Personal Choice Volume 2 No.27

Bare Almond-Trees

Wet almond-trees, in the rain,

Like iron sticking grimly out of earth;

Black almond trunks, in the rain,

Like iron implements twisted, hideous, out of the earth,

Out of the deep, soft fledge of Sicilian winter-green,

Earth-grass uneatable,

Almond trunks curving blackly, iron-dark, climbing the

    slopes.

Almond-tree, beneath the terrace rail,

Black, rusted, iron trunk,

You have welded your thin stems finer,

Like steel, like sensitive steel in the air,

Grey, lavender, sensitive steel, curving thinly and brittly up

    in a parabola.

What are you doing in the December rain?

Have you a strange electric sensitiveness in your steel tips?

Do you feel the air for electric influences

Like some strange magnetic apparatus?

Do you take in messages, in some strange code,

From heaven's wolfish, wandering electricity, that prowls so

    constantly round Etna?

Do you take the whisper of sulphur from the air?

Do you hear the chemical accents of the sun?

Do you telephone the roar of the waters over the earth?

And from all this, do you make calculations?

Sicily, December's Sicily in a mass of rain

With iron branching blackly, rusted like old, twisted

    implements

And brandishing and stooping over earth's wintry fledge,

    climbing the slopes

Of uneatable soft green!

DH Lawrence

David Herbert Lawrence (1885 – 1930) was an English writer, novelist, poet and essayist. His works reflect on modernity, industrialization, sexuality, emotional health, vitality, spontaneity and instinct. His best-known novels - Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley's Lover - notably concerned gay and lesbian relationships, and were the subject of censorship trials. Lawrence's opinions and artistic preferences earned him many enemies, and he endured persecution and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile, four years of which he described as a ‘savage enough pilgrimage’. At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. However, English novelist and critic E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as ‘the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation.’ Later, English literary critic F. R. Leavis also championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness.