TORTOISE SHOUT
by: D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
- THOUGHT
he was dumb,
- I said he was dumb,
- Yet I've heard him cry.
-
- First faint scream,
- Out of life's unfathomable dawn,
- Far off, so far, like a madness, under the horizon's dawning
rim,
- Far, far off, far scream.
-
- Tortoise in extremis.
-
- Why were we crucified into sex?
- Why were we not left rounded off, and finished in ourselves,
- As we began,
- As he certainly began, so perfectly alone?
-
- A far, was-it-audible scream,
- Or did it sound on the plasm direct?
-
- Worse than the cry of the new-born,
- A scream,
- A yell,
- A shout,
- A pæan,
- A death-agony,
- A birth-cry,
- A submission,
- All tiny, tiny, far away, reptile under the first dawn.
-
- War-cry, triumph, acute-delight, death-scream reptilian,
- Why was the veil torn?
- The silken shriek of the soul's torn membrane?
- The male soul's membrane
- Torn with a shriek half music, half horror.
-
- Crucifixion.
- Male tortoise, cleaving behind the hovel-wall of that dense
female,
- Mounted and tense, spread-eagle, out-reaching out of the
shell
- In tortoise-nakedness,
- Long neck, and long vulnerable limbs extruded, spread-eagle
over her house-roof,
- And the deep, secret, all-penetrating tail curved beneath
her walls,
- Reaching and gripping tense, more reaching anguish in uttermost
tension
- Till suddenly, in the spasm of coition, tupping like a jerking
leap, and oh!
- Opening its clenched face from his outstretched neck
- And giving that fragile yell, that scream,
- Super-audible,
- From his pink, cleft, old-man's mouth,
- Giving up the ghost,
- Or screaming in Pentecost, receiving the ghost.
-
- His scream, and his moment's subsidence,
- The moment of eternal silence,
- Yet unreleased, and after the moment, the sudden, startling
jerk of coition, and at once
- The inexpressible faint yell--
- And so on, till the last plasm of my body was melted back
- To the primeval rudiments of life, and the secret.
-
- So he tups, and screams
- Time after time that frail, torn scream
- After each jerk, the longish interval,
- The tortoise eternity,
- Agelong, reptilian persistence,
- Heart-throb, slow heart-throb, persistent for the next spasm.
-
- I remember, when I was a boy,
- I heard the scream of a frog, which was caught with his foot
in the mouth of an up-starting snake;
- I remember when I first heard bull-frogs break into sound
in the spring;
- I remember hearing a wild goose out of the throat of night
- Cry loudly, beyond the lake of waters;
- I remember the first time, out of a bush in the darkness,
a nightingale's piercing cries and gurgles startled the depths
of my soul;
- I remember the scream of a rabbit as I went through a wood
at midnight;
- I remember the heifer in her heat, blorting and blorting
through the hours, persistent and irrepressible;
- I remember my first terror hearing the howl of weird, amorous
cats;
- I remember the scream of a terrified, injured horse, the
sheet-lightning
- And running away from the sound of a woman in labor, something
like an owl whooing,
- And listening inwardly to the first bleat of a lamb,
- The first wail of an infant,
- And my mother singing to herself,
- And the first tenor singing of the passionate throat of a
young collier, who has long since drunk himself to death,
- The first elements of foreign speech
- On wild dark lips.
-
- And more than all these,
- And less than all these,
- This last,
- Strange, faint coition yell
- Of the male tortoise at extremity,
- Tiny from under the very edge of the farthest far-off horizon
of life.
-
- The cross,
- The wheel on which our silence first is broken,
- Sex, which breaks up our integrity, our single inviolability,
our deep silence
- Tearing a cry from us.
-
- Sex, which breaks us into voice, sets us calling across the
deeps, calling, calling for the complement,
- Singing, and calling, and singing again, being answered,
having found.
-
- Torn, to become whole again, after long seeking for what
is lost,
- The same cry from the tortoise as from Christ, the Osiris-cry
of abandonment,
- That which is whole, torn asunder,
- That which is in part, finding its whole again throughout
the universe.
"Tortoise Shout" is reprinted
from Tortoises. D.H. Lawrence. New York: Thomas Seltzer,
1921. |
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POEMS BY D.H. LAWRENCE |
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