Written by: Aram Adler-Smith
D.H. Lawrence (1885 to 1930) was a 20th-century English poet whom I would describe as “infamously influential.” He deserves this epithet for many of his literary triumphs, but the primary triumph is his innovative and open discussion of sexuality. D.H. Lawrence’s work made the pious clutch their pearls, it winded the rigid moralists from their protest, and it transformed all who believed sex ought to be kept under the covers into outraged litigants. A flawed man in many ways, D.H. Lawrence also pushed English society to consider sexuality as it is: a natural and emotional part of what it means to be a human — that is, an animal.
If any of his multitudinous written works stand as an example of D.H. Lawrence’s creative discussion of sexuality, it is his poem “Tortoise Shout.” This poem was published by Thomas Seltzer in D.H. Lawrence’s 1921 collection, Tortoises. Unknowingly, I came to discover the poem in a small book shop (though more of a literary cavern) in the Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye. The discovery of this masterful work is irrelevant to my description of how D.H. Lawrence’s creative golden thread flows through it, but I will say that I found “Tortoise Shout” not in a copy of Tortoises but in a bland, grey edition of The Ship of Death (1932). Though I would not have expected it, the erotic glow, the dazzling sexual turmoil, and the crystal clear image of the voyeur D.H. Lawrence staring poetically at his pet Tortoises having it on in his garden in Sicily refused to leave my mind.
The poem is long and mainly focuses on the sound (in this case, the male sound) of heterosexual intercourse. In some ways, the emphasis of male vocalization during this intercourse enables D.H. Lawrence to critique and minimize the societally overinflated importance of male pleasure in heterosexual encounters compared to that of the woman. The male tortoise is described in a way that is almost degrading, and his moan is heard as a “submission” or a “death-agony” — it is featured in this tone prominently. All such creative choices point to D.H. Lawrence intending the reader to view the male party critically.
“Why were we crucified into sex?” is how D.H. Lawrence phrases his initial disdain towards the concept. The poem begins with contempt and near scorn for the male party in a heterosexual encounter, but this swiftly transforms into a case for conceptualizing sex as scaffolding for removing selfhood and autonomy. D.H. Lawrence curses sexual urges and equates sexual vocalization with numerous animalistic cries of pain and suffering. What is surprising, however, is that directly after illustrating sex as a curse that breaks the integrity and stoic silence of a self-sufficient person, D.H. Lawrence ends the poem in an intimate and entirely different way. He recasts the sounds of suffering he hears in the sexual intercourse between his pet tortoises as an expedient for finding a truer peace. The poem ends with allusions to multiple biblical entities, but it also alludes quite strongly to the Myth of Aristophanes. The myth (as written by Plato) describes the human desire for sexual wholeness as the result of an ancient, godly intervention that split the once double-beings in two. Here, humans search for a sexual partner out of an involuntary need to find the other half (or other person) cut away from them by the gods. It is in this way that D.H. Lawrence presents a nuanced framework for viewing sexuality in the poem “Tortoise Shout.” It is a framework that condemns the overinflated valuation of male pleasure in sex, presents an understanding of sexuality as an animalistic and natural requirement that may (in his view) drain our ability to live truly at peace with ourselves, and gives a view of sex as wonderfully positive for human interconnectedness.
D.H. Lawrence’s artistic interaction with sexuality was innovative and freeing for me, and I think that you (the reader) will find that you have never read anything quite like it. The poem “Tortoise Shout” is not obscene, but rather unapologetic and genuine. I encourage you to give it an open-minded read.
TORTOISE SHOUT
By D.H. Lawrence
I thought he was dumb,
I said he was dumb,
Yet I’ve heard him cry.
First faint scream,
Out of life’s unfathomable dawn,
Far off, so far, like a madness, under the horizon’s dawning rim,
Far, far off, far scream.
Tortoise in extremis.
Why were we crucified into sex?
Why were we not left rounded off, and finished in ourselves,
As we began,
As he certainly began, so perfectly alone?
A far, was-it-audible scream,
Or did it sound on the plasm direct?
Worse than the cry of the new-born,
A scream,
A yell,
A shout,
A pæan,
A death-agony,
A birth-cry,
A submission,
All tiny, tiny, far away, reptile under the first dawn.
War-cry, triumph, acute-delight, death-scream reptilian,
Why was the veil torn?
The silken shriek of the soul’s torn membrane?
The male soul’s membrane
Torn with a shriek half music, half horror.
Crucifixion.
Male tortoise, cleaving behind the hovel-wall of that dense female,
Mounted and tense, spread-eagle, out-reaching out of the shell
In tortoise-nakedness,
Long neck, and long vulnerable limbs extruded, spread-eagle over her house-roof,
And the deep, secret, all-penetrating tail curved beneath her walls,
Reaching and gripping tense, more reaching anguish in uttermost tension
Till suddenly, in the spasm of coition, tupping like a jerking leap, and oh!
Opening its clenched face from his outstretched neck
And giving that fragile yell, that scream,
Super-audible,
From his pink, cleft, old-man’s mouth,
Giving up the ghost,
Or screaming in Pentecost, receiving the ghost.
His scream, and his moment’s subsidence,
The moment of eternal silence,
Yet unreleased, and after the moment, the sudden, startling jerk of coition, and at once
The inexpressible faint yell —
And so on, till the last plasm of my body was melted back
To the primeval rudiments of life, and the secret.
So he tups, and screams
Time after time that frail, torn scream
After each jerk, the longish interval,
The tortoise eternity,
Agelong, reptilian persistence,
Heart-throb, slow heart-throb, persistent for the next spasm.
I remember, when I was a boy,
I heard the scream of a frog, which was caught with his foot in the mouth of an up-starting snake;
I remember when I first heard bull-frogs break into sound in the spring;
I remember hearing a wild goose out of the throat of night
Cry loudly, beyond the lake of waters;
I remember the first time, out of a bush in the darkness, a nightingale’s piercing cries and gurgles startled the depths of my soul;
I remember the scream of a rabbit as I went through a wood at midnight;
I remember the heifer in her heat, blorting and blorting through the hours, persistent and irrepressible;
I remember my first terror hearing the howl of weird, amorous cats;
I remember the scream of a terrified, injured horse, the sheet-lightning
And running away from the sound of a woman in labor, something like an owl whooing,
And listening inwardly to the first bleat of a lamb,
The first wail of an infant,
And my mother singing to herself,
And the first tenor singing of the passionate throat of a young collier, who has long since drunk himself to death,
The first elements of foreign speech
On wild dark lips.
And more than all these,
And less than all these,
This last,
Strange, faint coition yell
Of the male tortoise at extremity,
Tiny from under the very edge of the farthest far-off horizon of life.
The cross,
The wheel on which our silence first is broken,
Sex, which breaks up our integrity, our single inviolability, our deep silence
Tearing a cry from us.
Sex, which breaks us into voice, sets us calling across the deeps, calling, calling for the complement,
Singing, and calling, and singing again, being answered, having found.
Torn, to become whole again, after long seeking for what is lost,
The same cry from the tortoise as from Christ, the Osiris-cry of abandonment,
That which is whole, torn asunder,
That which is in part, finding its whole again throughout the universe.
Link to Poem: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47366/tortoise-shout
Image Credit: The illustration featuring two tortoises making love was crafted by the artist Alan James Robinson. This is one of many illustrations to feature in a 1983 limited edition publication of D.H. Lawrence’s Tortoises.
Featured Image Caption: A half-plate glass negative featuring the English poet D.H. Lawrence, circa 1915. D.H. Lawrence sits with gravitas, gazing to the camera at his left side.
