D. H. LAWRENCE IN TAORMINA AND TAOS 165I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.
I think it did not hit him;
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in
undignified haste,
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.Something “earth-golden... like a god” gives way to “clumsy... clatter...
convulsed,” words that set off a sinuous, silent, slow epiphany and leave us
staring into earth’s dark door.
“Snake” might have left off here, in fascination (and still no noonday drink).
But Lawrence feels a curse he felt too in Melville ’s Moby-Dick, “the maniacal
fanaticism of our white mental consciousness.” His unguarded, likable gab suf-
fers a final spasm of loss after the violence.
And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.
And I thought of the albatross,
And I wished he would come back, my snake.The notion of “my” snake sounds petty, as against the creature ’s self-sufficient
purity of purpose. Still these lines tap into human conscience. Coleridge ’s An-
cient Mariner must wear around his neck the albatross he killed, until one day
he spots water-snakes swimming alongside the ship:
Blue, glossy green, and velvet black
They coil’d and swam, and every track
Was a flash of golden fire....
A spring of love gusht from my heart,
And I bless’d them unaware!The albatross falls from his neck into the sea, but Lawrence has “missed my
chance with one of the lords / Of life.”
Coping with the animate world around him, Lawrence joins an entire tra-
dition. Since 30,000 years ago in France ’s Lascaux cave, drawings of stags,
wild goats and asses, bears, horses, and bulls stand as vibrant and stylized as
Picasso’s. Millennia before the American continent was “discovered,” native
peoples carved and painted animals as intimate totems on remote desert rocks.
Much later, Psalms praise the Lord for “things creeping innumerable” in “the
great and wide sea”: “There is that Leviathan, whom thou hast made to take his