Mystery

by David Herbert Lawrence

Mystery 

Now I am all

One bowl of kisses,

Such as the tall

Slim votaresses

Of Egypt filled

For a God's excesses.

I lift to you

My bowl of kisses,

And through the temple's

Blue recesses

Cry out to you

In wild caresses.

And to my lips'

Bright crimson rim

The passion slips,

And down my slim

White body drips

The shining hymn.

And still before

The altar I

Exult the bowl

Brimful, and cry

To you to stoop

And drink, Most High.

Oh drink me up

That I may be

Within your cup

Like a Mystery,

Like wine that is still

In ecstasy.

Glimmering still

In ecstasy,

Commingled wines

Of you and me

In One fulfill,...

The Mystery. 

Reproach 

Had I but known yesterday,

Helen, you could discharge the ache

Out of the cloud; 

Had I known yesterday you could take

The turgid electric ache away,

Drink it up with your proud 

White body, as lovely white lightning 

Is drunk from an agonised sky by the earth,

I might have hated you, Helen. 

But since my limbs gushed full of fire,

Since from out of my blood and bone

Poured a heavy flame

To you, earth of my atmosphere, stone

Of my steel, lovely white flint of desire,

You have no name.

Earth of my swaying atmosphere,

Substance of my inconstant breath,

I cannot but cleave to you. 

Since you have drunken up the drear

Painful electric storm, and death

Is washed from the blue 

Of my eyes, I see you beautiful. 

You are strong and passive and beautiful,

I come like winds that uncertain hover;

But you

Are the earth I hover over. 

Humming-Bird 

I can imagine, in some otherworld

Primeval-dumb, far back

In that most awful stillness, that only gasped and hummed,

Humming-birds raced down the avenues.

Before anything had a soul,

While life was a heave of Matter, half inanimate,

This little bit chipped off in brilliance

And went whizzing through the slow, vast, succulent stems.

I believe there were no flowers, then

In the world where the humming-bird flashed ahead of creation.

I believe he pierced the slow vegetable veins with his long beak.

Probably he was big

As mosses, and little lizards, they say were once big.

Probably he was a jabbing, terrifying monster.

We look at him through the wrong end of the long telescope of Time,

Luckily for us.