Tortoises

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Title: Tortoises
Author: D. H. Lawrence
Release Date: August 31, 2007 [EBook #22475]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
0. START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TORTOISES
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Produced by David Widger
TORTOISES
By D. H. Lawrence
NEW YORK
THOMAS SELTZER
1921
CONTENTS
Baby Tortoise
Tortoise-Shell

Tortoise Family Connections
Lui et Elle
Tortoise Gallantry
Tortoise Shout
BABY TORTOISE
You know what it is to be born alone,
Baby tortoise!
The first day
to heave your feet little by little
from the shell,
Not yet awake,
And remain lapsed on earth,
Not
quite alive.
A tiny, fragile, half-animate bean.
To open your tiny beak-mouth, that looks as if
it would never open,
Like some iron door;
To lift the upper
hawk-beak from the lower base
And reach your skinny little neck

And take your first bite at some dim bit of
herbage,
Alone, small insect,
Tiny bright-eye,
Slow one.
To take your first solitary bite
And move on your slow, solitary hunt.

Your bright, dark little eye,
Your eye of a dark disturbed night,

Under its slow lid, tiny baby tortoise,
So indomitable.
No one ever heard you complain.
You draw your head forward, slowly, from your
little wimple
And set forward, slow-dragging, on your fourpinned
toes,
Rowing slowly forward.
Whither away, small bird?

Rather like a baby working its limbs,
Except that you make slow,
ageless progress
And a baby makes none.
The touch of sun excites you,
And the long ages, and the lingering
chill
Make you pause to yawn,
Opening your impervious mouth,

Suddenly beak-shaped, and very wide, like some
suddenly gaping pincers;
Soft red tongue, and hard thin gums,
Then
close the wedge of your little mountain
front,
Your face, baby tortoise.
Do you wonder at the world, as slowly you turn
your head in its wimple
And look with laconic, black eyes?
Or is
sleep coming over you again,
The non-life?
You are so hard to wake.
Are you able to wonder?
Or is it just your indomitable will and pride of
the first life
Looking round
And slowly pitching itself against the
inertia
Which had seemed invincible?
The vast inanimate,
And the fine brilliance of your so tiny eye.
Challenger.
Nay, tiny shell-bird,
What a huge vast inanimate it is, that you must
row against,
What an incalculable inertia.
Challenger.
Little Ulysses, fore-runner,
No bigger than my thumb-nail,
Buon

viaggio.
All animate creation on your shoulder,
Set forth, little Titan, under
your battle-shield.
The ponderous, preponderate,
Inanimate universe;
And you are
slowly moving, pioneer, you alone.
How vivid your travelling seems now, in the
troubled sunshine,
Stoic, Ulyssean atom;
Suddenly hasty, reckless,
on high toes.
Voiceless little bird,
Resting your head half out of your wimple
In
the slow dignity of your eternal pause.
Alone, with no sense of being
alone,
And hence six times more solitary;
Fulfilled of the slow
passion of pitching through
immemorial ages
Your little round house in the midst of chaos.
Over the garden earth,
Small bird,
Over the edge of all things.
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.
The Cross, the Cross
Goes deeper in than we know,
Deeper into life;

Right into the marrow
And through the bone.
TORTOISE-SHELL
Along the back of the baby tortoise
The scales are locked in an arch
like a bridge,
Scale-lapping, like a lobster's sections
Or a bee's.
Then crossways down his sides
Tiger-stripes and wasp-bands.
Five,
and five again, and five again,
And round the edges twenty-five little

ones,
The sections of the baby tortoise shell.
Four, and a keystone;
Four, and a keystone;
Four, and a keystone;

Then twenty-four, and a tiny little keystone.
It needed Pythagoras to see life placing her
counters on the living back
Of the baby tortoise;
Life establishing
the first eternal mathematical
tablet,
Not in stone, like the Judean Lord, or bronze, but
in life-clouded, life-rosy tortoise-shell.
The first little mathematical gentleman
Stepping, wee mite, in his
loose trousers
Under all the eternal dome of mathematical law.
Fives, and tens,
Threes and fours and twelves,
All the volte face of
decimals,
The whirligig of dozens and the pinnacle of seven,
Turn
him on his back,
The kicking little beetle,
And there again, on his
shell-tender, earth-touching
belly,
The long cleavage of division, upright of the
eternal cross.
And on either side count five,
On each side, two above, on each side,
two below
The dark bar horizontal.
It goes right through him, the sprottling insect,
Through his
cross-wise cloven psyche,
Through his five-fold complex-nature.
So turn him over on his toes again;
Four pin-point toes, and a
problematical thumbpiece,
Four rowing limbs, and one wedge-balancinghead,

Four and one makes five, which is the clue to all
mathematics.
The Lord wrote it all down on the little slate
Of the baby tortoise.
Outward and visible indication of the plan within,
The complex,
manifold involvedness of