Snake

[muddywatersss.livejournal.com]

 A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there. 


In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark
         carob tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at
        the trough before me. 


He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the
      gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied
      down, over the edge of the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a
     small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack 
     long body, 
Silently. 


Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second-comer, waiting. 


He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and
      mused a moment, 
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning
     bowels of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking. 


The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black black snakes are innocent, the
      gold are venomous. 


And voices in me said, If you were a man,
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish
       him off. 


But I must confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to
      drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless
Into the burning bowels of the earth?


I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.


I think it did not hit him;

But suddenly that part of him that was left behind con-
     vulsed in undignified haste,
Writhed like lightning and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-
     front
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascina-
    tion.  


And immediately I regretted it. 
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human
       education.  

And I thought of the albatross,
And I wished he would come back, my snake. 

For he seemed to me again like a king,

Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.  

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords

Of life.
And I have something to expiate:

A pettiness.    




d.h. lawrence