Snake

BY D. H. LAWRENCE

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.

 

                                                                                                     Taormina

An Arundel Tomb

By Phillop Larkin

Side by sideSide by side To see a recent photograph of this tomb of the Earl and Countess of Arundel that Larkin is describing, click here. , their faces blurred,    The earl and countess lie in stone,    Their proper habitshabits Clothes vaguely shown    As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,    And that faint hint of the absurd—    The little dogs under their feet. Such plainness of the pre-baroque pre-baroque In Larkin’s pronunciation, the phrase rhymes with 'shock.' The Baroque period, exemplified by ornamentation, followed the Renaissance. This tomb was sculpted in the Middle Ages.    Hardly involves the eye, until It meets his left-hand gauntletgauntlet An armored glove, worn in the Middle Ages, still    Clasped empty in the other; and    One sees, with a sharp tender shock,    His hand withdrawn, holding her hand. They would not think to lie so long.    Such faithfulness in effigyeffigy A sculptured likeness Was just a detail friends would see: A sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace    Thrown off in helping to prolong    The Latin names around the base. They would not guess how early in Their supinesupine On their backs stationary voyage The air would change to soundless damage,    Turn the old tenantry away; How soon succeeding eyes begin To look, not read. Rigidly they Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths    Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light Each summer thronged the glass. A bright    Litter of birdcalls strewed the same Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths    The endless altered people came, Washing at their identity.    Now, helpless in the hollow of    An unarmorial age, a trough Of smoke in slow suspended skeinsskeins Used figuratively, a skein is a quantity of thread     Above their scrap of history,    Only anOnly an When first published in June 1956 in the London Magazine, the line began: Only their attitude remains: Time has transfigured them into    Untruth. The stone fidelity They hardly meant has come to be    Their final blazonblazon Both a coat of arms, and a public proclamation, and to prove    Our almost-instinct almost true:    What will survive of us is love.