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b'DH Lawrence read by Classic Poetry Aloud:\\nhttp://www.classicpoetryaloud.com/\\nGiving voice to the poetry of the past.\\n \\n---------------------------------------\\n \\nSnake\\nby DH Lawrence (1885 \\u2013 1930)\\n\\nA snake came to my water-trough\\nOn a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,\\nTo drink there.\\n\\nIn the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob tree\\nI came down the steps with my pitcher\\nAnd must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before me.\\n\\nHe reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom\\nAnd trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the\\n edge of the stone trough\\nAnd rested his throat upon the stone bottom,\\nAnd where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,\\nHe sipped with his straight mouth,\\nSoftly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,\\nSilently.\\n\\nSomeone was before me at my water-trough,\\nAnd I, like a second-comer, waiting.\\n\\nHe lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,\\nAnd looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,\\nAnd flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,\\nAnd stooped and drank a little more,\\nBeing earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth\\nOn the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.\\n\\nThe voice of my education said to me\\nHe must be killed,\\nFor in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.\\nAnd voices in me said, If you were a man\\nYou would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.\\n\\nBut must I confess how I liked him,\\nHow glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough\\nAnd depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,\\nInto the burning bowels of this earth?\\n\\nWas it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?\\nWas it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?\\nWas it humility, to feel so honoured?\\nI felt so honoured.\\n\\nAnd yet those voices:\\nIf you were not afraid, you would kill him!\\n\\nAnd truly I was afraid, I was most afraid,\\nBut even so, honoured still more\\nThat he should seek my hospitality\\nFrom out the dark door of the secret earth.\\n\\nHe drank enough\\nAnd lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,\\nAnd flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,\\nSeeming to lick his lips,\\nAnd looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,\\nAnd slowly turned his head,\\nAnd slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,\\nProceeded to draw his slow length curving round\\nAnd climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.\\n\\nAnd as he put his head into that dreadful hole,\\nAnd as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,\\nA sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into\\n that horrid black hole,\\nDeliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,\\nOvercame me now his back was turned.\\n\\nI looked round, I put down my pitcher,\\nI picked up a clumsy log\\nAnd threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.\\n\\nI think it did not hit him,\\nBut suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in\\n undignified haste,\\nWrithed like lightning, and was gone\\nInto the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,\\nAt which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.\\n\\nAnd immediately I regretted it.\\nI thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!\\nI despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.\\n\\nAnd I thought of the albatross,\\nAnd I wished he would come back, my snake.\\n\\nFor he seemed to me again like a king,\\nLike a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,\\nNow due to be crowned again.\\n\\nAnd so, I missed my chance with one of the lords\\nOf life.\\nAnd I have something to expiate:\\nA pettiness.\\n\\n\\n\\nFirst aired: 30 May 2008\\n\\nFor hundreds more poetry readings, visit the Classic Poetry Aloud index.\\n\\nReading \\xa9 Classic Poetry Aloud 2009'