Not every man has gentians in his house <br />in Soft September, at slow, Sad Michaelmas. <br />Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark <br />darkening the daytime torchlike with the smoking blueness of Pluto's <br />gloom, <br />ribbed and torchlike, with their blaze of darkness spread blue <br />down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day <br />torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto's dark-blue daze, <br />black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue, <br />giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter's pale lamps give off <br />light, <br />lead me then, lead me the way. <br />Reach me a gentian, give me a torch! <br />Let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of a flower <br />down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness <br />down the way Persephone goes, just now, in first-frosted September <br />to the sightless realm where darkness is married to dark <br />and Persephone herself is but a voice, as a bride <br />a gloom invisible enfolded in the deeper dark <br />of the arms of Pluto as he ravishes her once again <br />and pierces her once more with his passion of the utter dark <br />among the splendour of black-blue torches, shedding <br />fathomless darkness on the nuptials. <br /> <br />Bavarian gentians, tall and dark, but dark <br />darkening the daytime torch-like with the smoking blueness of Pluto's gloom, <br />ribbed hellish flowers erect, with their blaze of darkness spread blue, <br />blown flat into points, by the heavy white draught of the day.<br /><br />David Herbert Lawrence<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/bavarian-gentians/
