Chapter 12 Whitman

by D. H. Lawrence

　　POST-MORTEM effects?

　　But what of Walt Whitman?

　　The 'good grey poet'.

　　Was he a ghost, with all his physicality?

　　The good grey poet.

　　Post-mortem effects. Ghosts.

　　A certain ghoulish insistency. A certain horrible pottage of human parts. A certain stridency and portentousness. A luridness about his beatitudes.

　　DEMOCRACY! THESE STATES! EIDOLONS! LOVERS, ENDLESS LOVERS!

　　ONE IDENTITY!

　　ONE IDENTITY!

　　I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE.

　　Do you believe me, when I say post-mortem effects ?

　　When the Pequod went down, she left many a rank and dirty steamboat still fussing in the seas. The Pequod sinks with all her souls, but their bodies rise again to man innumerable tramp steamers, and ocean-crossing liners. Corpses.

　　What we mean is that people may go on, keep on, and rush on, without souls. They have their ego and their will, that is enough to keep them going.

　　So that you see, the sinking of the Pequod was only a metaphysical tragedy after all. The world goes on just the same. The ship of the soul is sunk. But the machine-manipulating body works just the same: digests, chews gum, admires Botticelli and aches with amorous love.

　　I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE.

　　What do you make of that? I AM HE THAT ACHES. First generalization. First uncomfortable universalization. WITH AMOROUS LOVE! Oh, God! Better a bellyache. A bellyache is at least specific. But the ACHE OF AMOROUS LOVE!

　　Think of having that under your skin. All that!

　　I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE.

　　Walter, leave off. You are not HE. You are just a limited Walter. And your ache doesn't include all Amorous Love, by any means. If you ache you only ache with a small bit of amorous love, and there's so much more stays outside the cover of your ache, that you might be a bit milder about it.

　　I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE.

　　CHUFF! CHUFF! CHUFF!

　　CHU-CHU-CHU-CHU-CHUFF!

　　Reminds one of a steam-engine. A locomotive. They're the only things that seem to me to ache with amorous love. All that steam inside them. Forty million foot-pounds pressure. The ache of AMOROUS LOVE. Steam-pressure. CHUFF!

　　An ordinary man aches with love for Belinda, or his Native Land, or the Ocean, or the Stars, or the Oversoul: if he feels that an ache is in the fashion.

　　It takes a steam-engine to ache with AMOROUS LOVE. All of it.

　　Walt was really too superhuman. The danger of the superman is that he is mechanical.

　　They talk of his 'splendid animality'. Well, he'd got it on the brain, if that's the place for animality.

　　     I am he that aches with amorous love:

　　     Does the earth gravitate, does not all matter, aching, attract all matter?

　　     So the body of me to all I meet or know.