A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Poem of the Day: D.H. Lawrence

Snake 

A snake came to my water-trough 
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat, 
To drink there. 

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree 
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before me. 

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom 
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of the stone trough 
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom, 
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness, 
He sipped with his straight mouth, 
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body, 
Silently. 

Someone was before me at my water-trough, 
And I, like a second comer, waiting. 

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do, 
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do, 
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment, 
And stooped and drank a little more, 
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth 
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking. 

The voice of my education said to me 
He must be killed, 
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man 
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off. 

But must I confess how I liked him, 
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough 
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless, 
Into the burning bowels of this earth? 

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? 
Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him? 
Was it humility, to feel so honoured? 
I felt so honoured. 

And yet those voices: 
If you were not afraid, you would kill him! 

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, 
But even so, honoured still more 
That he should seek my hospitality 
From out the dark door of the secret earth. 

He drank enough 
And lifted his head dreamiliy, as one who has drunken, 
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black, 
Seeming to lick his lips, 
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air, 
And slowly turned his head, 
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream, 
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round 
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face. 

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole, 
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther, 
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole, 
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after, 
Overcame me now his back was turned. 

I looked round, I put down my pitcher, 
I picked up a clumsy log 
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter. 

I think it did not hit him, 
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste, 
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front, 
At which, in the intense still noon I stared with fascination. 

And immediately I regretted it. 
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act! 
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education. 

And I thought of the albatross, 
And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king, 
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld, 
Now due to be crowned again. 

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords 
Of life. 
And I have something to expiate; 
A pettiness.
--D.H. Lawrence

Lawrence, once so central a literary figure, has moved toward the periphery. But I think he'll be back again: There's too much going on in his work, too much pointed criticism of the vitiations of civilized life for him to dwindle into obscurity. And maybe it will be his poetry, often as direct and clear-sighted as this poem, and not his often too-talky, too-preachy novels that will bring him back.