And the accumulated splashing of a gong
where tissue plunges into bronze with wide wild circles of sound
and leaves off,
belongs to the bamboo thicket, and the drake in the air flying past.
And the sound of a blast through the sea-curved core of a shell
when a black priest blows on a conch,
and the dawn cry from a minaret, God is great,
and the calling of the old Red Indian high on the pueblo roof
whose voice flies on, calling like a swan
singing between the sun and the marsh,
on and on, like a dark-faced bird singing alone
singing to the men below, the fellow-tribesmen
who go by without pausing, soft-foot, without listening, yet
they hear:
there are other ways of summons, crying: Listen! Listen!
Come near!
THE TRIUMPH OF THE MACHINE
THEY talk of the triumph of the machine,
but the machine will never triumph.
Out of the thousands and thousands of centuries of man
the unrolling of ferns, white tongues of the acanthus lapping
at the sun,
for one sad century
machines have triumphed, rolled us hither and thither,
shaking the lark’s nest till the eggs have broken.
Shaken the marshes till the geese have gone
and the wild swans flown away singing the swan-song of us.
Hard, hard on the earth the machines are rolling,
but through some hearts they will never roll.
The lark nests in his heart
and the white swan swims in the marshes of his loins,
and through the wide prairies of his breast a young bull herds
the cows,
lambs frisk among the daisies of his brain.
And at last
all these creatures that cannot die, driven back
into the uttermost corners of the soul
will send up the wild cry of despair.
The trilling lark in a wild despair will trill down from the sky,
the swan will beat the waters in rage, white rage of an enraged swan,
even the lambs will stretch forth their necks like serpents,
like snakes of hate, against the man in the machine:
even the shaking white poplar will dazzle like splinters of glass
against him.
And against this inward revolt of the native creatures of the soul
mechanical man, in triumph seated upon the seat of his machine
will be powerless, for no engine can reach into the marshes
and depths of a man.
So mechanical man in triumph seated upon the seat of his machine
will be driven mad from himself, and sightless, and on that day
the machines will turn to run into one another
traffic will tangle up in a long-drawn-out crash of collision
and engines will rush at the solid houses, the edifice of our life
will rock in the shock of the mad machine, and the house will
come down.
Then, far beyond the ruin, in the far, in the ultimate, remote places
the swan will lift up again his flattened, smitten head
and look round, and rise, and on the great vaults of his wings
will sweep round and up to greet the sun with a silky glitter
of a new day
and the lark will follow trilling, angerless again,
and the lambs will bite off the heads of the daisies for friskiness.
But over the middle of the earth will be the smoky ruin of iron
the triumph of the machine.
FORTE DEI MARMI
THE evening sulks along the shore, the reddening sun
reddens still more on the blatant bodies of these all-but-naked,
sea-bathing city people.
Let me tell you that the sun is alive, and can be angry,
and the sea is alive, and can sulk,
and the air is alive, and can deny us as a woman can.
But the blatant bathers don’t know, they know nothing;
the vibration of the motor-car has bruised their insensitive bottoms
into rubber-like deadness, Dunlop inflated unconcern.
SEA-BATHERS
OH the handsome bluey-brown bodies, they might just as well
be gutta percha,
and the reddened limbs red indiarubber tubing, inflated,
and the half-hidden private parts just a little brass tap, rubinetto,
turned on for different purposes.
They call it health, it looks like nullity.
Only here and there a pair of eyes, haunted, looks out as if asking:
where then is life?
TALK OF LOYALTY
I HAVE noticed that people who talk a lot about loyalty
are always themselves by nature disloyal
and they fear the come-back.
TALK OF FAITH
AND people who talk about faith
usually want to force somebody to agree with them,
as if there was safety in numbers, even for faith.
AMO SACRUM VULGUS
OH I am of the people!
the people, the people!
Oh I am of the people
and proud of my descent.
And the people always love me,
they love me, they love me,
the people always love me,
in spite of my ascent.
You must admit I’ve risen
I’ve risen, I’ve risen,
you must admit I’ve risen
above the common run.
The middle classes hate it,
they hate it, they hate it
the middle classes hate it
and want to put me down.
But the people always love me
they love me, they love me,
the people always love me
because I’ve risen clean.
Therefore I know the people
the people, the people
are still in bud, and eager
to flower free of fear.
And so I sing a democracy
a democracy, a democracy
that puts forth its own aristocracy
like bearded wheat in ear.
Oh golden fields of people
of people, of people,
oh golden field of people
all moving into flowers.
No longer at the mercy
the mercy, the mercy
of middle-class mowing-machines, and
the middle-class money power.
BOREDOM, ENNUI, DEPRESSION
AND boredom, ennui, depression
are long slow vibrations of pain
that possess the whole body
and cannot be localised.
THE DEADLY VICTORIAN
WE hate the Victorians so much
because we are the third and fourth generation
expiating their sins
in the excruciating torment of hopelessness, helplessness, listlessness,
because they were such base and sordid optimists
successfully castrating the body politic,
and we are the gelded third and fourth generation.
WHAT ARE THE WILD WAVES SAYING?
WHAT are the wild waves saying
sister the whole day long?
It seems to me they are saying:
How disgusting, how infinitely sordid this humanity is
that dabbles its body in me
and daubs the sand with its flesh
in myriads, under the hot and hostile sun!
and so drearily “ enjoys itself! “
What are the wild waves saying.
WELCOME DEATH
How welcome death would be
if first a man could have his full revenge
&nb
sp; on our castrated society.
DARK SATANIC MILLS
THE dark, satanic mills of Blake
how much darker and more satanic they are now!
But oh, the streams that stream white-faced, in and out
in and out when the hooter hoots, white-faced, with a dreadful gush
of multitudinous ignominy,
what shall we think of these?
They are millions to my one!
They are millions to my one! But oh
what have they done to you, white-faced millions
mewed and mangled in the mills of man?
What have they done to you, what have they done to you,
what is this awful aspect of man?
Oh Jesus, didn’t you see, when you talked of service
this would be the result!
When you said: Retro me, Satanas!
this is what you gave him leave to do
behind your back!
And now, the iron has entered into the soul
and the machine has entangled the brain, and got it fast,
and steel has twisted the loins of man, electricity has exploded
the heart
and out of the lips of people just strange mechanical noises in
place of speech.
What is man, that thou art no longer mindful of him!
and the son of man, that thou pitiest him not?
Are these no longer men, these millions, millions?
What are they then?
WE DIE TOGETHER
OH, when I think of the industrial millions, when I see some
of them,
a weight comes over me heavier than leaden linings of coffins
and I almost cease to exist, weighed down to extinction
and sunk into depression that almost blots me out.
Then I say to myself: Am I also dead? is that the truth?
Then I know
that with so many dead men in mills
I too am almost dead.
I know the unliving factory-hand, living-dead millions
is unliving me, living-dead me,
I, with them, am living dead, mechanical enslaved at the machine.
And enshrouded in the vast corpse of the industrial millions
embedded in them, I look out on the sunshine of the South.
And though the pomegranate has red flowers outside the window
and oleander is hot with perfume under the afternoon sun
and I am “ II Signore “ and they love me here,
yet I am a mill-hand in Leeds
and the death of the Black Country is upon me
and I am wrapped in the lead of a coffin-lining, the living death
of my fellow-men.
WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO YOU?
WHAT have they done to you, men of the masses, creeping
back and forth to work?
What have they done to you, the saviours of the people, oh
what have they saved you from, while they pocketed the money?
Alas, they have saved you from yourself, from your own frail dangers
and devoured you with the machine, the vast maw of iron.
They saved you from squalid cottages and poverty of hand to mouth
and embedded you in the workmen’s dwellings, where your
wage is the dole of work, and the dole is your wage of nullity.
They took away, oh they took away your man’s native instincts
and intuitions
and gave a board-school education, newspapers, and cinema.
They stole your body from you, and left you an animated carcass
to work with, and nothing else:
unless goggling eyes, to goggle at the film
and a board-school brain, stuffed up with the ha’penny press.
Your instincts gone, your intuition gone, your passion dead
Oh carcass with a board-school mind and a ha’penny newspaper intelligence,
what have they done to you, what have they done to you,
oh what have they done to you?
Oh look at my fellow-men, oh look at them
the masses! Oh, what has been done to them?
WHAT IS A MAN TO DO?
OH, when the world is hopeless
what is a man to do?
When the vast masses of men have been caught by the machine
into the industrial dance of the living death, the jigging of
wage-paid work,
and fed on condition they dance this dance of corpses driven
by steam.
When year by year, year in, year out, in millions, in increasing millions
they dance, dance, dance this dry industrial jig of the corpses
entangled in iron
and there’s no escape, for the iron goes through their genitals,
brains, and souls
then what is a single man to do?
For mankind is a single corpus, we are all one flesh
even with the industrial masses, and the greedy middle mass.
Is it hopeless, hopeless, hopeless?
has the iron got them fast?
are their hearts the hub of the wheel?
the millions, millions of my fellow-men!
Then must a single man die with them, in the clutch of iron?
Or must he try to amputate himself from the iron-entangled
body of mankind
and risk bleeding to death, but perhaps escape into some
unpopular place
and leave the fearful Laocoon of his fellow-man entangled in iron
to its fearful fate.
CITY-LIFE
WHEN I am in a great city, I know that I despair.
I know there is no hope for us, death waits, it is useless to care.
For oh the poor people, that are flesh of my flesh,
I, that am flesh of their flesh,
when I see the iron hooked into their faces
their poor, their fearful faces
I scream in my soul, for I know I cannot
take the iron hook out of their faces, that makes them so drawn,
nor cut the invisible wires of steel that pull them
back and forth, to work,
back and forth to work,
like fearful and corpse-like fishes hooked and being played
by some malignant fisherman on an unseen shore
where he does not choose to land them yet, hooked fishes of
the factory world.
THIRTEEN PICTURES
O MY Thirteen pictures are in prison!
0 O somebody bail them out!
1 I don’t know what they’ve done poor things, but justice has arisen
in the shape of half-a-dozen stout
policemen and arrested them, and hauled them off to gaol.
O my Boccaccio, O how goes your pretty tale
locked up in a dungeon cell
with Eve and the Amazon, the Lizard and the frail
Renascence, all sent to hell
at the whim of six policemen and a magistrate whose stale
sensibilities hate everything that’s well.
AUTO-DA-FE
HELP! Help! they want to burn my pictures,
they want to make an auto-da-fe!
They want to make an act of faith, and burn my pretty pictures.
They’ve seized and carried them away!
Help! Help! I am calling in English
is the language dead and empty of reply!
The Unholy Inquisition has arrested all my pictures,
a magistrate, and six fat smaller fry.
Six fat smaller bobbies are the inquisitors minor
who’ve decided that Boccaccio must burn.
But the Grand Inquisitor is a stale magistrate
in Marlborough Road, and it is now his turn.
Oh he has put his pince-nez on, and stoutly has stepped down
to the police-station cell
wh
ere my darling pictures, prisoners, await his deadly frown
and his grand-inquisitorial knell.
Oh he knows all about it, he casts a yellow eye
on the gardener whose shirt’s blown back:
Burn that! — he sees Eve running from the likes of him: I
order you, destroy the whole vile pack. —
All my pretty pictures huddled in the dark awaiting
their doom at the hands of Mr Meade.
But the day they burn my pictures they burn the rose of
England
and fertilise the weeds on every mead.
Help! Oh help! they want to burn my pictures
we’ve got the Inquisition back
with a set of cankered magistrates and busy-busy bobbies.
Look out, my lad, you’ve got ‘em on your track.
SHOWS
TO-DAY, if a man does something pretentious and deliberate
let him show it to the crowd, probably they will applaud
and anyhow they can’t do any hurt.
But if he produces something beautiful, with the frail beauty
of life
let him hide it away, so it can go on blossoming.
If he show it, the eyes and the breath of the crowd
will defile it, and spoil its beauty.
Even the very flowers, in the shops or parks
are deflowered by being looked at by so many unclean eyes.
ROSE AND CABBAGE
AND still I look for the man who will dare to be
roses of England
wild roses of England
men who are wild roses of England
with metal thorns, beware!
but still more brave and still more rare
the courage of rosiness in a cabbage world
fragrance of roses in a stale stink of lies
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 868