Out of the darkness, fretted sometimes in its sleeping,

Jets of sparks in fountains of blue come leaping

To sight, revealing a secret, numberless secrets keeping.

 

Sometimes the darkness trapped within a wheel

Runs into speed like a dream, the blue of the steel

Showing the rocking darkness now a-reel.

 

And out of the invisible, streams of bright blue drops

Rain from the showery heavens, and bright blue crops

Surge from the under-dark to their ladder-tops.

 

And all the manifold blue and joyous eyes,

The rainbow arching over in the skies,

New sparks of wonder opening in surprise.

 

All these pure things come foam and spray of the sea

Of Darkness abundant, which shaken mysteriously,

Breaks into dazzle of living, as dolphins that leap from the sea

Of midnight shake it to fire, so the secret of death we see.

 

Winter in the Boulevard

The frost has settled down upon the trees

And ruthlessly strangled off the fantasies

Of leaves that have gone unnoticed, swept like old

Romantic stories now no more to be told.

 

The trees down the boulevard stand naked in thought,

Their abundant summery wordage silenced, caught

In the grim undertow; naked the trees confront

Implacable winter's long, cross-questioning brunt.

 

Has some hand balanced more leaves in the depths of the twigs?

Some dim little efforts placed in the threads of the birch?—

It is only the sparrows, like dead black leaves on the sprigs,

Sitting huddled against the cerulean, one flesh with their perch.

 

The clear, cold sky coldly bethinks itself.

Like vivid thought the air spins bright, and all

Trees, birds, and earth, arrested in the after-thought

Awaiting the sentence out from the welkin brought.

To the ancient consciousness, Matter, Materia, or Substantial things are God. A great rock is God. A pool of water is God. And why not? The longer we live the more we return to the oldest of all visions. A great rock is God. I can touch it. It is undeniable. It is God.

 

Then those things that move are doubly God. That is, we are doubly aware of their godhead: that which is, and that which moves: twice godly. Everything is a "thing": and every "thing" acts and has effect: the universe is a great complex activity of things existing and moving and having effect. And all this is God.

 

Today, it is almost impossible for us to realise what the old Greeks meant by god, or theos. Everything was theos; but even so, not at the same moment. At the moment, whatever struck you was god. If it was a pool of water, the very watery pool might strike you: then that was god; or the blue gleam might suddenly occupy your consciousness: then that was god; or a faint vapour at evening rising might catch the imagination: then that was theos; or thirst might overcome you at the sight of the water: then the thirst itself was god; or you drank, and the delicious and indescribable slaking of thirst was the god; or you felt the sudden chill of the water as you touched it: and then another god came into being, "the cold": and this was not a quality, it was an existing entity, almost a creature, certainly a theos: the cold; or again, on the dry lips something suddenly alighted: it was " the moist", and again a god. Even to the early scientists or philosophers, "the cold", "the moist", "the hot", "the dry" were things in themselves, realities, gods, theoi. And they did things.

 

With the coming of Socrates and "the spirit", the cosmos died. For two thousand years man has been living in a dead or dying cosmos, hoping for a heaven hereafter. And all the religions have been religions of the dead body and the postponed reward: eschatological, to use a pet word of the scientists.

Who says the sun cannot speak to me! The sun has a great blazing consciousness, and I have a little blazing consciousness. When I can strip myself of the trash of personal feelings and ideas, and get down to my naked sun-self, then the sun and I can commune by the hour, the blazing interchange, and he gives me life, sun-life, and I send him a little new brightness from the world of the bright blood. ...

 

Now this may sound nonsense, but that is merely because we are fools. There is an eternal vital correspondence between our blood and the sun: there is an eternal vital correspondence between our nerves and the moon. If we get out of contact and harmony with the sun and moon, then both turn into great dragons of destruction against us. The sun is a great source of blood-vitality, it streams strength to us. But once we resist the sun, and say: It is a mere ball of gas!—then the very streaming vitality of sunshine turns into subtle disintegrative force in us, and undoes us. The same with the moon, the planets, the great stars. They are either our makers or our unmakers. There is no escape.

 

We and the cosmos are one. The cosmos is a vast living body, of which we are still parts. The sun is a great heart whose tremors run through our smallest veins. The moon is a great gleaming nerve-centre from which we quiver forever. ...

 

When I hear modern people complain of being lonely then I know what has happened. They have lost the cosmos.—It is nothing human and personal that we are short of. What we lack is cosmic life, the sun in us and the moon in us.

What man most passionately wants is his living wholeness and his living unison, not his own isolate salvation of his "soul". Man wants his physical fulfilment first and foremost, since now, once and once only, he is in the flesh and potent. For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul, as my spirit is part of my nation. In my own very self, I am part of my family. There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.

 

DH Lawrence: Apocalypse

From the Internet

D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930)