D. H. LAWRENCE IN TAORMINA AND TAOS 167Despite all this, “your demonish New World nature” somehow breeds “will
... endurance... desperateness... generosity.”
A generation before most Americans, Lawrence found “life surging itself at
its very wellhead” in Whitman, “pioneering into the wilderness of unopened
life.” Birds, Beasts and Flowers! shows what he shared with Walt: himself as a
benchmark, tied in sympathy to the life stirring about him; a sensual yet wildly
fanciful touch for that life; rangy verse lines surging up, down, sideways, and
back upon themselves, colored by flagrant turns of speech; always bodily, al-
ways spiritual risings of consciousness; ardor for physical nature crossed with
skepticism about its human visitor.
Britons yearn southward toward Mediterranean lands, and Lawrence also
needed the dryly flourishing high desert and mountains north of Santa Fe. As-
pen, cedar, cottonwood, spruce, balsam, piñon pine, and red rock crop up in his
poems, in “my hearth-rug of desert.” Like Robinson Jeffers, who visited Taos
about when he was there, Lawrence revered the hawk and “scorched breast”
eagle, “Sun-breaster,” “sun-starer,” “foot-fierce” with the “god-thrust entering
you steadily from below.” His book’s cover features an eagle clasping a snake,
drawn by him in Southwest-Indian style. Lawrence adored the hummingbird
too—primeval, huge, a “jabbing, terrifying monster.” Given a 160-acre ranch
northwest of Taos, at 8,600 feet on Lobo Mountain, he even tried to form a
utopian community. His ashes ended up there.
“Mountain Lion,” one of his least known but most striking poems, has
him
Climbing through the January snow, into the Lobo canyon
Dark grow the spruce trees, blue is the balsam, water sounds still
unfrozen, and the trail is still evident.
He meets “Two Mexicans, strangers”—“Men! The only animal in the world to
fear!” What are they doing here, what are they carrying?
Something yellow.
A deer?
Qué tiene, amigo?—
León— ...
It is a mountain lion,
A long, slim cat, yellow like a lioness.
Dead.
He trapped her this morning, he says, smiling foolishly.
Lift up her face,
Her round, bright face, bright as frost.
Her round, fine-fashioned head, with two dead ears: