DH Lawrence is more known for writing banned novels, but his nature poems are sublime – far better than his cheeky fiction. Born in Nottingham, he ran off with his tutor’s wife, though they did stay together for the rest of their lives, until his early death age just 44.
While they lived in Sicily, DH wrote Snake. On coming across a venomous reptile, his ‘English education’ tells him to throw a stick at it – the snake is not injured but convulses and goes back underground. Immediately he feels shame, missing out for a chance at meeting one of the ‘lords of life’.
This poem will kind of make you love snakes, even if you’re terrified of them. Read it aloud!
A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough
before me.He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over
the edge of the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second-comer, waiting.He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused
a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels
of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold
are venomous.And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink
at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?
Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?
Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid,
But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders,
and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into
that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing
himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed
in an undignified haste,
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.And I thought of the albatross,
And I wished he would come back, my snake.For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.
Baby Tortoise (also by DH Lawrence)
Lawrence’s poem ‘Baby Tortoise‘ also speaks to empathy for other creatures:
To open your tiny beak-mouth, that looks as if it would never open
Like some iron door:
You draw your head forward, slowly, from your little wimple
And set forward, slow-dragging, on your four-pinned toes,
Rowing slowly forward.
Rather like a baby working its limbs.
Except that you make slow, ageless progress
And a baby makes none.
Traveller,
With your tail tucked a little on one side
Like a gentleman in a long-skirted coat.All life carried on your shoulder,
Invincible fore-runner.
