Baby Tortoise¹

You know what it is to be born alone,

Baby tortoise!

The first day to heave your feet little by little

from the shell,

Not yet awake,

And remain lapsed on earth,

Not quite alive.

A tiny, fragile, half-animate bean.

To open your tiny beak-mouth, that looks as if

it would never open,

Like some iron door;

To lift the upper hawk-beak from the lower base

And reach your skinny little neck

And take your first bite at some dim bit of

herbage,

Alone, small insect,

Tiny bright-eye,

Slow one.

To take your first solitary bite

And move on your slow, solitary hunt.

Your bright, dark little eye,

Your eye of a dark disturbed night,

Under its slow lid, tiny baby tortoise,

So indomitable.

No one ever heard you complain.

You draw your head forward, slowly, from your

little wimple

And set forward, slow-dragging, on your four-

pinned toes,

Rowing slowly forward.

Whither away, small bird?

Rather like a baby working its limbs,

Except that you make slow, ageless progress

And a baby makes none.

The touch of sun excites you,

And the long ages, and the lingering chill

Make you pause to yawn,

Opening your impervious mouth,

Suddenly beak-shaped, and very wide, like some

suddenly gaping pincers;

Soft red tongue, and hard thin gums,

Then close the wedge of your little mountain

front,

Your face, baby tortoise.

Do you wonder at the world, as slowly you turn

your head in its wimple

And look with laconic, black eyes?

Or is sleep coming over you again,

The non-life?

You are so hard to wake.

Are you able to wonder?

Or is it just your indomitable will and pride of

the first life

Looking round

And slowly pitching itself against the inertia

Which had seemed invincible?

The vast inanimate,

And the fine brilliance of your so tiny eye,

Challenger.

Nay, tiny shell-bird,

What a huge vast inanimate it is, that you must

row against,

What an incalculable inertia.

Challenger,

Little Ulysses, fore-runner,

No bigger than my thumb-nail,

Buon viaggio.

All animate creation on your shoulder,

Set forth, little Titan, under your battle-shield.

The ponderous, preponderate,

Inanimate universe;

And you are slowly moving, pioneer, you alone.

How vivid your travelling seems now, in the

troubled sunshine,

Stoic, Ulyssean atom;

Suddenly hasty, reckless, on high toes.

Voiceless little bird,

Resting your head half out of your wimple

In the slow dignity of your eternal pause.

Alone, with no sense of being alone,

And hence six times more solitary;

Fulfilled of the slow passion of pitching through

immemorial ages

Your little round house in the midst of chaos.

Over the garden earth,

Small bird,

Over the edge of all things.

Traveller,

With your tail tucked a little on one side

Like a gentleman in a long-skirted coat.

All life carried on your shoulder,

Invincible fore-runner.

Editorial Comment. — David Herbert Lawrence [1885–1930] was a prominent but controversial classic English author and poet who published six long poems on tortoises in 1921, based on his personal observations of captive animals in a garden in Florence, Italy, in September 1920. The tortoises were probably Hermann's tortoises, Testudo hermanni. The poems describe the anthropomorphized behaviors of these captive tortoises, from the life of a hatchling (“Baby Tortoise” as reprinted above), through a description of shell morphology (“Tortoise Shell”), tortoise behavior (“Tortoise Family Connections”), courtship (“Lui et Elle”), mating (“Tortoise Gallantry”), and male vocalizations during copulation (“Tortoise Shout”). Lawrence presents a veritable life history of tortoise behaviors in a delightful old English style. All the poems are worthy of reading and enjoying, and I urge you all to explore them more fully—his views of tortoise behaviors and their meanings and his wonderful descriptions make for fascinating reading.