5. The Egyptian vegetation god, murdered by his ris, like Christ, was resurrected, and became an brother Set, who cut the corpse into fourteen important ruler in the other world, pieces and scattered them throughout Egypt. Osi
.
227 8 / D. H. LAWRENCE
Bavarian Gentians
Not every man has gentians in his house in soft September, at slow, sad Michaelmas.1
Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark
darkening the daytime torchlike with the smoking blueness of Pluto's2 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.
Beach 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 splendour of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on the lost bride and her groom.
1923
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? Mediterranean evergreen
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,
1. September 29, the feast celebrating the Arch-but had to descend again to Hades in the autumn, angel Michael. 'the frosted September' (line 14). Demeter and 2. God of the underworld in classical mythology. Persephone were central figures in ancient fertility Also called Dis, he abducted Persephone, daughter myths, where Persephone's annual descent and of the goddess of agriculture, Demeter. Perseph-return were linked with the death and rebirth of one was allowed to return to the earth every spring, vegetation.
.
SNAKE / 2279
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 Etna0 smoking. the volcano
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
