The Project Gutenberg EBook of New Poems, by D. H. Lawrence
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Title: New Poems
Author: D. H. Lawrence
Release Date: September 22, 2007 [EBook #22726]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NEW POEMS ***
Produced by Lewis Jones
D.H. Lawrence (1918) _New Poems_
NEW POEMS
POEMS BY THE SAME AUTHOR
LOVE POEMS AND OTHERS
AMORES
LOOK, WE HAVE COME THROUGH
FIRST PUBLISHED, OCTOBER, 1918
NEW EDITION (RESET), AUGUST, 1919
New Poems
By D. H. Lawrence
London: Martin Seeker
TO
AMY LOWELL
THE LONDON AND NORWICH PRESS, LIMITED, LONDON AND NORWICH, ENGLAND
CONTENTS
Apprehension
Coming Awake
From a College Window
Flapper
Birdcage Walk
Letter from Town: The Almond Tree
Flat Suburbs, S.W., in the Morning
Thief in the Night
Letter from Town: On a Grey Evening in March
Suburbs on a Hazy Day
Hyde Park at Night: Clerks
Gipsy
Two-Fold
Under the Oak
Sigh no More
Love Storm
Parliament Hill in the Evening
Piccadilly Circus at Night: Street Walkers
Tarantella
In Church
Piano
Embankment at Night: Charity
Phantasmagoria
Next Morning
Palimpsest of Twilight
Embankment at Night: Outcasts
Winter in the Boulevard
School on the Outskirts
Sickness
Everlasting Flowers
The North Country
Bitterness of Death
Seven Seals
Reading a Letter
Twenty Years Ago
Intime
Two Wives
Heimweh
Debacle
Narcissus
Autumn Sunshine
On That Day
APPREHENSION
AND all hours long, the town
Roars like a beast in a cave
That is wounded there
And like to drown;
While days rush, wave after wave
On its lair.
An invisible woe unseals
The flood, so it passes beyond
All bounds: the great old city
Recumbent roars as it feels
The foamy paw of the pond
Reach from immensity.
But all that it can do
Now, as the tide rises,
Is to listen and hear the grim
Waves crash like thunder through
The splintered streets, hear noises
Roll hollow in the interim.
COMING AWAKE
WHEN I woke, the lake-lights were quivering on the
wall,
The sunshine swam in a shoal across and across,
And a hairy, big bee hung over the primulas
In the window, his body black fur, and the sound
of him cross.
There was something I ought to remember: and
yet
I did not remember. Why should I? The run-
ning lights
And the airy primulas, oblivious
Of the impending bee--they were fair enough
sights.
FROM A COLLEGE WINDOW
THE glimmer of the limes, sun-heavy, sleeping,
Goes trembling past me up the College wall.
Below, the lawn, in soft blue shade is keeping,
The daisy-froth quiescent, softly in thrall.
Beyond the leaves that overhang the street,
Along the flagged, clean pavement summer-white,
Passes the world with shadows at their feet
Going left and right.
Remote, although I hear the beggar's cough,
See the woman's twinkling fingers tend him a
coin,
I sit absolved, assured I am better off
Beyond a world I never want to join.
FLAPPER
LOVE has crept out of her sealed heart
As a field-bee, black and amber,
Breaks from the winter-cell, to clamber
Up the warm grass where the sunbeams start.
Mischief has come in her dawning eyes,
And a glint of coloured iris brings
Such as lies along the folded wings
Of the bee before he flies.
Who, with a ruffling, careful breath,
Has opened the wings of the wild young sprite?
Has fluttered her spirit to stumbling flight
In her eyes, as a young bee stumbleth?
Love makes the burden of her voice.
The hum of his heavy, staggering wings
Sets quivering with wisdom the common
things
That she says, and her words rejoice.
BIRDCAGE WALK
WHEN the wind blows her veil
And uncovers her laughter
I cease, I turn pale.
When the wind blows her veil
From the woes I bewail
Of love and hereafter:
When the wind blows her veil
I cease, I turn pale.
LETTER FROM TOWN: THE
ALMOND TREE
YOU promised to send me some violets. Did you
forget?
White ones and blue ones from under the orchard
hedge?
Sweet dark purple, and white ones mixed for a
pledge
Of our early love that hardly has opened yet.
Here there's an almond tree--you have never seen
Such a one in the north--it flowers on the street,
and I stand
Every day by the fence to look up for the flowers
that expand
At rest in the blue, and wonder at what they mean.
Under the almond tree, the happy lands
Provence, Japan, and Italy repose,
And passing feet are chatter and clapping of
those
Who play around us, country girls clapping their
hands.
You, my love, the foremost, in a flowered gown,
All your unbearable tenderness, you with the
laughter
Startled upon your eyes now so wide with here-
after,
You with loose hands of abandonment hanging
down.
FLAT SUBURBS, S.W., IN THE
MORNING
THE new red houses spring like plants
In level rows
Of reddish herbage that bristles and slants
Its square shadows.
The pink young houses show one side bright
Flatly assuming the sun,
And one side shadow, half in sight,
Half-hiding the pavement-run;
Where hastening creatures pass intent
On their level way,
/> Threading like ants that can never relent
And have nothing to say.
Bare stems of street-lamps stiffly stand
At random, desolate twigs,
To testify to a blight on the land
That has stripped their sprigs.
THIEF IN THE NIGHT
LAST night a thief came to me
And struck at me with something dark.
I cried, but no one could hear me,
I lay dumb and stark.
When I awoke this morning
I could find no trace;
Perhaps 'twas a dream of warning,
For I've lost my peace.
LETTER FROM TOWN: ON A
GREY EVENING IN MARCH
THE clouds are pushing in grey reluctance slowly
northward to you,
While north of them all, at the farthest ends,
stands one bright-bosomed, aglance
With fire as it guards the wild north cloud-coasts,
red-fire seas running through
The rocks where ravens flying to windward melt
as a well-shot lance.
You should be out by the orchard, where violets
secretly darken the earth,
Or there in the woods of the twilight, with
northern wind-flowers shaken astir.
Think of me here in the library, trying and trying
a song that is worth
Tears and swords to my heart, arrows no armour
will turn or deter.
You tell me the lambs have come, they lie like
daisies white in the grass
Of the dark-green hills; new calves in shed;
peewits turn after the plough--
It is well for you. For me the navvies work in the
road where I pass
And I want to smite in anger the barren rock of
each waterless brow.
Like the sough of a wind that is caught up high in
the mesh of the budding trees,
A sudden car goes sweeping past, and I strain my
soul to hear
The voice of the furtive triumphant engine as it
rushes past like a breeze,
To hear on its mocking triumphance unwitting
the after-echo of fear.
SUBURBS ON A HAZY DAY
O STIFFLY shapen houses that change not,
What conjuror's cloth was thrown across you,
and raised
To show you thus transfigured, changed,
Your stuff all gone, your menace almost rased?
Such resolute shapes, so harshly set
In hollow blocks and cubes deformed, and heaped
In void and null profusion, how is this?
In what strong _aqua regia_ now are you steeped?
That you lose the brick-stuff out of you
And hover like a presentment, fading faint
And vanquished, evaporate away
To leave but only the merest possible taint!
HYDE PARK AT NIGHT, BEFORE
THE WAR
_Clerks_.
WE have shut the doors behind us, and the velvet
flowers of night
Lean about us scattering their pollen grains of
golden light.
Now at last we lift our faces, and our faces come
aflower
To the night that takes us willing, liberates us to the
hour.
Now at last the ink and dudgeon passes from our
fervent eyes
And out of the chambered weariness wanders a
spirit abroad on its enterprise.
Not too near and not too far
Out of the stress of the crowd
Music screams as elephants scream
When they lift their trunks and scream aloud
For joy of the night when masters are
Asleep and adream.
So here I hide in the Shalimar
With a wanton princess slender and proud,
And we swoon with kisses, swoon till we seem
Two streaming peacocks gone in a cloud
Of golden dust, with star after star
On our stream.
GIPSY
I, THE man with the red scarf,
Will give thee what I have, this last week's earn-
ings.
Take them, and buy thee a silver ring
And wed me, to ease my yearnings.
For the rest, when thou art wedded
I'll wet my brow for thee
With sweat, I'll enter a house for thy sake,
Thou shalt shut doors on me.
TWO-FOLD
How gorgeous that shock of red lilies, and larkspur
cleaving
All with a flash of blue!--when will she be leaving
Her room, where the night still hangs like a half-
folded bat,
And passion unbearable seethes in the darkness, like
must in a vat.
UNDER THE OAK
You, if you were sensible,
When I tell you the stars flash signals, each one
dreadful,
You would not turn and answer me
"The night is wonderful."
Even you, if you knew
How this darkness soaks me through and through,
and infuses
Unholy fear in my vapour, you would pause to dis-
tinguish
What hurts, from what amuses.
For I tell you
Beneath this powerful tree, my whole soul's fluid
Oozes away from me as a sacrifice steam
At the knife of a Druid.
Again I tell you, I bleed, I am bound with withies,
My life runs out.
I tell you my blood runs out on the floor of this oak,
Gout upon gout.
Above me springs the blood-born mistletoe
In the shady smoke.
But who are you, twittering to and fro
Beneath the oak?
What thing better are you, what worse?
What have you to do with the mysteries
Of this ancient place, of my ancient curse?
What place have you in my histories?
SIGH NO MORE
THE cuckoo and the coo-dove's ceaseless calling,
Calling,
Of a meaningless monotony is palling
All my morning's pleasure in the sun-fleck-scattered
wood.
May-blossom and blue bird's-eye flowers falling,
Falling
In a litter through the elm-tree shade are scrawling
Messages of true-love down the dust of the high-
road.
I do not like to hear the gentle grieving,
Grieving
Of the she-dove in the blossom, still believing
Love will yet again return to her and make all good.
When I know that there must ever be deceiving,
Deceiving
Of the mournful constant heart, that while she's
weaving
Her woes, her lover woos and sings within another
wood.
Oh, boisterous the cuckoo shouts, forestalling,
Stalling
A progress down the intricate enthralling
By-paths where the wanton-headed flowers doff
their hood.
And like a laughter leads me onward, heaving,
Heaving
A sigh among the shadows, thus retrieving
A decent short regret for that which once was very
good.
L
OVE STORM
MANY roses in the wind
Are tapping at the window-sash.
A hawk is in the sky; his wings
Slowly begin to plash.
The roses with the west wind rapping
Are torn away, and a splash
Of red goes down the billowing air.
Still hangs the hawk, with the whole sky moving
Past him--only a wing-beat proving
The will that holds him there.
The daisies in the grass are bending,
The hawk has dropped, the wind is spending
All the roses, and unending
Rustle of leaves washes out the rending
Cry of a bird.
A red rose goes on the wind.--Ascending
The hawk his wind-swept way is wending
Easily down the sky. The daisies, sending
Strange white signals, seem intending
To show the place whence the scream was heard.
But, oh, my heart, what birds are piping!
A silver wind is hastily wiping
The face of the youngest rose.
And oh, my heart, cease apprehending!
The hawk is gone, a rose is tapping
The window-sash as the west-wind blows.
Knock, knock, 'tis no more than a red rose rapping,
And fear is a plash of wings.
What, then, if a scarlet rose goes flapping
Down the bright-grey ruin of things!
PARLIAMENT HILL IN THE
EVENING
THE houses fade in a melt of mist
Blotching the thick, soiled air
With reddish places that still resist
The Night's slow care.
The hopeless, wintry twilight fades,
The city corrodes out of sight
As the body corrodes when death invades
That citadel of delight.
Now verdigris smoulderings softly spread
Through the shroud of the town, as slow
Night-lights hither and thither shed
Their ghastly glow.
PICCADILLY CIRCUS AT NIGHT
_Street-Walkers_.
WHEN into the night the yellow light is roused like
dust above the towns,
Or like a mist the moon has kissed from off a pool in
the midst of the downs,
Our faces flower for a little hour pale and uncertain
along the street,
Daisies that waken all mistaken white-spread in ex-
pectancy to meet
The luminous mist which the poor things wist was
dawn arriving across the sky,
When dawn is far behind the star the dust-lit town
has driven so high.
All the birds are folded in a silent ball of sleep,
All the flowers are faded from the asphalt isle in
the sea,
Only we hard-faced creatures go round and round,
and keep
The shores of this innermost ocean alive and
illusory.
Wanton sparrows that twittered when morning
looked in at their eyes
And the Cyprian's pavement-roses are gone, and
now it is we
Flowers of illusion who shine in our gauds, make a
Paradise
On the shores of this ceaseless ocean, gay birds of
the town-dark sea.
TARANTELLA
SAD as he sits on the white sea-stone
And the suave sea chuckles, and turns to the moon,
And the moon significant smiles at the cliffs and
the boulders.
He sits like a shade by the flood alone
While I dance a tarantella on the rocks, and the
croon
Of my mockery mocks at him over the waves'
bright shoulders.
What can I do but dance alone,
Dance to the sliding sea and the moon,
For the moon on my breast and the air on my limbs
and the foam on my feet?
For surely this earnest man has none
Of the night in his soul, and none of the tune
Of the waters within him; only the world's old
wisdom to bleat.
I wish a wild sea-fellow would come down the
glittering shingle,
A soulless neckar, with winking seas in his eyes
And falling waves in his arms, and the lost soul's kiss
On his lips: I long to be soulless, I tingle
To touch the sea in the last surprise
Of fiery coldness, to be gone in a lost soul's bliss.
IN CHURCH
IN the choir the boys are singing the hymn.
The morning light on their lips
Moves in silver-moist flashes, in musical trim.
Sudden outside the high window, one crow
Hangs in the air
And lights on a withered oak-tree's top of woe.
One bird, one blot, folded and still at the top
Of the withered tree!--in the grail
Of crystal heaven falls one full black drop.
Like a soft full drop of darkness it seems to sway
In the tender wine
Of our Sabbath, suffusing our sacred day.
PIANO
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see