Look! We Have Come Through!. D. H. Lawrence

Must be in love with me.

       Here this round ball of earth

       Where all the mountains sit

       Solemn in groups,

       And the bright rivers flit

       Round them for girth.

       Here the trees and troops

       Darken the shining grass,

       And many people pass

       Plundered from heaven,

       Many bright people pass,

       Plunder from heaven.

       What of the mistresses

       What the beloved seven?

      —They were but witnesses,

       I was just driven.

       Where is there peace for me?

       Isis the mystery

       Must be in love with me.

THE SEA

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      You, you are all unloving, loveless, you;

       Restless and lonely, shaken by your own moods,

       You are celibate and single, scorning a comrade even,

       Threshing your own passions with no woman for

       the threshing-floor,

       Finishing your dreams for your own sake only,

       Playing your great game around the world, alone,

       Without playmate, or helpmate, having no one to

       cherish,

       No one to comfort, and refusing any comforter.

       Not like the earth, the spouse all full of increase

       Moiled over with the rearing of her many-mouthed

       young;

       You are single, you are fruitless, phosphorescent,

       cold and callous,

       Naked of worship, of love or of adornment,

       Scorning the panacea even of labour,

       Sworn to a high and splendid purposelessness

       Of brooding and delighting in the secret of life's

       goings,

       Sea, only you are free, sophisticated.

       You who toil not, you who spin not,

       Surely but for you and your like, toiling

       Were not worth while, nor spinning worth the

       effort!

       You who take the moon as in a sieve, and sift

       Her flake by flake and spread her meaning out;

       You who roll the stars like jewels in your palm,

       So that they seem to utter themselves aloud;

       You who steep from out the days their colour,

       Reveal the universal tint that dyes

       Their web; who shadow the sun's great gestures

       and expressions

       So that he seems a stranger in his passing;

       Who voice the dumb night fittingly;

       Sea, you shadow of all things, now mock us to

       death with your shadowing.

       BOURNEMOUTH

HYMN TO PRIAPUS

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      MY love lies underground

       With her face upturned to mine,

       And her mouth unclosed in a last long kiss

       That ended her life and mine.

       I dance at the Christmas party

       Under the mistletoe

       Along with a ripe, slack country lass

       Jostling to and fro.

       The big, soft country lass,

       Like a loose sheaf of wheat

       Slipped through my arms on the threshing floor

       At my feet.

       The warm, soft country lass,

       Sweet as an armful of wheat

       At threshing-time broken, was broken

       For me, and ah, it was sweet!

       Now I am going home

       Fulfilled and alone,

       I see the great Orion standing

       Looking down.

       He's the star of my first beloved

       Love-making.

       The witness of all that bitter-sweet

       Heart-aching.

       Now he sees this as well,

       This last commission.

       Nor do I get any look

       Of admonition.

       He can add the reckoning up

       I suppose, between now and then,

       Having walked himself in the thorny, difficult

       Ways of men.

       He has done as I have done

       No doubt:

       Remembered and forgotten

       Turn and about.

       My love lies underground

       With her face upturned to mine,

       And her mouth unclosed in the last long kiss

       That ended her life and mine.

       She fares in the stark immortal

       Fields of death;

       I in these goodly, frozen

       Fields beneath.

       Something in me remembers

       And will not forget.

       The stream of my life in the darkness

       Deathward set!

       And something in me has forgotten,

       Has ceased to care.

       Desire comes up, and contentment

       Is debonair.

       I, who am worn and careful,

       How much do I care?

       How is it I grin then, and chuckle

       Over despair?

       Grief, grief, I suppose and sufficient

       Grief makes us free

       To be faithless and faithful together

       As we have to be.

BALLAD OF A WILFUL WOMAN

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      FIRST PART

       UPON her plodding palfrey

       With a heavy child at her breast