Mystic
They call all experience of the senses mystic, when the
experience is considered.
So an apple becomes mystic when I taste in it
the summer and the snows, the wild welter of earth
and the insistence of the sun.
All of which things I can surely taste in a good apple.
Though some apples taste preponderantly of water, wet and sour
and some of too much sun, brackish sweet
like lagoon-water, that has been too much sunned.
If I say I taste these things in an apple, I am called mystic, which
means a liar.
The only way to eat an apple is to hog it down like a pig
and taste nothing
that is real.
But if I eat an apple, I like to eat it with all my senses awake.
Hogging it down like a pig I call the feeding of corpses.
Notes
Where Robert Morgan’s Honey approached sweetness through disciplined calmness and delicate apiary geometry, D. H. Lawrence’s Mystic fiercely demands a fully awakened sensory rebellion against the numb, hurried devouring of the world. Tasting the wild welter of earth, snows, and insistent sun in a single apple exposes how modern appetite often reduces food to the mechanical feeding of corpses, proving that true perception is dismissed as mystic only because society has forgotten how to experience reality with all senses alive. It sharpens August’s theme of Feast into an uncompromising manifesto of mindful indulgence, reminding us that to eat without attention is mere consumption, while to truly taste is to partake in the cosmic alchemy of the earth. #poetry #dhlawrence #feast #august #mystic