Tortoises

by D.H. Lawrence

Tortoises is a collection of six poems by D.H. Lawrence inspired by his observation of tortoises going about their business, wild in the landscape of his home. They reveal something about tortoises, about the man watching them, and perhaps about the relationship of each with nature, where they dwell and develop through a lifetime, interconnected.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Animals, Fiction

ebook

Published August 31, 2007

About the author

David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English writer of the 20th century, whose prolific and diverse output included novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, literary criticism, and personal letters. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, human sexuality 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 influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the canonical "great tradition" of the English novel. He is now generally valued as a visionary thinker and a significant representative of modernism in English literature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.H._Law...

Reviews

[Sara]

i love the baby tortois poem.dital and deep in this.i love the other also but the baby the best

[Debbie Zapata · Rating 5 out of 5]

I began this collection wondering if I would understand the deeper meanings of Lawrence's poetry, since I have only read a few of his novels and at the time I read them, totally missed the not-so-hidden messages. The first poem here, Baby Tortoise, is so incredibly detailed that I felt I was in the garden with Lawrence, watching the little creature explore his world. We move on to examine the mathematical perfection of design in Tortoise Shell, next we meet Mother and Father Tortoise as the baby meanders around the garden in Tortoise Family Connections.

In Lui Et Elle, our attention shifts to the tortoise parents. About Mother, Lawrence says:
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.

And Father Tortoise is described as:
Agelessly silent,
And with a grim, reptile determination,
Cold, voiceless age-after-age behind him,
serpents' long obstinacy
Of horizontal persistence.

The final two poems of the collection, Tortoise Gallantry and Tortoise Shout, are stunning glimpses behind the curtain surrounding private connections made in the garden. And not just mating tortoises: Lawrence ponders
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.


I think this collection is lovely, and I am impressed with the ideas expressed in my first sample of D. H. Lawrence's poetry. I will be looking for more, and I will also re-visit his novels.

[Fin · Rating 3 out of 5]

You draw your head forward, slowly, from your
little wimple
And set forward, slow-dragging, on your four-
pinned toes,
Rowing slowly forward.
Whither away, small bird?

Starts off cutesy nature fluff, but by the end of the poem sequence it's somehow mutated into a feverish and misanthropic study of tortoise-sex-as-eternal-crucifixion.. so typical Lawrence I guess. Can see what Deleuze & Guattari are on about now.

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.

(this is about a tortoise orgasm)

[Octavia Cade · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've had this tiny little chapbook on my Kindle for ages; I think I first got it back when I was doing my PhD, and flipping through various nature writing collections. It is as appealingly weird as I remember. Basically, it does what it says on the tin. Tortoises contains six (fairly long) poems about, you guessed it, tortoises. Unless he's just bullshitting, Lawrence had a family of them living in his garden, and he seems thoroughly fascinated by them. He especially seems fascinated with tortoise sex, and let's be honest this is about what you'd expect from him. The female tortoise is very large, the male is very small, and it's all as awkward as you think and yet strangely entertaining, which is probably why he was watching them in the first place.

Not that I'm one to talk. If tortoises were fucking in my garden I'd probably watch them too, though I don't know that I'd go so far as to put the experience into verse.

[Bernardo Magalhães · Rating 5 out of 5]

o melhor dos melhores