A Spiritual Woman

David Herbert Lawrence 1885 (Eastwood, Nottinghamshire) – 1930 (Vence)



Close your eyes, my love, let me make you blind;  
     They have taught you to see  
Only a mean arithmetic on the face of things,  
A cunning algebra in the faces of men,  
     And God like geometry
Completing his circles, and working cleverly.  
 
I’ll kiss you over the eyes till I kiss you blind;  
     If I can—if any one could.  
Then perhaps in the dark you’ll have got what you want to find.
You’ve discovered so many bits, with your clever eyes,
     And I’m a kaleidoscope  
That you shake and shake, and yet it won’t come to your mind.
Now stop carping at me.—But God, how I hate you!  
     Do you fear I shall swindle you?  
Do you think if you take me as I am, that that will abate you
Somehow?—so sad, so intrinsic, so spiritual, yet so cautious, you
Must have me all in your will and your consciousness—  
     I hate you.

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 20, 2023

47 sec read
149

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABXXBB AXAXXACCCCXC
Closest metre Iambic hexameter
Characters 849
Words 158
Stanzas 2
Stanza Lengths 6, 12

David Herbert Lawrence

David Herbert Lawrence was an English writer and poet. His collected works represent, among other things, an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation. Lawrence's writing explores issues such as sexuality, emotional health, vitality, spontaneity, and instinct. Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage". At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." Later, the literary critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness. more…

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