Bavarian Gentians
Not every man has gentians in his house
in Soft September, at slow, Sad Michaelmas.
Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark
darkening the daytime torchlike with the smoking blueness of Pluto's gloom,
ribbed and torch-like, with their blaze of darkness spread blue
down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day
torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto's dark-blue daze,
black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue,
giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter's pale lamps give off light,
lead me then, lead me the way.
Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!
let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower
down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness,
even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September
to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark
and Persephone herself is but a voice
or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom,
among the splendour of torches of darkness, shedding
darkness on the lost bride and her groom.
D. H. Lawrence
I see Lawrence in this poem, on the edge of Winter, sitting by his gentian, thinking of the world turning into the dark season, meditating on its blueness.
That deep blue - that dark!
"Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!
let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower..."
It's a fantasy of blue - it's like a prayer.
Down into frost and darkness -
down into death's country with a flower of hope for a guide?
Is this what they used to call Alchemy?
To carry a dark flower into the blackness where it becomes a light?
"Lead me then, lead me the way."
Even in the darkest place life is not extinguished.
