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ermoso es! (She ’s beautiful!). In New
Mexico D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930), meeting two hunters with a mountain
lion they’ve killed, gives his sense of her, the “fine rays in the brilliant frost of
her face. / Beautiful dead eyes.”
From his birthplace in the mining and farming terrain of Midlands England,
Lawrence ranged the world seeking a place to fuse spiritual with bodily life. His
native country gave him that in the novels, but lush Tuscany and torrid Sicily fired
his poetry. Meanwhile he took on the New World—Mexico and fervently the
Southwest, “the rounded sides of the squatting Rockies, / Tigress-brindled with
aspen, / Jaguar-splashed, puma-yellow, leopard-livid slopes of America.”
Birds, Beasts and Flowers! (1923), a gallery of piercing, raving poems, came
out first in the United States, with that exclamation mark occurring only on the
cover he himself designed, not on the title page. (plate 10) Along with Taos,
Santa Fe, Española, and Lobo in New Mexico, the poems stem from Italy, Ger-
many, Austria, Australia, Ceylon, and not from jolly old England. In Tuscany
pomegranate and peach, the “bursten” fig, “fruit of the female mystery, covert
and inward... showing her crimson through the purple slit / Like a wound,”
the grape and dark Etruscan cypress all make his mythic mind run wild. In
Sicily the almond tree under “Etna’s snow-edged wind,” the “ruddy-muzzled
cyclamens / In little bunches like bunches of wild hares,” the mosquito with
“room for me and a mountain lion”
D. H. Lawrence in Taormina and Taos
H