 | | Don't touch me and appreciate me.
It is an infamy.
You would think twice before you touched a weasel on a fence
as it lifts its straight white throat.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . .
Nor the adder we saw asleep with her head on her shoulder
curled up in the sunshine like a princess;
when she lifted her head in delicate, startled wonder
you did not stretch forward to caress her . . .
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This is part clean embodiment of a "natural religious sense," part phallus-guarding "attitude" (Lawrence would later do "attitude" less viperishly). The future-salient poem in the book is "Song of a Man Who Has Come Through." The opening line, ''Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!" is irresistible, a bugle call. Modern in its urgency, its air-stream phrases, the poem is informed by an earthly future-wonder:
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| | If only I am sensitive, subtle, oh, delicate, a winged gift!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge
Driven by invisible blows,
The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall
find the Hesperides.
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Lawrence's mother has finally released him to the adventure of other wonders, at least of displaced ones (the Hesperides, the apple grove of the West, belonged to a mother goddess, Hera.)
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The poems in
Birds, Beasts and Flowers
fuse prophetic ardor with winningly relaxed, lavish, and precise observations of real things. Lawrence's genius has stopped rocking, mother-sick, and sings forward on a deep keel. The obsessions have opened like an ark and taken on board the world. Seldom have acts of attention seemed so creative and lively, so electric with voice, so generous of sight and prolific of figure (metaphor as both the flash point of perception and fusional bliss).
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A few poems are exceptions, works (so to say) of prophetic nostalgia. "Grapes," for instance, addresses the white Western anemia implicated in Yeats's "The Magi." Startlingly, Prohibition in the United States is taken as a sign of an irresistible need for intoxication: "It is like the agonized perverseness of a child heavy with sleep, yet fighting, fighting to keep awake." The lost children of a dark-skinned Bacchus, "we are on
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