D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930). New Poems. 1916.
32. Bitterness of Death
A
How can you lie so relentless hard
While I wash you with weeping water!
Do you set your face against the daughter
Of life? Can you never discard
Your curt pride’s ban?
How can you shame to act this part
Of unswerving indifference to me?
You want at last, ah me!
To break my heart
Evader!
Was always sooner to soften
Even than your eyes.
Now shut it lies
Relentless, however often
I kiss it in drouth.
Nor any relaxing. Where,
Where are you, what have you done?
What is this mouth of stone?
How did you dare
Take cover in death!
Once you could see,
The white moon show like a breast revealed
By the slipping shawl of stars.
Could see the small stars tremble
As the heart beneath did wield
Systole, diastole.
Was woman once to you,
Bride to your groom.
No tree in bloom
But it leaned you a new
White bosom.
Soft as a summering tree
Unfolds from the sky, for your good,
Unfolded womanhood;
Shedding you down as a tree
Sheds its flowers on a river.
Set like rocks beside a sea of gloom,
And I shed my very soul down into your thought;
Like flowers I fell, to be caught
On the comforted pool, like bloom
That leaves the boughs.
Oh, masquerader,
With a hard face white-enamelled,
What are you now?
Do you care no longer how
My heart is trammelled,
Evader?
Metallic, obdurate
With bowels of steel?
Did you never feel?—
Cold, insensate,
Mechanical!
You that I loved, you wonderful,
You who darkened and shone,
You were many men in one;
But never this null
This never-warm!
Is it all nought?
Cold, metal-cold?
Are you all told
Here, iron-wrought?
Is this what’s become of you?