Explore "Both Sides of the Medal" by D.H. Lawrence on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
AND because you love me / think you you do not hate me? / Ha, since you love me / to ecstasy / it follows you hate me to ecstasy.
Because when you hear me / go down the road outside the house / you must come to the window to watch me go, / do you think it is pure worship?
Because, when I sit in the room, / here, in my own house, / and you want to enlarge yourself with this friend of / mine, / such a friend as he is, / yet you cannot get beyond your awareness of me / you are held back by my being in the same world / with you, / do you think it is bliss alone? / sheer harmony?
No doubt if I were dead, you must / reach into death after me, / but would not your hate reach even more madly / than your love? / your impassioned, unfinished hate?
Since you have a passion for me, / as I for you, / does not that passion stand in your way like a / Balaam's ass? / and am I not Balaam's ass / golden-mouthed occasionally? / But mostly, do you not detest my bray?
Since you are confined in the orbit of me / do you not loathe the confinement? / Is not even the beauty and peace of an orbit / an intolerable prison to you, / as it is to everybody?
But we will learn to submit / each of us to the balanced, eternal orbit / wherein we circle on our fate / in strange conjunction.
What is chaos, my love? / It is not freedom. / A disarray of falling stars coming to nought.