Page:Tortoises, DH Lawrence, 1921.djvu/37

The immune, the animate,
Enveloped in isolation,
Forerunner.
Now look at him!

Alas, the spear is through the side of his isolation.
His adolescence saw him crucified into sex,
Doomed, in the long crucifixion of desire, to seek
    his consummation beyond himself.
Divided into passionate duality,
He, so finished and immune, now broken into
    desirous fragmentariness,
Doomed to make an intolerable fool of himself
In his effort toward completion again.
 
Poor little earthy house-inhabiting Osiris,
The mysterious bull tore him at adolescence into
    pieces,
And he must struggle after reconstruction, igno-
    miniously.

And so behold him following the tail
Of that mud-hovel of his slowly-rambling spouse,
Like some unhappy bull at the tail of a cow,
But with more than bovine, grim, earth-dank
    persistence,