Analysis of Tortoise Shout
David Herbert Lawrence 1885 (Eastwood, Nottinghamshire) – 1930 (Vence)
I thought he was dumb,
I said he was dumb,
Yet I've heard him cry.
First faint scream,
Out of life's unfathomable dawn,
Far off, so far, like a madness, under the horizon's dawning rim,
Far, far off, far scream.
Tortoise in extremis.
Why were we crucified into sex?
Why were we not left rounded off, and finished in ourselves,
As we began,
As he certainly began, so perfectly alone?
A far, was-it-audible scream,
Or did it sound on the plasm direct?
Worse than the cry of the new-born,
A scream,
A yell,
A shout,
A pæan,
A death-agony,
A birth-cry,
A submission,
All tiny, tiny, far away, reptile under the first dawn.
War-cry, triumph, acute-delight, death-scream reptilian,
Why was the veil torn?
The silken shriek of the soul's torn membrane?
The male soul's membrane
Torn with a shriek half music, half horror.
Crucifixion.
Male tortoise, cleaving behind the hovel-wall of that dense female,
Mounted and tense, spread-eagle, out-reaching out of the shell
In tortoise-nakedness,
Long neck, and long vulnerable limbs extruded, spread-eagle over her house-roof,
And the deep, secret, all-penetrating tail curved beneath her walls,
Reaching and gripping tense, more reaching anguish in uttermost tension
Till suddenly, in the spasm of coition, tupping like a jerking leap, and oh!
Opening its clenched face from his outstretched neck
And giving that fragile yell, that scream,
Super-audible,
From his pink, cleft, old-man's mouth,
Giving up the ghost,
Or screaming in Pentecost, receiving the ghost.
His scream, and his moment's subsidence,
The moment of eternal silence,
Yet unreleased, and after the moment, the sudden, startling jerk of coition, and at once
The inexpressible faint yell --
And so on, till the last plasm of my body was melted back
To the primeval rudiments of life, and the secret.
So he tups, and screams
Time after time that frail, torn scream
After each jerk, the longish interval,
The tortoise eternity,
Agelong, reptilian persistence,
Heart-throb, slow heart-throb, persistent for the next spasm.
I remember, when I was a boy,
I heard the scream of a frog, which was caught with his foot in the mouth of an up-starting snake;
I remember when I first heard bull-frogs break into sound in the spring;
I remember hearing a wild goose out of the throat of night
Cry loudly, beyond the lake of waters;
I remember the first time, out of a bush in the darkness, a nightingale's piercing cries and gurgles startled the depths of my soul;
I remember the scream of a rabbit as I went through a wood at midnight;
I remember the heifer in her heat, blorting and blorting through the hours, persistent and irrepressible;
I remember my first terror hearing the howl of weird, amorous cats;
I remember the scream of a terrified, injured horse, the sheet-lightning
And running away from the sound of a woman in labor, something like an owl whooing,
And listening inwardly to the first bleat of a lamb,
The first wail of an infant,
And my mother singing to herself,
And the first tenor singing of the passionate throat of a young collier, who has long since drunk himself to death,
The first elements of foreign speech
On wild dark lips.
And more than all these,
And less than all these,
This last,
Strange, faint coition yell
Of the male tortoise at extremity,
Tiny from under the very edge of the farthest far-off horizon of life.
The cross,
The wheel on which our silence first is broken,
Sex, which breaks up our integrity, our single inviolability, our deep silence
Tearing a cry from us.
Sex, which breaks us into voice, sets us calling across the deeps, calling, calling for the complement,
Singing, and calling, and singing again, being answered, having found.
Torn, to become whole again, after long seeking for what is lost,
The same cry from the tortoise as from Christ, the Osiris-cry of abandonment,
That which is whole, torn asunder,
That which is in part, finding its whole again throughout the universe.
Scheme | AAB CDXC E EEFX CX GCHXFIBJD JGKKL JXHEXEJXMCNXOO EEEHXX ECNIEA XXPQEXQNEPMXRXXXE EEXHIX EJEE RX XRLE |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 11111 11111 11111 111 111010001 11111010100010101 11111 1001 10110011 101111010100001 1101 1110001110001 01111001 111110101 11011011 01 01 01 011 01100 011 0010 110101011010011 1110010111010 11011 010110111 0111 1101110110 010 11010101011111 10011101101101 0101 11011000101011010011 001101100110101 100101110100110 110000101111010101 10011111011 010110111 10100 1111111 10101 11001001001 110110010 010101010 100101001001010111011 0111 011101111101101 10010100110010 11101 11011111 1011010100 0100100 1010010 1111101010110 101011101 1101101111111001111101 10101111111011001 101010011110111 1100101110 10100111101001001101011001111 101001101011110111 10100100011011010010000100 101011101001111001 10100110101010110 010011011010010101111 01001001011101 0111110 011010101 001101010100110110111110111 011001101 1111 01111 01111 11 1111 1011010100 10110010110101101011 01 011110101110 11111001001010110110 100111 111101111100101101010100 10010010011010101 1101101101101111 011101011101110100 11111010 1110110110101010 |
Closest metre | Iambic hexameter |
Characters | 3,936 |
Words | 669 |
Sentences | 21 |
Stanzas | 15 |
Stanza Lengths | 3, 4, 1, 4, 2, 9, 5, 14, 6, 6, 17, 6, 4, 2, 4 |
Lines Amount | 87 |
Letters per line (avg) | 35 |
Words per line (avg) | 8 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 205 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 44 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on April 06, 2023
- 3:23 min read
- 85 Views
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"Tortoise Shout" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 1 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/7900/tortoise-shout>.
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