It’s more than the increasing depth of the day

music

A VERY COMMON FIELD

What is it about this grassy field
that’s so familiar to me? Something
with the beings, the form of the place?

It’s not within
the foxtail,
not within
the brome, not within oat grass
or red clover
or yellow vetch
or the lot of them as one
motion in the wind.

It’s not the morning
or even of the morning,
or of the invisible
crickets, one near, one away,
still sounding
in the damp after dawn.

What is it so resonant and recognized here?
A sense like nostalgia,
like manner,
like a state felt but
not remembered?

It isn’t the center of the purple cornflower
or its rayed and fluted edges, not the slow
rise of the land or the few scattered trees
left in the fallow orchard, not the stone path,
not the grains and bristles of stems and seeds,
each oblivious in its own business,
but something impossible without these.

It’s more than
the increasing depth
of the day and
the blue of its height,
more than the half-body
of the lizard
turned upside down
on the path, torn

and transfigured during the night, more
than the bells beginning their lesson in the background.

It’s not a voice, not a message,
but something like a lingering,
a reluctance to abandon, a biding
so constantly present
that I can never
isolate it
from the disorderly crows
passing over or
from the sun moving
as wind down through the brief fires
of moisture on the blades of timothy

and sage, never separate it
from the scent
of fields drying and warm, never
isolate it from
my own awareness.

It is something
that makes possible,
that occasions without causing,
something
I can never extricate
to name, never
name to know,
never know to imitate.

— Pattiann Rogers

we were a passionate couple

[This was Lawrence's first book, a first edition with 1910 date on the copyright page. It was quickly changed to 1911. Apparently only a handful of copies in the first issue state are known to exist.

The United States' first appearance was significant since it contained sexually explicit passages considered too suggestive for the time and were taken out and/or revised for the first British edition, which didn't appear until later.

The original had pages 227 and 230 revised for the British issue, including
p. 230 originally as: "God! – we were a passionate couple – and she would have me in her bedroom while she drew Greek statues of me…"; and was changed to: "Lord! – we were an infatuated couple – and she would choose to view me in an aesthetic light…."] 1

from
THE WHITE PEACOCK

We got married. She gave me a living she had in her parsonage, and we went to live at her Hall. She wouldn't let me out of her sight. God! -- we were a passionate couple -- and she would have me in her bedroom while she drew Greek statues of me -- her Croton, her Hercules! I never saw her drawings. She had her own way too much -- I let her do as she liked with me.

Then gradually she got tired -- it took her three years to have a real bellyful of me. I had a physique then -- for that matter I have now."

He held out his arm to me, and bade me try his muscle. I was startled. The hard flesh almost filled his sleeve.

"Ah," he continued, "You don't know what it is to have the pride of a body like mine. But she wouldn't have children -- no, she wouldn't -- said she daren't. That was the root of the difference at first But she cooled down, and if you don't know the pride of my body you'd never know my humiliation. I tried to remonstrate -- and she looked simply astounded at my cheek. I never got over that amazement.

She began to get souly. A poet got hold of her, and she began to affect Burne-Jones -- or Waterhouse -- it was Waterhouse -- she was a lot like one of his women -- Lady of Shalott, I believe. At any rate, she got souly, and I was her animal -- son animal-son boeuf. I put up with that for above a year. Then I got some servants' clothes and went.

I was seen in France -- then in Australia -- though I never left England. I was supposed to have died in the bush. She married a young fellow. Then I was proved to have died, and I read a little obituarynotice on myself in a woman's paper she subscribed to. She wrote it herself -- as a warning to other young ladies of position not to be seduced by plausible "Poor Young Men."

Now she's dead. They've got the paper -- her paper -- in the kitchen down there, and it's full of photographs, even an old photo of me --" an unfortunate misalliance." I feel, somehow, as if I were at an end too. I thought I'd grown a solid, middle-aged- man, and here I feel sore as I did at twenty-six, and I talk as I used to.

One thing -- I have got some children, and they're of a breed as you'd not meet anywhere. I was a good animal before everything, and I've got some children."

He sat looking up where the big moon swam through the black branches of the yew.

"So she's dead -- your poor peacock!" I murmured.

He got up, looking always at the sky, and stretched himself again. He was an impressive figure massed in blackness against the moonlight, with his arms outspread.

"I suppose," he said, "it wasn't all her fault."
"A white peacock, we will say," I suggested.

D. H. Lawrence