The Rainbow

The Rainbow D H Lawrence
Table of Contents

Chapter 1
How Tom Brangwen Married a Polish Lady
Chapter 2
They Live at the Marsh
Chapter 3
Childhood of Anna Lensky
Chapter 4
Girlhood of Anna Brangwen
Chapter 5
Wedding at the Marsh
Chapter 6
Anna Victrix
Chapter 7
The Cathedral

Chapter 8
The Child
Chapter 9
The Marsh and the Flood
Chapter 10
The Widening Circle
Chapter 11
First Love
Chapter 12
Shame
Chapter 13
The Man's World
Chapter 14
The Widening Circle
Chapter 15
The Bitterness of Ecstasy
Chapter 16
The Rainbow

Chapter 1
How Tom Brangwen Married a Polish Lady
I
The Brangwens had lived for generations on the Marsh Farm, in the
meadows where the Erewash twisted sluggishly through alder trees,
separating Derbyshire from Nottinghamshire. Two miles away, a
church-tower stood on a hill, the houses of the little country town
climbing assiduously up to it. Whenever one of the Brangwens in the
fields lifted his head from his work, he saw the church-tower at Ilkeston
in the empty sky. So that as he turned again to the horizontal land, he
was aware of something standing above him and beyond him in the
distance.
There was a look in the eyes of the Brangwens as if they were
expecting something unknown, about which they were eager. They had
that air of readiness for what would come to them, a kind of surety, an
expectancy, the look of an inheritor.
They were fresh, blond, slow-speaking people, revealing themselves
plainly, but slowly, so that one could watch the change in their eyes
from laughter to anger, blue, lit-up laughter, to a hard blue-staring
anger; through all the irresolute stages of the sky when the weather is
changing.
Living on rich land, on their own land, near to a growing town, they
had forgotten what it was to be in straitened circumstances. They had
never become rich, because there were always children, and the
patrimony was divided every time. But always, at the Marsh, there was
ample.
So the Brangwens came and went without fear of necessity, working
hard because of the life that was in them, not for want of the money.
Neither were they thriftless. They were aware of the last halfpenny, and
instinct made them not waste the peeling of their apple, for it would
help to feed the cattle. But heaven and earth was teeming around them,

and how should this cease? They felt the rush of the sap in spring, they
knew the wave which cannot halt, but every year throws forward the
seed to begetting, and, falling back, leaves the young-born on the earth.
They knew the intercourse between heaven and earth, sunshine drawn
into the breast and bowels, the rain sucked up in the daytime,
nakedness that comes under the wind in autumn, showing the birds'
nests no longer worth hiding. Their life and interrelations were such;
feeling the pulse and body of the soil, that opened to their furrow for
the grain, and became smooth and supple after their ploughing, and
clung to their feet with a weight that pulled like desire, lying hard and
unresponsive when the crops were to be shorn away. The young corn
waved and was silken, and the lustre slid along the limbs of the men
who saw it. They took the udder of the cows, the cows yielded milk and
pulse against the hands of the men, the pulse of the blood of the teats of
the cows beat into the pulse of the hands of the men. They mounted
their horses, and held life between the grip of their knees, they
harnessed their horses at the wagon, and, with hand on the bridle-rings,
drew the heaving of the horses after their will.
In autumn the partridges whirred up, birds in flocks blew like spray
across the fallow, rooks appeared on the grey, watery heavens, and flew
cawing into the winter. Then the men sat by the fire in the house where
the women moved about with surety, and the limbs and the body of the
men were impregnated with the day, cattle and earth and vegetation and
the sky, the men sat by the fire and their brains were inert, as their
blood flowed heavy with the accumulation from the living day.
The women were different. On them too was the drowse of
blood-intimacy, calves sucking and hens running together in droves,
and young geese palpitating in the hand while the food was pushed
down their throttle. But the women looked out from the heated, blind
intercourse of farm-life, to the spoken world beyond. They were aware
of the lips and the mind of the world speaking and giving utterance,
they heard the sound in the distance, and they strained to listen.
It was enough for the