The Seething Poetry of the Incarnate Now is Supreme

By: D.H. Lawrence

“One great mystery of time is terra incognita to us: the instant…The quick of all time is the instant. The quick of all the universe, of all creation, is the incarnate, carnal self. Poetry gave us the clue: free verse: Whitman. Now we know.”

— D.H. Lawrence

Life, the ever present, knows no finality, no finished crystallization. The perfect rose is only a running flame, emerging and flowing off, and never in any sense at rest, static, finished. Herein lies its transcendent loveliness.

The whole tide of all life and all time suddenly heaves, and appears before us as an apparition, a revelation. We look at the very white quick of nascent creation. A water lily heaves herself from the flood, looks round, gleams, and is gone. We have seen the incarnation, the quick of the ever-swirling flood.

We have seen the invisible.

We have seen, we have touched, we have partaken of the very substance of creative change, creative mutation.

If you tell me about the lotus, tell me of nothing changeless or eternal. Tell me of the mystery of the inexhaustible, forever-unfolding creative spark.

Tell me of the incarnate disclosure of the flux, mutation in blossom, laughter and decay perfectly open in their transit, nude in their movement before us.

Let me feel the mud and the heavens in my lotus. Let me feel the heavy, silting, sucking mud, the spinning of sky winds. Let me feel them both in purest contact, the nakedness of sucking weight, nakedly passing radiance.

Give me nothing fixed, set, static.

Don't give me the infinite or the eternal: nothing of infinity, nothing of eternity. Give me the still, white seething, the incandescence and the coldness of the incarnate moment: the moment, the quick of all change and haste and opposition: the moment, the immediate present, the Now.

The immediate moment is not a drop of water running downstream. It is the source and issue, the bubbling up of the stream. Here, in this instant moment, up bubbles the stream of time, out of the wells of futurity, flowing on to the oceans of the past.

The source, the issue, the creative quick. There is poetry of this immediate present, instant poetry, as well as poetry of the infinite past and the infinite future.

The seething poetry of the incarnate Now is supreme, beyond even the everlasting of the before and after.

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This beautiful passage is from Lawrence’s essay, “The Poetry of the Present,” which was published as a preface to an edition of Lawrence’s New Poems (1920).

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