The Project Gutenberg eBook, Look! We Have Come Through!, by D. H. Lawrence

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Title: Look! We Have Come Through!

Author: D. H. Lawrence

Release Date: November 7, 2007 [eBook #23394]

Language: English

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LOOK! WE HAVE COME THROUGH!***

E-text prepared by Lewis Jones

LOOK! WE HAVE COME THROUGH!

by

D. H. LAWRENCE

Published by Chatto & Windus
London MCMXVII

Some of these poems have appeared in the "English Review" and in "Poetry," also in the "Georgian Anthology" and the "Imagist Anthology"

FOREWORD

THESE poems should not be considered separately, as so many single pieces. They are intended as an essential story, or history, or confession, unfolding one from the other in organic development, the whole revealing the intrinsic experience of a man during the crisis of manhood, when he marries and comes into himself. The period covered is, roughly, the sixth lustre of a man's life

CONTENTS

MOONRISE ELEGY NONENTITY MARTYR A LA MODE DON JUAN THE SEA HYMN TO PRIAPUS BALLAD OF A WILFUL WOMAN FIRST MORNING "AND OH— THAT THE MAN I AM MIGHT CEASE TO BE—" SHE LOOKS BACK ON THE BALCONY FROHNLEICHNAM IN THE DARK MUTILATION HUMILIATION A YOUNG WIFE GREEN RIVER ROSES GLOIRE DE DIJON ROSES ON THE BREAKFAST TABLE I AM LIKE A ROSE ROSE OF ALL THE WORLD A YOUTH MOWING QUITE FORSAKEN FORSAKEN AND FORLORN FIREFLIES IN THE CORN A DOE AT EVENING SONG OF A MAN WHO IS NOT LOVED SINNERS MISERY SUNDAY AFTERNOON IN ITALY WINTER DAWN A BAD BEGINNING WHY DOES SHE WEEP? GIORNO DEI MORTI ALL SOULS LADY WIFE BOTH SIDES OF THE MEDAL LOGGERHEADS DECEMBER NIGHT NEW YEAR'S EVE NEW YEAR'S NIGHT VALENTINE'S NIGHT BIRTH NIGHT RABBIT SNARED IN THE NIGHT PARADISE RE-ENTERED SPRING MORNING WEDLOCK HISTORY SONG OF A MAN WHO HAS COME THROUGH ONE WOMAN TO ALL WOMEN PEOPLE STREET LAMPS "SHE SAID AS WELL TO ME" NEW HEAVEN AND EARTH ELYSIUM MANIFESTO AUTUMN RAIN FROST FLOWERS CRAVING FOR SPRING

ARGUMENT

After much struggling and loss in love and in the world of man, the protagonist throws in his lot with a woman who is already married. Together they go into another country, she perforce leaving her children behind. The conflict of love and hate goes on between the man and the woman, and between these two and the world around them, till it reaches some sort of conclusion, they transcend into some condition of blessedness

MOONRISE

AND who has seen the moon, who has not seen
Her rise from out the chamber of the deep,
Flushed and grand and naked, as from the chamber
Of finished bridegroom, seen her rise and throw
Confession of delight upon the wave,
Littering the waves with her own superscription
Of bliss, till all her lambent beauty shakes towards
    us
Spread out and known at last, and we are sure
That beauty is a thing beyond the grave,
That perfect, bright experience never falls
To nothingness, and time will dim the moon
Sooner than our full consummation here
In this odd life will tarnish or pass away.

ELEGY

THE sun immense and rosy
Must have sunk and become extinct
The night you closed your eyes for ever against me.

Grey days, and wan, dree dawnings
Since then, with fritter of flowers—
Day wearies me with its ostentation and fawnings.

Still, you left me the nights,
The great dark glittery window,
The bubble hemming this empty existence with
   lights.

Still in the vast hollow
Like a breath in a bubble spinning
Brushing the stars, goes my soul, that skims the
   bounds like a swallow!

I can look through
The film of the bubble night, to where you are.
Through the film I can almost touch you.

EASTWOOD

NONENTITY

THE stars that open and shut
Fall on my shallow breast
Like stars on a pool.

The soft wind, blowing cool
Laps little crest after crest
Of ripples across my breast.

And dark grass under my feet
Seems to dabble in me
Like grass in a brook.

Oh, and it is sweet
To be all these things, not to be
Any more myself.

For look,
I am weary of myself!

MARTYR À LA MODE

AH God, life, law, so many names you keep,
You great, you patient Effort, and you Sleep
That does inform this various dream of living,
You sleep stretched out for ever, ever giving
Us out as dreams, you august Sleep
Coursed round by rhythmic movement of all
   time,

The constellations, your great heart, the sun
Fierily pulsing, unable to refrain;
Since you, vast, outstretched, wordless Sleep
Permit of no beyond, ah you, whose dreams
We are, and body of sleep, let it never be said
I quailed at my appointed function, turned poltroon

For when at night, from out the full surcharge
Of a day's experience, sleep does slowly draw
The harvest, the spent action to itself;
Leaves me unburdened to begin again;
At night, I say, when I am gone in sleep,
Does my slow heart rebel, do my dead hands
Complain of what the day has had them do?

Never let it be said I was poltroon
At this my task of living, this my dream,
This me which rises from the dark of sleep
In white flesh robed to drape another dream,
As lightning comes all white and trembling
From out the cloud of sleep, looks round about
One moment, sees, and swift its dream is over,
In one rich drip it sinks to another sleep,
And sleep thereby is one more dream enrichened.

If so the Vast, the God, the Sleep that still grows
     richer
Have said that I, this mote in the body of sleep
Must in my transiency pass all through pain,
Must be a dream of grief, must like a crude
Dull meteorite flash only into light
When tearing through the anguish of this life,
Still in full flight extinct, shall I then turn
Poltroon, and beg the silent, outspread God
To alter my one speck of doom, when round me
     burns
The whole great conflagration of all life,
Lapped like a body close upon a sleep,
Hiding and covering in the eternal Sleep
Within the immense and toilsome life-time,
     heaved
With ache of dreams that body forth the Sleep?

Shall I, less than the least red grain of flesh
Within my body, cry out to the dreaming soul
That slowly labours in a vast travail,