Pentecostal
Shall I tell you, then, how it is?
There came a cloven gleam,
Like a tongue of darkened flame,
To burn in me.
And so I seem
To have you still the same
In one world with me.
In the flicker of a flower,
In a worm that is blind, yet strives,
In the mouse that pauses to listen,
Glimmers our
Shadow as well, and deprives
Them none of their glisten.
In each shaken morsel
Our shadow trembles
As if it rippled from out of us hand in hand.
We are part and parcel
In shadow, nothing dissembles
Our darkened universe. You understand?
For I have told you plainly how it is.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on August 11, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Pentecostal” was published in the February 1919 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse.
D. H. Lawrence
David Herbert Lawrence, novelist, short-story writer, poet, and essayist, was born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England, on September 11, 1885. Though better known as a novelist, Lawrence's first-published works (in 1909) were poems, and his poetry, especially his evocations of the natural world, have since had a significant influence on many poets on both sides of the Atlantic.