Hehe yes, we do not always agree but we do get along
Printable View
Hehe yes, we do not always agree but we do get along
DM, that sounds like the lyric to a song...hehehe.
Hehe..
I think we finally learned to laugh our differences off, don't you?
I do like to argue, but I never really took any of it seriously or personally
That is the spirit; real fair sportsmanship. It is getting late again, DM, I think I am fading and will call it a night.:yawnb:I am sitting here with one eye closed.;) Nighty night!Quote:
Originally Posted by Dark Muse
Goodnight
I am reposting this for all our benefit:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Virgil
I did a little reseach on Lawrence's Tortoise poems and I wanted to share it with you. The Tortoise poems are a sequence of six poems that Lawrence wrote and first published as a small bookl called Tortoise (1921) and then incoproated into a much larger book of poems called Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923). The Tortoise poems were actually written in September of 1920 while Lawrence was staying alone in Florence, Italy. The six poems are called "Baby Tortoise," "Tortoise Shell," "Tortoise Family Connections," "Lui Et Elle," "Tortoise Gallantry," and "Tortoise Shout." The movement of the poems goes from birth to adulthood to death. Thy span the life cycle.
Ok, I just researched back to the last poem we did. It was "Tortoise Family Connections." So now I see that there are 3 more poems left that we had not yet discussed. We can start with "Lui Et Elle," but it might benefit us all to review the others that preceeded this poem, by simply reading them. I will make a more formal announcement that this is the poem to be discussed. What do you think everyone?
Perhaps we should do the next one now Janine. It might make sense to get one under our belt before we do a short story. I doubt ktd is coming back shortly, if at all. Were we going in poem sequence or were you selecting them at random?
Virgil, Yes, I think we can assume that ktd is not coming back; is she even on the forum lately? I haven't seen her for ages. So what do you mean when you say - were we going in poem sequence or were we you selecting them at random? I was picking the next poem in the Tortoise sequence entitled "Lui Et Elle."Quote:
Originally Posted by Virgil
I already posted in the LSS thread that we would start the story on Monday. You still want me to pick one, right? Also, we have a new comer there; that is great news.
How bout we start this poem on Monday, also? I will formally announce it then. We can flip back and forth between the two threads, can't we? We don't have to post everyday either, not in this one, anyway.
Sounds good. Monday is perfect.
Good! I just read the poem online. It is a long one; so I will post it in its entirity and then later in segments as we go along. I have a first impression about the poem already. Do you know, Virgil, what the title translates to from the French? You can find the poem here - http://www.poetry-archive.com/l/lui_et_elle.htmlQuote:
Originally Posted by Virgil
Here is the entire poem:
LUI ET ELLE
by: D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
SHE is large and matronly
And rather dirty,
A little sardonic-looking, as if domesticity had driven her to it.
Though what she does, except lay four eggs at random in the garden once a year
And put up with her husband,
I don't know.
She likes to eat.
She hurries up, striding reared on long uncanny legs,
When food is going.
Oh yes, she can make haste when she likes.
She snaps the soft bread from my hand in great mouthfuls,
Opening her rather pretty wedge of an iron, pristine face
Into an enormously wide-beaked mouth
Like sudden curved scissors,
And gulping at more than she can swallow, and working her thick, soft tongue,
And having the bread hanging over her chin.
O Mistress, Mistress,
Reptile mistress,
Your eye is very dark, very bright,
And it never softens
Although you watch.
She knows,
She knows well enough to come for food,
Yet she sees me not;
Her bright eye sees, but not me, not anything,
Sightful, sightless, seeing and visionless,
Reptile mistress.
Taking bread in her curved, gaping, toothless mouth,
She has no qualm when she catches my finger in her steel overlapping gums,
But she hangs on, and my shout and my shrinking are nothing to her,
She does not even know she is nipping me with her curved beak.
Snake-like she draws at my finger, while I drag it in horror away.
Mistress, reptile mistress,
You are almost too large, I am almost frightened.
He is much smaller,
Dapper beside her,
And ridiculously small.
Her laconic eye has an earthy, materialistic look,
His, poor darling, is almost fiery.
His wimple, his blunt-prowed face,
His low forehead, his skinny neck, his long, scaled, striving legs,
So striving, striving,
Are all more delicate than she,
And he has a cruel scar on his shell.
Poor darling, biting at her feet,
Running beside her like a dog, biting her earthy, splay feet,
Nipping her ankles,
Which she drags apathetic away, though without retreating into her shell.
Agelessly silent,
And with a grim, reptile determination,
Cold, voiceless age-after-age behind him, serpents' long obstinacy
Of horizontal persistence.
Little old man
Scuffling beside her, bending down, catching his opportunity,
Parting his steel-trap face, so suddenly, and seizing her scaly ankle,
And hanging grimly on,
Letting go at last as she drags away,
And closing his steel-trap face.
His steel-trap, stoic, ageless, handsome face.
Alas, what a fool he looks in this scuffle.
And how he feels it!
The lonely rambler, the stoic, dignified stalker through chaos,
The immune, the animate,
Enveloped in isolation,
Forerunner.
Now look at him!
Alas, the spear is through the side of his isolation.
His adolescence saw him crucified into sex,
Doomed, in the long crucifixion of desire, to seek his consummation beyond himself.
Divided into passionate duality,
He, so finished and immune, now broken into desirous fragmentariness,
Doomed to make an intolerable fool of himself
In his effort toward completion again.
Poor little earthy house-inhabiting Osiris,
The mysterious bull tore him at adolescence into pieces,
And he must struggle after reconstruction, ignominiously.
And so behold him following the tail
Of that mud-hovel of his slowly-rambling spouse,
Like some unhappy bull at the tail of a cow,
But with more than bovine, grim, earth-dank persistence,
Suddenly seizing the ugly ankle as she stretches out to walk,
Roaming over the sods,
Or, if it happen to show, at her pointed, heavy tail
Beneath the low-dropping back-board of her shell.
Their two shells like doomed boats bumping,
Hers huge, his small;
Their splay feet rambling and rowing like paddles,
And stumbling mixed up in one another,
In the race of love--
Two tortoises,
She huge, he small.
She seems earthily apathetic,
And he has a reptile's awful persistence.
I heard a woman pitying her, pitying the Mère Tortue.
While I, I pity Monsieur.
"He pesters her and torments her," said the woman.
How much more is he pestered and tormented, say I.
What can he do?
He is dumb, he is visionless,
Conceptionless.
His black, sad-lidded eye sees but beholds not
As her earthen mound moves on,
But he catches the folds of vulnerable, leathery skin,
Nail-studded, that shake beneath her shell,
And drags at these with his beak,
Drags and drags and bites,
While she pulls herself free, and rows her dull mound along.
"Lui et Elle" is reprinted from Tortoises. D.H. Lawrence. New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1921.
Just finished reading the poem and I quite liked it.
Oh good. Suggestion: you could jot down some notes on passages and what they meant to you or how you interpretted them, anything really - maybe just passages you particularly liked.
Thanks for the suggestion. I will keep that in mind and maybe take another look at the poem. I know there were a few things I really liked