Image-making love

Always

at the core of me

burns a small flame of anger, gnawing

from trespassed contacts, from hot, digging-in fingers of love.

Always

in the eyes of those who loved me well

I have seen at last the image of whom they loved

and took for me,

mistook for me.

And always

it was a pretty monkey that resembled me

and was a gibe at me.

So now I want above all things

to preserve my nakedness

from the gibe and finger-clutch of image-making love.

D. H. Lawrence in Imagist Poetry, Penguin Books, 1972

Nothing to save

There is nothing to save, now all is lost,

but a tiny core of stillness in the heart

like the eye of a violet.

D. H. Lawrence in Imagist Poetry, Penguin Books, 1972

Bavarian Gentians

Not every man has gentians in his house

in Soft September, at slow, Sad Michaelmas.

Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark

darkening the daytime torchlike with the smoking blueness of Pluto's

gloom,

ribbed and torchlike, with their blaze of darkness spread blue

down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day

torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto's dark-blue daze,

black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue,

giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter's pale lamps give off

light,

lead me then, lead me the way.

Reach me a gentian, give me a torch

let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower

down 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 invisible enfolded in the deeper dark

of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom,

among the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on the

lost bride and groom.

D. H. Lawrence in The Faber Book of Modern Verse, Michael Roberts (ed.), Faber & Faber, 1936 (1ª ed.).

Disto se falou no dia d'Ela

      Oh, game-keeper or not, you're a good cock. I can see that with one eye shut. Not like that blasted Clifford! A lily-livered hound with never a fuck in him, never had. I like you, my boy, I'll bet you've a good cod on you; oh, you're a bantam, I can see that. You're a fighter. Game-keeper! Ha-ha, by crikey, I wouldn't trust my game to you!


D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Penguin Books, 1960.

Um verso

Before my heart stops beating, and I become what I am not.

D. H. Lawrence, in "St. Matthew", Birds, Beasts & Flowers!, Black Sparrow Press, 1992.

Bare Almond Trees

Wet almond trees, in the rain,
Like iron sticking grimly out of earth;
Black almond trunks, in the rain,
Like iron implements twisted, hideous, out of the earth,
Out of the deep, soft fledge of Sicilian winter-green,
Earth-grass uneatable,
Almond trunks curving blackly, iron-dark, climbing the slopes.

Almond tree, beneath the terrace rail,
Black, rusted, iron trunk,
You have welded your thin stems finer,
Like steel, like sensitive steel in the air,
Grey, lavender, sensitive steel, curving thinly and brittly up
in a parabola.

What are you doing in the December rain?
Have you a strange electric sensitiveness in your steel tips?
Do you feel the air for electric influences
Like some strange magnetic apparatus?
Do you take in messages, in some strange code,
From heaven's wolfish, wandering electricity, that prowls so
constantly round Etna?
Do you take the whisper of sulphur from the air?
Do you hear the chemical accents of the Sun?
Do you telephone the roar of the waters-over-the-earth?
And from all this, do you make calculations?

Sicily, December's Sicily in a mass of rain
With iron branching blackly, rusted like old, twisted implements
And brandishing and stooping over earth's wintry fledge, climbing
the slopes
Of uneatable soft green!

D. H. Lawrence, Birds, Beasts & Flowers!, Black Sparrow Press, 1992.

The Revolutionary

Look at them standing there in authority
The pale-faces,
As if it could have any effect any more.

Pale-face authority,
Caryatids,
Pillars of white bronze standing rigid, lest the skies fall.

What a job they've got to keep it up.
Their poor, idealist foreheads naked capitals
To the entablature of clouded heaven.

When the skies are going to fall, fall they will
In a great chute and rush of débâcle downwards.

Oh and I wish the high and super-gothic heavens would come down now,
The heavens above, that we yearn to and aspire to.

I do not yearn, nor aspire, for I am a blind Samson.
And what is daylight to me that I should look skyward?
Only I grope among you, pale-faces, caryatids, as among a forest of pillars that hold up the dome of high ideal heaven
Which is my prison,
And all these human pillars of loftiness, going stiff, metallic-stunned with the weight of their responsibility
I stumble against them.
Stumbling-blocks, painful ones.

To keep on holding up this ideal civilization
Must be excruciating: unless you stiffen into metal, when it is easier to stand stock rigid than to move.

This is why I tug at them, individually, with my arm round their waist
The human pillars.
They are not stronger than I am, blind Samson.
The house sways.

I shall be so glad when it comes down.
I am so tired of the limitations of their Infinite.
I am so sick of the pretensions of the Spirit.
I am so weary of pale-face importance.

Am I not blind, at the round-turning mill?
Then why should I fear their pale faces?
Or love the effulgence of their holy light,
The sun of their righteousness?

To me, all faces are dark,
All lips are dusky and valved.

Save your lips, O pale-faces,
Which are slips of metal,
Like slits in an automatic-machine, you columns of give-and-take.

To me, the earth rolls ponderously, superbly
Coming my way without forethought or afterthought.
To me, men's footfalls fall with a dull, soft rumble, ominous and lovely,
Coming my way.

But not your foot-falls, pale-faces,
They are a clicketing of bits of disjointed metal
Working in motion.

To me, men are palpable, invisible nearnesses in the dark
Sending out magnetic vibrations of warning, pitch-dark throbs of invitation.

But you, pale-faces,
You are painful, harsh-surfaced pillars that give off nothing except rigidity,
And I jut against you if I try to move, for you are everywhere, and I am blind,
Sightless among all your visuality,
You staring caryatids.

See if I don't bring you down, and all your high opinion
And all your ponderous roofed-in erection of right and wrong
Your particular heavens,
With a smash.

See if your skies aren't falling!
And my head, at least, is thick enough to stand it, the smash.

See if I don't move under a dark and nude, vast heaven
When your world is in ruins, under your fallen skies.
Caryatids, pale-faces.
See if I am not Lord of the dark and moving hosts
Before I die.

D. H. Lawrence, Birds, Beasts & Flowers!, Black Sparrow Press, 1992.

Hermes (ou como de uma analogia «fazer» uma personagem)

Tinha tudo debaixo de olho, como um jovem Hermes de olhos azuis e astutos. E os conhecimentos que tinha eram, realmente, admiráveis. Era admirável o que sabia de vacas de Jersey, de fabrico de queijo, de como cavar fossos e levantar vedações, de flores e jardinagem, de navios e navegação. Era uma fonte de sabedoria sobre tudo, e comunicava ao pessoal estes conhecimentos de uma forma muito estranha, semi-irónica e semi-solene, como se, realmente, pertencesse ao mundo superior e semi-real dos deuses.

D. H. Lawrence, O Amor no Feno e Outros Contos, Maria Teresa Guerreiro (trad.), Assírio & Alvim, 1988

Muitas coisas dissolvidas no silêncio e negrura

Parou entre as medas, mas não ouvia mais do que o pingar da água, as chicotadas ligeiras da chuva. Tudo estava perdido na escuridão. Imaginou que a morte haveria de ser assim, muitas coisas dissolvidas no silêncio e negrura, apagadas, mas em existência. Na densa negrura, sentiu-se quase extinto. Receava não encontrar as coisas como as deixara. Quase num frenesim, aos tropeços, aos apalpões, regressou e só parou quando tocou na chapa fria. Ia à procura de um raio de luz.

D. H. Lawrence, O Amor no Feno e Outros Contos, Maria Teresa Guerreiro (trad.), Assírio & Alvim, 1988

Não era mais conspícuo que os montes de flores

Lavou-se da cabeça aos pés, de pé no canto fresco e esquecido do campo, onde ninguém o veria nem de dia, de modo que, agora, no tom cinzento do luar, não era mais conspícuo que os montes de flores. A noite parecia-lhe nova e diferente: não se lembrava de alguma vez ter visto o brilho cinzento lustroso, nem de ter reparado em como as luzes pareciam vitais, como gente viva habitando os espaços de prata.

D. H. Lawrence, O Amor no Feno e Outros Contos, Maria Teresa Guerreiro (trad.), Assírio & Alvim, 1988

«O Amante de Lady Chatterley», de D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence dava títulos aos seus livros que durante muito tempo me mantiveram afastada deles: O Amante de Lady Chatterley, Amor no Feno e Outros Contos, A Virgem e o Cigano, por exemplo. Pareciam-me títulos de romances de cordel dos do tipo de Eurico Cebolo ou de telenovelas avant la lettre.
Um dia um amigo disse-me mesmo muito bem de O Amante de Lady Chatterley e eu resolvi lê-lo. O esqueleto da história podia vagamente parecer-se com tudo isso, telenovela brasileira, romance de Eurico Cebolo, etc. Mas Lawrence devia ser um tipo muito observador e que, portanto, percebia muito de homens, mulheres, sexo e do frágil equilíbrio entre estes elementos, e isso percebe-se desde o princípio de O Amante de Lady Chatterley. Se ainda não o leram, façam como eu e quando puderem sigam o conselho do meu amigo. Deixo-vos um excerto.

Connie sentia-se fascinada quando a escutava, mas, logo a seguir, um pouco envergonhada. Não devia escutar com aquela estranha e violenta curiosidade. Afinal, as histórias mais íntimas de outras pessoas só devem ser ouvidas num espírito de respeito por essa coisa que luta e que sofre: a alma humana, num espírito de simpatia delicada, discriminativa. Porque até a sátira é uma forma de simpatia. É a maneira como a simpatia se dá e se retira que determina as nossas vidas. E neste ponto reside a enorme importância do romance, quando em mãos capazes. O romance pode informar e conduzir a novos lugares a corrente da nossa consciência simpatizante, e pode libertar a nossa simpatia de elementos mortos. Assim, o romance, quando em mãos capazes, pode revelar os lugares mais secretos da vida: pois é nos lugares da vida secretos e passionais que a maré da consciência sensitiva deve subir e descer, purificando e refrescando.

D. H Lawrence, O Amante de Lady Chatterley, António R. Salvador (trad.) Relógio d'Água, 2005.