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Unknown: TMT Xerox Corporation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the [unidentified] Foundation and the Henry NYAS Foundation Incorporated. [Inaudible] is a co-production of Symphony Bass and WNYC, New

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York Public Radio. Additional support for this program is provided by this and other national public radio member stations and by the NPR cultural program fund. Contributors include the John D.

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and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Fund, connecting artists and communities nationwide. This is NPR, National Public Radio. Morton Marcus: This is KUSP, community sponsored radio at

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88.9 on your FM dial for Santa Cruz, Salinas, the Monterey Bay, and Big Sur. Stay tuned for the new Poetry Show. Tonight, a birthday celebration of one of the most iconoclastic and marvelous of 20th century poets, the great novelist and short

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story writer, D.H. Lawrence. Softly in the dusk, a woman is singing to me; taking me back down the vista of years, till I see a child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings and pressing

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the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings. In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong to the old Sunday evenings at home, with a winter outside and hymns in the

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cozy parlor, the tinkling piano our guide. So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamor with a great black piano appassionato. The glamour of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast down in the flood of remembrance, I weep

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like a child for the past. Good evening, everybody and welcome to the new Poetry Show. We will be on from now on from nine until ten on Sunday evenings. And tonight, we have a birthday program for the great

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novelist, short story writer, and as I hope I will convince you, great 20th century poet, D.H. Lawrence, who was born on September 11th, 1885, that is September 11th, this day, a hundred and nine years ago. So, join me in this interesting

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evening and I plan to do some interesting things, read some well-known Lawrence poems, and not so well-known Lawrence poems. Let me just say that Lawrence's poems are out as a Penguin book, which sells for around sixteen, seventeen

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dollars in the United States, a huge soft-back, over nine hundred pages long and is well worth your time and money. He was one of the most original poets maybe because he cared more about, how shall I say, he cared more about the content of

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his poetry, and cared more about stories and tales and novels than he did about poetry. David Herbert Lawrence was born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire in 1895, the fourth of five children of a miner and his middle class wife, he attended

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Nottingham High School and Nottingham University College. His first novel, "The White Peacock," was published in 1911, just a few weeks after the death of his mother to whom he had been abnormally close. At this time, he finally ended his

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relationship with Jessie Chambers, who is the Miriam of, "Sons and Lovers," his autobiographical novel which was yet to be written, and he became engaged to Louie Burrows. His career as a school teacher, ended in 1911 by an illness that

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was ultimately diagnosed as tuberculosis. In 1912, he met Frieda Weekley whose maiden name was Frieda von Richthofen, and yes, was related to the von Richthofens of World War II fame. And she was the wife of Lawrence's French teacher at the

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University. He eloped with her and they went to Italy. They were married on the return to England in 1914. Lawrence was now living precariously by his writing, I'm sorry they eloped to Germany and he came back in 1914. Lawrence was now writing

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precariously, living precariously by his writing and his greatest novels, "The Rainbow," and, "Women in Love," were completed and published during World War One in 1915 and 1916. The former book, "The Rainbow," was suppressed, the

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first of many engagements with censors around the world that Lawrence was to have. After the war, which is of course 1919, Lawrence began his savage pilgrimage, as he said, in search of a more fulfilling mode of life than industrial Western

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civilization could offer him. This took him and Frieda to Sicily, Salaam, Australia, and finally to New Mexico and Taos, where he is of course still celebrated. But Lawrence has returned to Europe in 1925, and Lawrence's last novel, "Lady

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Chatterley's Lover," was banned in 1928, and his paintings were confiscated in 1929 for lewdness. He died in Venice in 1930 at the age of 44. Lawrence produced an amazing quantity of work, novels, stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books,

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translations, and letters. And after his death, Frieda who was with him all the time, theirs was a passionate, tempestuous love affair, wrote: "What he had seen and felt and known, he gave in his writing to his fellow man, the splendor of living, the

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hope of more and more life, a heroic, and immeasurable gift." And it is that passion, that hecticness if you would, as one British critic remarked, that really characterizes this little man who was just quaking with passion, and who he found in his

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love life certainly answered by freedom, and why I have chosen to start this show with the very passionate piano music of Franz Liszt, and his "Twelve Transcendental Meditations." So, let me try some things here. I don't want to go too much into

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this, but I want to look at some of the early stuff. What is great about Lawrence's poetry, it seems to me, are these marvelous observation, observations of life, the natural world and the imagery he sees, the details he sees. This

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is what is so strong in his work. The early, early poems, the early rhyme poems are very, very much poems about the ego of the young man in love, who is not being loved in return, the suffering he feels at the death of his mother. And it is when he

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is able to turn outward, that we find him observing in others, making insight into the life of animals and the life of people. And also giving us these wonderfully detailed pictures that make us look at the world around us in ways that we had

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never seen it before, and in a language which was so vivid that we would just enter into his poems. Let me go into this one poem, which I thought I had already ready to go, and it looks like I don't. Yes, there it is.

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Here's one of the really early poems and in this he is looking at his landladie's, a little child, and it's called, "To a Baby Running Barefoot," and just notice the marvelous imagery, the marvelous comparisons he has from the child to other modes of

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the natural world. This becomes a philosophical concern, the relationship of a life force and all living beings later on, but here it's a matter of description and what I love is he is concentrating on the child's feet. And what he's

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really doing is giving a series of images and variations of images on the baby's feet. So here is: THE BABY RUNNING BAREFOOT When the white feet of the baby beat across the grass, the

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little white feet nod like white flowers in the wind, they poise and run like puffs of wind that pass over water where the weeds are thin. And the sight of their white playing in the grass is winsome as a robin song, so flattering, or like two

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butterflies that settle on a glass cup for a moment, soft little wingbeats fluttering. And I wish that the baby would tack across here to me like a wind-shadow running on a pond, so she could stand with two little bare white feet upon my

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knee and I could feel her feet in either hand. Cool like syringa buds in morning hours, or firm and silken as young peony flowers. And I had read one of his first grade poems which was, "Piano,"

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but before I do that, let me read one of the first realized poems that he ever did. There are a lot of poems: "Endless Anxiety," "The End," "The Virgin," "Mothers," "Suspense," "The Bride," and many other poems, even the ones that he'd

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write after her death to his mother, who was very, very sensitive and really contained the artistic side of D.H. Lawrence. And really, that was, of course, what he developed from his workman's world, his father's I read was a miner. And

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here is the the poem of all the poems about his mother's death, which went on from 1910 through 1911, her sickness and death, that really gets to a sense of literature, the others are really cries of pain. They are abstract, they're not

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particularly well-written. But here is a poem called, "At the Window," and in it, we see what makes Lawrence's poems great, this observation of the outside world, the original precise language he can use for it. And here, instead of crying his own

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pain, what he has done, he has projected himself again into another, in this case his mother, as her eyes see the world for the last time. And there is more pathos and a sense of human mortality in this poem than all the other poems that he

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had written in- during this time, about his suffering and his mother's suffering, which was all of course through him. So again, we see the natural world imagery and the power of his work when he believes in himself and is able to empathize

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with others. The pine-trees bend to listen to the autumn wind as it mutters AT THE WINDOW something which sets the black poplars ashake with hysterical

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laughter. And slowly the house of day is closing its eastern shutters. Further down the valley the clustered tombstones recede, winding about their dimness the mist's gray cerements, after the street lamps in the twiligh have

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suddenly started to bleed. The leaves fly over the window and utter a word as they pass to the face that gazes outwards, watching for night to waft a me ning, or a message over the wi dow glass.

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And the other poem from this period I read at the beginning, which is the poem called, "The Piano," but I'm going to do something very interesting here, or anyway, something that you might not do all the time, I am going to read "The Piano," but

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I am going to move back and for h with it to the original versi n of the poem, and many of y u have heard me on past poet y nights talk about why this po m is good, why the language he e is good, why this choice is go d and why it isn't. And I'm goi

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g to particularly ask you to s e how in the revision Lawrenc condenses and makes cleaner wit an economy of means the whol length of the original and yet I'm going to say something tha may seem strange: in the versio I read, which is the accepte

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version, the version you see i all anthologies of "The Piano," which is usually one of his most anthologized pieces, I also want you to see how sentimentality has crept into the revised ersion, and that it was much tronger in the original version

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or avoiding sentimentality in s me of the key phrases, and I w ll point them out to you. Let me give you the situation here because there is a narrative situation as there was in that first poem I read. What

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is strange about that? Nothing. In Lawrence, his best poems in many ways, maybe 90% of them, come to think of it, have done narrative basis because naturally, Lawrence is a storyteller. He is the novelist and short-story writer par

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excellence. And so, at his strongest he is always thinking in terms of story. Anyway, let me go to this. Here is the poem, unrevised, okay? In other words, this is the original version of the poem, "The Piano." Now, let's just therefore, since

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we're making this comparison, go through what the poem is about. Lawrence as a man is sitting with a woman singing to him, and a piano is being played. And this reminds him of those Sunday nights, when he would sit underneath the piano while his

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mother played music. So he is reminded of the two women, and notice that in this piano, this dark, sleek, black piano, he thinks, to give you this sense of memory and a metaphor, that his mother's beat-up, old, small, brown piano must be

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enclosed in this piano because it has touched off- the big piano has touched off the memory of his childhood. Okay? So let us go on to what the original poem sounded like, and how then one, he will condense it, and how, alas, I think he takes out

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and replaces some of the strongest lines with much weaker ones. So, here is, "The Piano," by the great D.H. Lawrence. And again, it reminds him, and this is why we're reading it, not only of his mother, but about the lost world of childhood.

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THE PIANO Somewhere beneath the piano, superb, sleek, black, must hide my mother's piano, little and brown with a back that stood close to the wall, and the front's faded silk, both torn,

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and the keys with little hollows that my mother's fingers had worn. Softly in the shadows, a woman is singing to me quietly. Through the years, I have crept back to see a child sitting under the piano in the boom of the shaking strings, pressing

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the little poised feet of a mother, who smiles as she sings. The full-throated woman has chosen a winning living song and surely the heart that is in me must belong to the old Sunday evenings, when darkness wandered outside and hymns gleamed on our

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warm lips, as we watched mother's fingers blind. Or is this my sister at home in the front room, singing love's first surprised gladness alone in the bloom. She will start when she sees me and blushing spread out her hands to cover my mouth's

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raillery till I'm bound in her shame's hard-spun bands. A woman is singing to me a wild Hungarian air, and her arms and her bosom and the whole of her soul is bare and the great black piano was clamoring as my mother's never could clamor, and

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my mother's tunes are devoured of this music's ravaging glamour. Well, there we have the memory of three women: one is the woman's who's not a memory, it's the actual experience of a woman

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who's singing to him now this wild Hungarian air we find out, and then the memory of his mother on Sunday evenings, and then finally, a memory of his sister when she was singing once a love song, maybe the first love song, which she then very

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embarrassed seeing him listening to her, she goes up and puts his hand in her mouth so he will not make fun of her. Here is what happens to, "Piano," now and what I will well, we'll go into it later. I think you can see first of all that he allows the

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first line, "a woman is singing to me," and the second line to, "take him back down to the vista of years," it's much cleaner. He really eliminates what he doesn't need, he doesn't need the part about his sister, and although I like, you know, that

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the distant piano is a another piano, my mother's old piano, it's really not needed with the first two lines of the revision. And what he's done, actually, he's started the poem now with the second stanza of the original. What I want you to

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listen to, though, is how sentimental the revision gets. I think that almost all the changes, especially the wonderful sense of how he changes what sounds good, the boom of the shaking strings, to give the sense of what it

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sounded like to be sitting under the piano, he even improves that by light-years. But there's still, what he opts for here is a sentimentality, which is almost embarrassing, but still, here is the revised version which I read before of:

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PIANO Softly in the dusk, a woman is singing to me, taking me back down the vista of years, till I see a child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings and pressing

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the soft poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings. In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong to the old Sunday evenings at home, with a winter outside and hymns in the cozy

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parlor, the tinkling piano our guide. So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamor with the great black piano appassionato. The glamour of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast down in the flood of remembrance. I weep

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like a child for the past. And what is changed there, you see, is that, "the full-throated woman has chosen a winning loving song and surely the heart that is in me must belong to the old Sunday evenings, when

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darkness wandered outside." See, it seems to me that that's much better than, "in spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song betrays me back," that's okay until we get to, "till the heart of me weeps to belong to the old Sunday evenings at

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home." I mean, it's just too much. It insists too much on the nostalgia and the loss. And then when we get to the last one, "the glamour of childhood days is upon me, my manhood is cast down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child

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for the past," flood of remembrance, then, and weep, are the tears and again, it's just tremendously overstated. In the other one it was: "And the great black piano was clamoring as my mother's never could clamor, and my mother's tunes are devoured

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of this music's ravishing glamour." You just don't have this sense- I mean, I would have even just left the suggestion of that with cutting out, "I weep like a child for the past," by putting, "my manhood is cast down in the flood of

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remembrance," period, and just leave it at that, "I weep like a child of the past," is really, I think bad poetry is extremely sentimental. So sometimes when he goes back and opts for a revision, a poet, even though it is years later, and I say a poet

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because it's not just Lawrence who has these problems, but a poet will very, very simply make wrong choices. He may be trying too hard. Well, anyway, he goes off to Germany, goes off to Italy, and suddenly, he is not writing rhyme poems anymore, as

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these poems are, he is now with Frieda, it is 1912 and he writes a book which is full of love poems, and which is called, "We Have Come Through." And the second part of this, in writing this selection, he discovers Walt Whitman. I will read one

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poem from here to show how strong he will become, but still he is not writing the great poems for which he will be known. And this is again a poem in which he gets out of himself, and it's called, "Giorno dei Morti," which is the journey of

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the dead. Interesting how controlled this poem is, again, it is observing the scene, it is a funeral march in Italy. What is more interesting to me though, is that the greatest poem he will ever write, or maybe the second greatest poem

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he will ever write, is a poem about the journey of death, maybe the next last thing he will write, and it is called, "The Ship of Death," and I hope to be able to read it by the end of this program. But here is an earlier small masterpiece of

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observation and notice the details, notice the pathos you feel just from the observed details, not from the opinions given. Here is this poem about a funeral march in Italy: GIORNO DEI MORTI

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Along the avenue of cypresses, all in their scarlet cloaks and surplices of linen, go the chanting choristers, the priests in gold and black, the villagers. And all along the path to the cemetery the round dark heads of men crowd

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silently, and black-scarved faces of womenfolk, wistfully watch at the banner of death, and the mystery. And at the foot of a grave a father stands with sunken head, and forgotten, folded hands. And at the foot of a grave a mother kneels with

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pale shut face, nor either hears nor feels the coming of the chanting choristers between the avenue of cypresses, the silence of the many villagers, the candle-flames beside the surplices.

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Then, after the war, his worst years of poverty are the years in which he writes, "The Rainbow," and, "Women in Love," those two great novels. And after the war, he leaves for Italy and he does not write very much poetry from around 1914 to

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1919. Suddenly, in 1920, actually May 1920 and September 1921, explodes with a book, "Birds, Beasts and Flowers," and here, his observations of the natural world, in this case, animals as well as flora, his sympathy for the animals of the

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world. And notice how brilliant the language captures this whole experience, the heat, the movement of the snake, and then the questioning man who questions all the Judeo-Christian sins, what a snake is and represents, and he

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realizes that somehow, a theme that will come again and again with D.H. Lawrence, somehow we have missed our relationship with the natural world and we have begun to shrivel ourselves because we are not part of and cannot appreciate the natural

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world. And that's really what's going on in, "Snake." He thinks the Judeo-Christian imagery, our sense of what a snake in the animal world and the natural world are has been destroyed. Here is one of the greatest of D.H. Lawrence's poems:

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SNAKE Snake came to my water-trough on a hot, hot day, and I in pajamas 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

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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

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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

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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

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moment, and stooped and drank a little mor, 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,

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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

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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 honored? I

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felt so honored. 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, honored still more that he should seek my hospitality from out the dark door of the secret earth. He

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drank enough and lifted his head, dreamily, 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,

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and slowly, very slowly, as if thrice a dream, 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

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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

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his back was turned. I looked around, I put down my pitcher, I picked up a clumsy log and threw it at the water-trough with a clatter. I think I did not hit him, but suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in an undignified

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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,

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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

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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. You know, the Poetry Show is made possible in part by a grant

00:41:12.240 - 00:41:26.580

from Stapleton's Grocery and we appreciate their support. Stapleton's Grocery specializes in organic produce with stores in the Farmers Exchange Building in Santa Cruz and on Clair Street next to Trader Joe's in Capitola. Why don't you go in

00:41:26.580 - 00:41:42.450

and just see some of the marvelous produce they have there and realize, you know, that we really owe our loyalty to these businesses which have seen us through hard times and have been here for so long. And Stapleton's one of those

00:41:42.450 - 00:42:11.220

businesses, so go on in and really see some of the marvelous food they have there. Well, Accordions According to Texas. Accordions According to Texas is a series from Texas Folklife Resources and the University of Texas radio station KUT that

00:42:11.220 - 00:42:25.740

presents in music and words the history and importance of that portable, practical instruments of the many ethnic communities of the state. The stories are told by players, dancers, artisans and archivists, with an emphasis on the accordion's role

00:42:25.980 - 00:42:52.770

in the social life of the community. And on September 25th, will be Conjuntos Dancing Cowboy, a portrait of contemporary accordionist Mingo Saldivar, which will be the thirteenth program in the series. And they will be heard

00:42:52.770 - 00:43:24.940

on Sunday afternoons at four o'clock during KUSP's "Lost Highway" program. I'm looking for scripts here, looks like that's it. So that's the promos that I have to do. And I want to thank all those subscribers out there who have

00:43:24.970 - 00:43:43.480

subscribed to KUSP over the years and have made this the wonderful station that it is, community-sponsored station, where your local programmers again and again bring their expertise and their love of subject matter from jazz to

00:43:43.480 - 00:44:06.460

poetry, from swing to ethnic music, you name it, and they give you their marvelous knowledge and expertise. Very, very rare. Very rare, and especially with a quality that's done on this radio program, or this radio station. Anyway,

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let's get back to D.H. Lawrence and what we have done, what we are doing tonight is we're going through a D.H. Lawrence birthday. And again, I see that I've probably taken too much with the early poems and explaining too many things but

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what else is new? Let me read you some of these marvelous poems, other poems, on animals. We're now in a book that he wrote called, "Birds, Beasts and Flowers," which came in 1923. And these are the poems he wrote in Italy from May to September.

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And actually, the poem I want to read which is called, "The Bat," it's a little before that. Here is, "The Bat," and he is having some fun with another animal that we do not consider a man's best friend. Now, in "The Snake," it gave rise to a very

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deep meditation on how we have learned our response to the snake and given it a symbolism which has really removed us from the natural world. Well, here he is more kidding around. So here it is:

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THE BAT At evening, sitting on this terrace, when the sun from the west, beyond Pisa, beyond the mountains of Carrara, departs, and the world is taken by surprise. When the tired flower

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of Florence is in gloom beneath the glowing brown hills surrounding. When under the arches of the Ponte Vecchio a green light enters against stream, flush from the west, against the current of obscure Arno. Look up, and you see

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things flying between the day and the night. Swallows with spools of dark thread sewing the shadows together. A circle swoop, and a quick parabola under the bridge arches where light pushes through. A sudden turning upon itself of a thing

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in the air. A dip to the water. And you think: "The swallows are flying late!" Swallows? Dark air-life looping yet missed the pure loop, a twitch, a twitter, an elastic shudder in flight and serrated wings against the sky, like a glove, a black glove

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thrown up at the light, and falling back. Never swallows! Bats! The swallows are gone. At a wavering instant the swallows gave way to bats by the Ponte Vecchio, changing guard. Bats, an uneasy creeping in one's scalp as the bats swoop

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overhead! Flying madly. Pipistrello! Black piper on an infinitesimal pipe. Little lumps that fly in air and have voices indefinite, wildly vindictive. Wings like bits of umbrella. Bats! Creatures that hang themselves up like an old rag,

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to sleep, and disgustingly upside down. Hanging upside down like rows of disgusting old rags and grinning in their sleep. Bats! In China, the bat is symbol for happiness. Not for me!

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And then he has a truly marvelous poem also written in Florence, which obviously this was talking about the Pont de Vecchio bridge and Florence itself, in which the man and the bat have a dialogue and in this it gets more serious. But he

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realized that they were really sort of two different poems. So, I would recommend you to read, "Man and Bat," which we don't- I don't have time for it right now. There are many, many other marvelous poems. "The Turkey-Cock," is particularly

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his favorite, there's, "The Swan," and, "The Goat." And what I would like to read is, "The Hummingbird," and, "Grapes," to give you how this goes. But let me start off with, "Grapes," because we've been reading animals. So let me give you,

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"Grapes," with which he goes into the world in which grapes were the supreme flora. And of course what he's talking here is vines, creeping plants, and he imagines the world, a half-mythic world, but also the world, let's say of the

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Pleistocene era, when the vines were predominant. And he begins to talk about roses and how roses really, everything that is created is a rose, but once that rose was a grape and listen to the landscape he conjures up. It is a rather remarkable poem.

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Here is the very seldomly heard D.H. Lawrence poem: GRAPES So many fruits come from roses from the rose of all roses from the unfolded rose. Rose of all the world. Admit that apples and

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strawberries and peaches and pears and blackberries are all Rosaceae, issue of the explicit rose, the open-countenanced, skyward-smiling rose. What then of the vine? Oh, what of the tendrilled vine? Ours is the universe of the unfolded rose,

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the explicit, the candid revelation. But long ago, oh, long ago before the rose began to simper supreme, before the rose of all roses, rose of all the world, was even in bud, before the glaciers were gathered up in a bunch out of

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the unsettled seas and winds, or else before they had been let down again, in Noah's flood, there was another world, a dusky, flowerless, tendrilled world and creatures webbed and marshy, and on the margin, men soft-footed and pristine, still,

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and sensitive, and active, audile, tactile sensitiveness as of a tendril which orientates and a reaches out, reaching out and grasping by an instinct more delicate than the moon's as she feels for the tides. Of which world, the vine was the

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invisible rose, before petals spread, before color made its disturbance, before eyes saw too much. In a green, muddy, web-foot, unutterably songless world the vine was rose of all roses. There were no poppies or carnations, hardly a greenish

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lily, watery faint. Green, dim, invisible flourishing of vines royally gesticulate. Look now even now, how it keeps its power of invisibility! Look how black, how blue-black, how globed in Egyptian darkness dropping among his leaves, hangs the dark

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grape! See him there, the swart, so palpably invisible: whom shall we ask about him? The Negro might know a little. When the vine was rose, Gods were dark-skinned. Bacchus is a dream's dream. Once God was all

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negroid, as now he is fair. But it's so long ago, the ancient Bushman has forgotten more utterly than we, who have never known. For we are on the brink of re-remembrance. Which, I suppose, is why America has gone dry. Our pale day is sinking

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into twilight, and if we sip the wine, we find dreams coming upon us out of the imminent night. Though, we find ourselves crossing the fern-scented frontiers of the world before the floods, where man was dark and evasive and that tiny

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vine-flower rose of all roses, perfumed, and all in naked communion communicating as now our clothed vision can never communicate. Vistas, down dark avenues as we sip the wine. The grape is swart, the avenues dusky and tendrilled, subtly

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prehensile. But we, as we start awake, clutch at our vistas democratic, boulevards, tram-cars, policemen. Oh, give us our own back. Let us go to the soda-fountain, to get sober. Soberness, sobriety. It is like the agonized perverseness of a

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child heavy with sleep, yet fighting, fighting to keep awake. Soberness, sobriety, with heavy eyes propped open. Dusky are the avenues of wine, and we must cross the frontiers, though we will not, of the lost, fern-scented world: take the

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fern-seed on our lips, close the eyes, and go down the tendrilled avenues of wine and the otherworld. But almost to go along with that is this marvelous little poem, "The Hummingbird." And it talks of this other world, this

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imagined world, when we had our chance, this mythic world to become part of nature and become part of the natural being. I would suggest another poem I don't have time to even go into which is called, "The Tortoise and the Tortoise Shell," a

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six-part poem about tortoises, in which Lawrence discusses very clearly his entire idea about the life force. But here is, "The Hummingbird," who it would seem from this imagery, inhabit the world of the vines and the tendrils and the grape, which is

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the world of myth. THE HUMMINGBIRD I can imagine, in some otherworld primeval-dumb, far back in that most awful stillness, that only gasped and

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hummed, hummingbirds race down the avenues. Before anything had a soul, while life was a heave of matter, half inanimate, this little bit chipped off in brilliance and went whizzing through the slow, vast, succulent stems. I believe there

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were no flowers, then in the world where the hummingbird flashed ahead of creation. I believe he pierced the slow vegetable veins with his long beak. Probably he was big as mosses, and little lizards, they say were once big. Probably he

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was a jabbing, terrifying monster. We look at him through the wrong end of the long telescope of Time. Luckily for us. That last line is great, "the smallest of the hummingbird, we

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look at him through the wrong end of the long telescope of time," actually, once he must have been the monster of monsters. Well, I'm just about to run out of time, let me go through the two greatest poems that he ever wrote. And they

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are, "The Ship of Death," and "Gentians," and they are marvelous poems that in many ways, work out his last twelve or thirteen poems called, "Last Poems." And they talk about death and let me read them the shorter one. First, this is,

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"Bavarian Gentians," and gentians are of course, that dark, smoky, purpleish, black flower. And what is interesting about them is that this story is told, and it is welcoming to death, it is he is ready to die. And this is his last sickness,

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1930 to 1932. And he is dying and he knows he's dying. And all of these last poems are about death, but they're about being ready for death. And here he is prepared. The halls of Dis are the halls of Pluto, which is Dis is the Roman name for Pluto, who

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is the god of the underworld. Demeter is the mother the cereal God called Ceres, the God of vegetation on earth, and she is the daughter of Persiphone, who came down, was kidnapped by Pluto or Dis and lives half the year in the underworld. And what

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Lawrence asks here is that the gentians become sort of a dark torch to take him into the darkness of death. And notice the imagery here is darker and darker and darker, and that the rhythm and the tone all reflect this very somber mood, but it is

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the mood of a wedding, he is ready for death. He is ready to go, he welcomes death. He wants to be welcomed into the nether world of death. So, he uses the Greek myth in here but don't let that throw you if you're not a Greek myth fan, because the rest

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of it is just beautiful, and the line comes, "reach me gentian, give me a torch," the second half of the poem. This is when he wants to use the gentians to go into the nether world, he is ready to die. And what I want to point out is it's strange when

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he says, "not every man has gentians in his house," and we realize why when he says, give it to me as a torch to take me into death. It is the death flower. Okay, here is D.H. Lawrence's:

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BAVARIAN GENTIANS Not every man has gentians in his house and soft September, at slow, sad Michaelmas. Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark darkening the daytime torchlike with the smoking

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blueness of Pluto's gloom, ribbed and torchlike with their blaze of darkness spread blue down flattering into points, flattened under the sweep of white day torch-flower of the blues-smoking darkness, Pluto's dark-blue daze, black lamps from

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the halls of Dis, burning dark blue, giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter's pale lamps give off light, lead me then, lead the way. Reach me a gentian, give me a torch. Let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower down

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the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness. Even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September to the sightless realm where darkness was awake upon the dark and Persephone herself is but a voice or a darkness

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invisible enfolded in the deeper dark of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with a passion of dense gloom, among the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on the lost bride and her groom.

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Let me read then, to end this, the last poem, maybe the greatest poem, maybe, "Bavarian Gentians," is his greatest poem, "The Ship of Death." It's based on his trips to the north of Italy, and the reading in Etruscan literature, of the

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Etruscans, who are the people who were settled in North Italy before the Romans, and how they, very much like the Egyptians, would use little ships in their tombs, on which the soul was supposed to sail into the next world. And here the idea is, are

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you ready for death? You people who are dying, we are all dying. And it is a meditation on death, and it is a meditation on quietness and there is of course, a line, the deep "quietus of death got by a bare bodkin?" when you kill yourself,

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from Shakespeare's Hamlet. And he talks about being ready for death, preparing oneself for death, and not dying, but being reborn in the other world beyond life and it is sort of like a world of resurrection. And this really is Lawrence's last word:

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THE SHIP OF DEATH Based on the practice of putting little ships in Etruscan tombs which would take the soul to the other world. And I will read, it's in ten sections, very short sections, and I'll read each

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section. Number One Now it is autumn and the falling fruit of a long journey towards oblivion. The apples falling like great drops of dew to

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bruise themselves an exit from themselves. And it is time to go, to bid farewell to one's own self, and find an exit from the fallen self. Two

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Have you built your ship of death, oh, have you? Oh, build your ship of death, for you will need it. The grim frost is at hand, when the apples will fall thick, almost thunderous, on the hardened earth. And death is on the air like a smell of ashes!

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Ah, can't you smell it? And in the bruised body, the frightened soul finds itself shrinking, wincing from the cold that blows upon it through the orifices. Three

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And can a man his own quietus make with a bare bodkin? As the bard says. With daggers, bodkins, bullets, man can make a bruise or break of exit for his life. But is that a quietus, oh, tell me, is it quietus? Surely not. For how can murder, even

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self-murder ever a quietus make? Four Oh, let us talk of quiet that we know, that we can know, the deep and lovely quiet of a strong heart at peace. How can we this,

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our own quietus make? Five Build then the ship of death, for you must take the longest journey, to oblivion. And die the death, the long and painful

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death that lies between the old self and the new. Already our bodies are fallen, bruised, badly bruised, already our souls are oozing through the exit of the cruel bruise. Already the dark and endless ocean of the end is washing in through the

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breaches of our wounds, already the flood is upon us. Oh build your ship of death, your little ark and furnish it with food, with little cakes, and wine for the dark flight down oblivion. Six

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Piecemeal the body dies, and the timid soul has her footing washed away, as the dark flood rises. We are dying, we are dying, we are all of us dying and nothing will stay the death-flood rising within us and soon it will rise on the world,

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on the outside world. We are dying, we are dying, piecemeal our bodies are dying and our strength leaves us, and our soul cowers naked in the dark rain over the flood, cowering in the last branches of the tree of our life.

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Seven We are dying, we are dying, so all we can do is now to be willing to die, and to build the ship of death to carry the soul on the longest journey. A little ship, with oars and food and

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little dishes, and all accoutrements fitting and ready for the departing soul. Now launch the small ship, now as the body