Because it's Deep Dead Blue Poetry Month
This is an odd one. I remembered that my high school AP English teacher asked me to read a poem aloud in class one day, and that he told me afterwards that I sped through it too fast. I've always remembered that it was by Thomas Hardy, and that the word blue was repeated a lot. So a couple of days ago I started googling to try to find it, with no luck on multiple tries at multiple search terms. I dredged the word "gentian" out of my memory, tentatively, but that didn't help either. Then I removed Thomas Hardy from the search terms and googled "blue gentians poem", et voilà, up popped "Bavarian Gentians" by D.H. Lawrence.
It's different than my vague memories. Mostly I didn't remember the mythological aspects at all. But I did remember the incantatory repetition, and the sensuous layer upon layer of deepening dark blue. I remembered it being about death, but it ends up being about sex as well.
Bavarian Gentians
D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
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, torch-like, 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 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 splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on
the lost bride and her groom.
It's different than my vague memories. Mostly I didn't remember the mythological aspects at all. But I did remember the incantatory repetition, and the sensuous layer upon layer of deepening dark blue. I remembered it being about death, but it ends up being about sex as well.
Bavarian Gentians
D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
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, torch-like, 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 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 splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on
the lost bride and her groom.