Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.
The Evening LandD. H. Lawrence
O A
The sun sets in you!
Are you the grave of our day?
I would rather you came to me.
Mahomet never went to any mountain
Save it had first approached him and cajoled his soul.
America—
I wish you would.
You who never find yourself in love
But only lose yourself further, decomposing.
Your pristine isolate integrity, lost aeons ago,
Your singleness within the universe.
And break further and further down
Your bounds of isolation,
But who never rise, resurrected, from this grave of mingling,
In a new proud singleness, America.
Like a be-aureoled, bleached skeleton hovering
Its cage-ribs in the social heaven, beneficent.
Into machine-uprisen perfect man.
Is not so frightening as that clean smooth
Automaton of your uprisen self,
Machine American.
And answer the first machine-cut question from the lips of your iron men?—
Put the first cents into metallic fingers of your officers,
And sit beside the steel-straight arms of your fair women,
American?
Of the solid click of your human contact;
And after this
The winding-sheet of your selfless ideal love—
Boundless love,
Like a poison gas.
Not boundless?
This boundless love is like the bad smell
Of something gone wrong in the middle—
All this philanthropy and benevolence on other people’s behalf
Just a bad smell.
Your elvishness,
Your New England uncanniness,
Your western brutal faery quality.
Yankee, Yankee—
What we call human—
Carries me where I want to he carried.
What we call human, and what we don’t call human?
The rose would smell as sweet.
And to be limited by a mere word is to be less than a hopping flea, which hops over such an obstruction at his first jump.
Your weird bright perfect productive mechanism—
Two spectres.
A dark unfathomed wistfulness, utterly un-Jewish;
A grave stoic endurance, non-European;
An ultimate fearlessness, un-African;
An irrational generosity, non-Oriental.
Glimpsed now and then.
You don’t know yourself.
And I, who am half in love with you,
What am I in love with—
My own imaginings?
Say it is not so.
America, America,
Of all your machines;
Say, in the deep sockets of your idealistic skull—
Dark aboriginal eyes,
Stoic, able to wait through ages,
Glancing.
And white words, white-wash American—
Deep pulsing of a strange heart,
New throb, like a stirring under the false dawn that precedes the real.
Elvish, lurking among the undergrowth
Of many-stemmed machines and chimneys that smoke like pine-trees.
Modern, unissued, instinctive America,
Your nascent faery people
Lurking among the deeps of your industrial thicket,
Allure me till I am beside myself,
A nympholept.
Whatever he meant!