Analysis of Lui et Elle
David Herbert Lawrence 1885 (Eastwood, Nottinghamshire) – 1930 (Vence)
She is large and matronly
And rather dirty,
A little sardonic-looking, as if domesticity had driven her to it.
Though what she does, except lay four eggs at random in the garden once a year
And put up with her husband,
I don't know.
She likes to eat.
She hurries up, striding reared on long uncanny legs
When food is going.
Oh yes, she can make haste when she likes.
She snaps the soft bread from my hand in great mouthfuls,
Opening her rather pretty wedge of an iron, pristine face
Into an enormously wide-beaked mouth
Like sudden curved scissors,
And gulping at more than she can swallow, and working her thick, soft tongue,
And having the bread hanging over her chin.
O Mistress, Mistress,
Reptile mistress,
Your eye is very dark, very bright,
And it never softens
Although you watch.
She knows,
She knows well enough to come for food,
Yet she sees me not;
Her bright eye sees, but not me, not anything,
Sightful, sightless, seeing and visionless,
Reptile mistress.
Taking bread in her curved, gaping, toothless mouth,
She has no qualm when she catches my finger in her steel overlapping gums,
But she hangs on, and my shout and my shrinking are nothing to her.
She does not even know she is nipping me with her curved beak.
Snake-like she draws at my finger, while I drag it in horror away.
Mistress, reptile mistress,
You are almost too large, I am almost frightened.
He is much smaller,
Dapper beside her,
And ridiculously small.
Her laconic eye has an earthy, materialistic look,
His, poor darling, is almost fiery.
His wimple, his blunt-prowed face,
His low forehead, his skinny neck, his long, scaled, striving legs,
So striving, striving,
Are all more delicate than she,
And he has a cruel scar on his shell.
Poor darling, biting at her feet,
Running beside her like a dog, biting her earthy, splay feet,
Nipping her ankles,
Which she drags apathetic away, though without retreating into her shell.
Agelessly silent,
And with a grim, reptile determination,
Cold, voiceless age-after-age behind him, serpents' long obstinacy
Of horizontal persistence.
Little old man
Scuffling beside her, bending down, catching his opportunity,
Parting his steel-trap face, so suddenly, and seizing her scaly ankle,
And hanging grimly on,
Letting go at last as she drags away,
And closing his steel-trap face.
His steel-trap, stoic, ageless, handsome face.
Alas, what a fool he looks in this scuffle.
And how he feels it!
The lonely rambler, the stoic, dignified stalker through chaos,
The immune, the animate,
Enveloped in isolation,
Fore-runner.
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, ignominiously.
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.
Suddenly seizing the ugly ankle as she stretches out to walk,
Roaming over the sods,
Or, if it happen to show, at her pointed, heavy tail
Beneath the low-dropping back-board of her shell.
Their two shells like domed boats bumping,
Hers huge, his small;
Their splay feet rambling and rowing like paddles,
And stumbling mixed up in one another,
In the race of love --
Two tortoises,
She huge, he small.
She seems earthily apathetic,
And he has a reptile's awful persistence.
I heard a woman pitying her, pitying the Mère Tortue.
While I, I pity Monsieur.
'He pesters her and torments her,' said the woman.
How much more is he pestered and tormented, say I.
What can he do?
He is dumb, he is visionless,
Conceptionless.
His black, sad-lidded eye sees but beholds not
As her earthen mound moves on,
But he catches the folds of vulnerable, leathery skin,
Nail-studded, that shake beneath her shell,
And drags at these with his beak,
Drags and drags and bites,
While she pulls herself free, and rows her dull mound along.
Scheme | aabxcx defxeghxxi jJxxx xxkfeJ hxlmn jc llo xagefap ddqp xras xatung gt bxxrlx rxvaevx ewa xxxs xexp foqlxwo xs blrx xeekuipmxx |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 1110100 01010 0100101011100110011 1111011111100010101 0111010 111 1111 1101101110101 11110 111111111 11011111011 1000101011110101 0110100111 110110 01011111100100111 01001101001 11010 1010 111101101 011010 111 11 111011111 11111 0111111110 111001 1010 10100110101 111111101100011001 1111011011011010 111101111011011 11111110111101001 101010 1111111110 11110 10010 0010001 001011110000101 111011100 111111 11101101111101 11010 11110011 0110101111 11010101 100101011001011 10010 111010011010100101 110 0101100010 11011010111011000 1010010 1011 1000101011010100 10111111000100110 010101 1011111101 0101111 1111010101 01101110110 01111 010100101010110 0010100 0100010 110 1111 0101110111010 10101110011 100101010101110100101 010011000100 1110001110010101 1111010001101 01100101001 11010101001 0010011110100110 01110100101 0101110001 111101110101 110101101101 11111111010 10010010101110111 101001 11110111010101 01011011101 11111110 0111 11110010110 01001101010 00111 1100 1111 111010 0110110010 1101010001000111 1111001 11000101010 111111001011 1111 111111 1 111111111 1010111 111001110001001 110110101 0111111 10101 1110110101101 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 4,193 |
Words | 728 |
Sentences | 39 |
Stanzas | 21 |
Stanza Lengths | 6, 10, 5, 6, 5, 2, 3, 7, 4, 4, 6, 2, 6, 7, 3, 4, 4, 7, 2, 4, 10 |
Lines Amount | 107 |
Letters per line (avg) | 32 |
Words per line (avg) | 7 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 161 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 35 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 3:38 min read
- 101 Views
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"Lui et Elle" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 27 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/7855/lui-et-elle>.
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