D. H. Lawrence: "Mystic"

They call all experience of the senses mystic, when the
       experience is considered.
So an apple becomes mystic when I taste in it
the summer and the snows, the wild welter of earth
and the insistence of the sun.

All of which things I can surely taste in a good apple.
Though some apples taste preponderantly of water, wet and sour
and some of too much sun, brackish sweet
like lagoon-water, that has been too much sunned.

If I say I taste these things in an apple, I am called mystic, which
       means a liar.
The only way to eat an apple is to hog it down like a pig
and taste nothing
that is real.

But if I eat an apple, I like to eat it with all my senses awake.
Hogging it down like a pig I call the feeding of corpses.



 
"Mystic" by D. H. Lawrence. Text as published in D. H. Lawrence: Complete Poems (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics, 1994).

Art credit: Detail of "Pig Eating Apples In Barnyard Blue Sky," photograph by Lynn M. Stone/KimballStock.

D. H. Lawrence: "Maximus"

God is older than the sun and moon
and the eye cannot behold him
nor voice describe him.

But a naked man, a stranger, leaned on the gate
with his cloak over his arm, waiting to be asked in.
So I called him: Come in, if you will!––
He came in slowly, and sat down by the hearth.
I said to him: And what is your name?––
He looked at me without answer, but such a loveliness
entered me, I smiled to myself, saying: He is a God!
So he said: Hermes!

God is older than the sun and moon
and the eye cannot behold him
nor the voice describe him:
and still, this is the God Hermes, sitting by my hearth.



"Maximus" by D. H. Lawrence, from The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence. © Wordsworth Editions, 1994.

Image credit: "Hermes," oil on canvas, by Salvador Dali, 1981 (originally color).

 

D. H. Lawrence: "Escape"

When we get out of the glass bottles of our own ego,
and when we escape like squirrels from turning in the cages of our personality
and get into the forest again,
we shall shiver with cold and fright
but things will happen to us
so that we don't know ourselves.

Cool, unlying life will rush in,
and passion will make our bodies taut with power,
we shall stamp our feet with new power
and old things will fall down,
we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like burnt paper.

"Escape" by D. H. Lawrence, from The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence. © Wordsworth Poetry Library, 1994.

Image credit: Unknown.