166 PA RT T W O
pastime therein.” And God awes Job: “Canst thou draw out leviathan with an
hook?” Moby-Dick’s pastime in the Atlantic, flailing whaleboats and drowning
Ahab, seems supernatural—whether malevolent, indifferent, or unknowable.
Though Lawrence could make free with “the blue deep bed of the sea” where
“enormous mother whales lie dreaming,” he put his sense of unknowing into
“Fish.”
They are beyond me, are fishes.
I stand at the pale of my being
And look beyond.A “slim young pike” goes beyond this poet ’s limits, “Slouching along away
below, half out of sight,” even as its human-like “slouching” keeps the pike
within verbal sight.
But watching closer
That motionless deadly motion,
That unnatural barrel body, that long ghoul nose...
I left off hailing him.That “motionless deadly motion” catches something uncanny, like the “repose
in swiftness” of Melville ’s breaching whale. So does “unnatural,” while betray-
ing a stubborn human sense of what ’s natural.
This fish gets the poet ’s best shot, in wildly empathic writing:
Your life a sluice of sensation along your sides,
A flush at the flails of your fins, down the whorl of your tail.
Suddenly he ’s caught a “gold-and-greenish” one,
Unhooked his gorping, water-horny mouth,
And seen his horror-tilted eye,
His red-gold, water-precious, mirror-flat bright eye;
And felt him beat in my hand, with his mucous, leaping lifethrob.Lawrence ’s words have a lifethrob of their own. Never mind “water-horny”—
what ’s “gorping”? In Midlands dialect they’re gaping, gawking. Roiling lan-
guage paints this creature ’s death throes at once close and strange,
But I, I only wonder
And don’t know.
I don’t know fishes.You’ve got to love a poet who comes down to this.
Much as he cherished Italy and England too, Lawrence nursed a love-hate
for America, a sharp but skewed notion of the paleface country’s boundless
democratic benevolence, its greed and prosperity. He decried our eagle perched
over the world, “The pioneering brute invasion of the West, crime-tinged!”