struck the bell?
Who rang the knell?
Not I, not you,
yet all of us.
At the core of space the final knell
Of our era has struck, and it chimes
in terrible rippling circles between the stars
till it reaches us, and its vibrations shatter us
each time they touch us.
And they keep on coming, with greater force
striking us, the vibrations of our finish.
And all that we can do
is to die the amazing death
with every stroke, and go on
till we are blank.
And yet, as we die, why should not our vast mechanised day die with us
so that when we are reborn, we can be bom into a fresh world?
For the new word is Resurrection.
The New Word
Shall I tell you again the new word
the new word of the unborn day?
It is Resurrection.
The resurrection of the flesh.
For our flesh is dead
only egoistically we assert ourselves.
And the new word means nothing to us,
it is such an old word,
till we admit how dead we are,
till we actually feel as blank as we really are.
Sun in Me
A sun will rise in me
I shall slowly resurrect
already the whiteness of false dawn is on my inner ocean.
A sun in me.
And a sun in heaven.
And beyond that, the immense sun behind the sun,
the sun of immense distances, that fold themselves together
within the genitals of living space.
And further, the sun within the atom
which is god in the atom.
Be Still!
The only thing to be done now,
now that the waves of our undoing have begun to strike on us,
is to contain ourselves.
To keep still, and let the wreckage of ourselves go,
let everything go, as the wave smashes us,
yet keep still, and hold
the tiny grain of something that no wave can wash away,
not even the most massive wave of destiny.
Among all the smashed debris of myself
keep quiet, and wait.
For the word is Resurrection.
And even the sea of seas will have to give up its dead.
At Last
When things get very bad, they pass beyond tragedy.
And then the only thing we can do is to keep quite still
and guard the last treasure of the soul, our sanity.
Since, poor individuals that we are,
if we lose our sanity
we lose that which keeps us individual
distinct from chaos.
In death, the atom takes us up
and the suns.
But if we lose our sanity
nothing and nobody in the whole vast realm of space
wants us, or can have anything to do with us.
We can but howl the lugubrious howl of idiots,
the howl of the utterly lost
howling their nowhereness.
Nemesis
The nemesis that awaits our civilisation
is social insanity
which in the end is always homicidal.
Sanity means the wholeness of the consciousness.
And our society is only part conscious, like an idiot.
If we do not rapidly open all the doors of consciousness
and freshen the putrid little space in which we are cribbed
the sky-blue walls of our unventilated heaven
will be bright red with blood.
The Optimist
The optimist builds himself safe inside a cell
and paints the inside walls sky-blue
and blocks up the door
and says he’s in heaven.
The Third Thing
Water is H20, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one,
but there is also a third thing, that makes it water
and nobody knows what that is.
The atom locks up two energies
but it is a third thing present which makes it an atom.
The Sane Universe
One might talk of the sanity of the atom
the sanity of space
the sanity of the electron
the sanity of water —
For it is all alive
and has something comparable to that which we call sanity in
ourselves.
The only oneness is the oneness of sanity.
Fear of Society is the Root of All Evil
Today, the social consciousness is mutilated
so everything is insane;
success is insane, and failure is insane,
chastity is insane, and debauchery is insane,
money is insane, and poverty is insane.
A fearful thing is the mutilated social consciousness.
God
Where sanity is
there God is.
And the sane can still recognise sanity
so they can still recognise God.
Sane and Insane
The puritan is insane
and the profligate is insane
and they divide the world.
The wealthy are insane
and the poverty-stricken are insane
and the world is going to pieces between them.
The puritan is afraid
and the profligate is afraid.
The wealthy are afraid
and the poverty-stricken are afraid.
They are afraid with horrible and opposing fears
which threaten to tear the world in two, between them.
A Sane Revolution
If you make a revolution, make it for fun,
don’t make it in ghastly seriousness,
don’t do it in deadly earnest,
do it for fun.
Don’t do it because you hate people
do it just to spit in their eye.
Don’t do it for the money,
do it and be damned to the money.
Don’t do it for equality,
do it because we’ve got too much equality
and it would be fun to upset the apple-cart
and see which way the apples would go a-rolling.
Don’t do it, anyhow, for international Labour.
Do it so that we can all of us be little aristocracies on our own
and kick our heels like jolly escaped asses.
Don’t do it, anyhow, for international Labour.
Labour is the one thing a man has too much of.
Let’s abolish Labour, let’s have done with labouring!
Work can be fun, and men can enjoy it; then it’s not labour.
Let’s have it so! Le
t’s make a revolution for fun!
Always This Paying
Nothing is really any fun today,
because you’ve always got to pay for everything.
And whatever costs you money, money, money, is really no fun.
That’s why women aren’t much fun. You’re always having to pay
for them.
Or else, poor things, they’re having to pay for themselves,
which is perhaps worse.
Why isn’t anything free, why is it always pay, pay, pay?
A man can’t get any fun out of wife, sweetheart or tart
because of the beastly expense.
Why don’t we do something about the money system?
Poor Young Things
The young today are bom prisoners,
poor things, and they know it.
Bom in a universal workhouse,
and they feel it.
Inheriting a sort of confinement
work, and prisoners’ routine
and prisoners’ flat, ineffectual pastime.
A Played-Out Game
Success is a played-out game, success, success!
because what have you got when you’ve got it?
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 856