Mosquito- D. H. Lawrence

When did you start your tricks,

Monsieur ?
What do you stand on such high legs for ?

Why this length of shredded shank,
You exaltation ?
Is it so that you shall lift your centre of gravity upwards
And weigh no more than air as you alight upon me,

Stand upon me weightless, you phantom ?

I heard a woman call you the Winged Victory
In sluggish Venice.
You turn your head towards your tail, and smile.
How can you put so much devilry
Into that translucent phantom shred
Of a frail corpus ?

Queer, with your thin wings and your streaming legs

How you sail like a heron, or a dull clot of air,
A nothingness.
Yet what an aura surrounds you ;
Your evil little aura, prowling, and casting a numbness on my mind.
That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic :

Invisibility, and the anæsthetic power

To deaden my attention in your direction.
But I know your game now, streaky sorcerer.
Queer, how you stalk and prowl the air
In circles and evasions, enveloping me,
Ghoul on wings
Winged Victory.
Settle, and stand on long thin shanks

Eyeing me sideways, and cunningly conscious that I am aware,

You speck.
I hate the way you lurch off sideways into air
Having read my thoughts against you.
Come then, let us play at unawares,
And see who wins in this sly game of bluff,
Man or mosquito.

You don’t know that I exist, and I don’t know that you exist.

Now then !
It is your trump,
It is your hateful little trump,
You pointed fiend,
Which shakes my sudden blood to hatred of you :
It is your small, high, hateful bugle in my ear.

Why do you do it ?

Surely it is bad policy.
They say you can’t help it.
If that is so, then I believe a little in Providence protecting the innocent.
But it sounds so amazingly like a slogan,
A yell of triumph as you snatch my scalp.
Blood, red blood

Super-magical

Forbidden liquor.
I behold you stand
For a second enspasmed in oblivion,
Obscenely estasied
Sucking live blood,
My blood.

Such silence, such suspended transport,

Such gorging,
Such obscenity of trespass.
You stagger
As well as you may.
Only your accursed hairy frailty,
Your own imponderable weightlessness

Saves you, wafts you away on the very draught my anger makes in its snatching.

Away with a pæan of derision,
You winged blood-drop.
Can I not overtake you ?
Are you one too many for me,
Winged Victory ?

Am I not mosquito enough to out-mosquito you?

Queer, what a big stain my sucked blood makes
Beside the infinitesimal faint smear of you !
Queer, what a dim dark smudge you have disappeared into !
About the Author:
D. H. Lawrence

David Herbert Richards Lawrence (11 September 1885 – 2 March 1930) was an English author, poet, playwright, essayist and literary critic. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, human sexuality and instinct. He died of tuberculosis.

This particular poem 'Mosquito' is taken from his famous collecton of poetry 'Birds, Beasts and Flowers'.