Look! We Have Come Through!Lawrence, D. H. (David Herbert)
General
Look! We Have Come Through!
Lawrence, D. H. (David Herbert)
Poetry
Then, we shall be two and distinct, we shall have
each our separate being.
And that will be pure existence, real liberty.
Till then, we are confused, a mixture, unresolved,
unextricated one from the other.
It is in pure, unutterable resolvedness, distinction
of being, that one is free,
not in mixing, merging, not in similarity.
When she has put her hand on my secret, darkest
sources, the darkest outgoings,
when it has struck home to her, like a death, "this
is _him!_"
she has no part in it, no part whatever,
it is the terrible _other_,
when she knows the fearful _other flesh_, ah, dark-
ness unfathomable and fearful, contiguous and
concrete,
when she is slain against me, and lies in a heap
like one outside the house,
when she passes away as I have passed away
being pressed up against the _other_,
then I shall be glad, I shall not be confused with
her,
I shall be cleared, distinct, single as if burnished
in silver,
having no adherence, no adhesion anywhere,
one clear, burnished, isolated being, unique,
and she also, pure, isolated, complete,
two of us, unutterably distinguished, and in
unutterable conjunction.
Then we shall be free, freer than angels, ah,
perfect.
VIII
AFTER that, there will only remain that all men
detach themselves and become unique,
that we are all detached, moving in freedom more
than the angels,
conditioned only by our own pure single being,
having no laws but the laws of our own being.
Every human being will then be like a flower,
untrammelled.
Every movement will be direct.
Only to be will be such delight, we cover our faces
when we think of it
lest our faces betray us to some untimely fiend.
Every man himself, and therefore, a surpassing
singleness of mankind.
The blazing tiger will spring upon the deer, un-
dimmed,
the hen will nestle over her chickens,
we shall love, we shall hate,
but it will be like music, sheer utterance,
issuing straight out of the unknown,
the lightning and the rainbow appearing in us
unbidden, unchecked,
like ambassadors.
We shall not look before and after.
We shall _be_, _now_.
We shall know in full.
We, the mystic NOW.
ZENNOR
_AUTUMN RAIN_
THE plane leaves
fall black and wet
on the lawn;
The cloud sheaves
in heaven's fields set
droop and are drawn
in falling seeds of rain;
the seed of heaven
on my face
falling--I hear again
like echoes even
that softly pace
Heaven's muffled floor,
the winds that tread
out all the grain
of tears, the store
harvested
in the sheaves of pain
caught up aloft:
the sheaves of dead
men that are slain
now winnowed soft
on the floor of heaven;
manna invisible
of all the pain
here to us given;
finely divisible
falling as rain.
_FROST FLOWERS_
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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