I wrote the following in October 2021. 

Etruscan civilisation spanned 900–27 BC, according to a search I just did. Etruria covered Tuscany and parts of surrounding regions. There was also Etruscan religion, sort of based on the Ancient Greek tradition (although not so ancient then), which eventually got absorbed into Roman mythology. The Etruscans had temples and it all looks very Mediterranean. They spoke Etruscan.

 

DH Lawrence wrote a poem called Cypresses, with the opening lines:

Tuscan cypresses,

What is it?

He uses an Etru- word (Etruscan[s], Etruria) 15 times. My feeling is, if you don’t know the words, it’s difficult to get a foothold in the poem. I found it – about half an hour ago – in a collection of Modern Verse next to where my grandad sits on his sofa. The inside cover is stamped 4 SEP 1953, Ilford County High School for Boys. I wonder if he nicked it. His is the only name in the log, with 2-1-1 marked in the Date Returned column. So he returned it, then nicked it? But 2-1-1 isn’t a feasible date. So it was a joke. A bad boy stealing poetry. The Condition column is completed: old. Probably also a joke. The poem itself was about 30 years old when he ‘borrowed’ the book. 

Lawrence was apparently staying in a friend’s abandoned villa when he wrote the poem (I like Lawrence, it feels friendly). The villa was near Florence (Lawrence visits Florence), just outside Fiesole. It’d been empty since a nearby explosion had shattered the windows. I picture them bursting inwards, which feels like a good metaphor (for anxiety, maybe, or heartbreak?). It must have been cold at night, as it does get in Tuscany, at least in Matteo’s house, despite the baking hot days. Matteo’s a friend from uni. The night’s cool is a clean cool, one that makes a bedroom breathable if allowed in by an open, or shattered, window. Like a soft, sustained wind. If you’re a few drinks deep, already in a dreaming mind due to some charming eyes, and are grateful for bed, you will sleep very well in that air.

Lawrence seemed to think of the Etruscans as life-appreciators. For me, last year was turmoil: work was soul-draining, rest wasn’t very restful, an upsetting number of people were suicidal. Tuscany – at least the side Matteo showed me – was slow and warm and delicious and unburdened. Perhaps that’s only as a non-Tuscan in Tuscany: there wasn’t the workload that concentrates near home. Lawrence’s Etruscans wore a subtle smile. I wore one too (when in Etruria!). The air exerts some force on me still – as the Etruscans did on Lawrence (1885-1930 AD) – so that when I read

Tuscan cypresses,

What is it?

in drizzly East London, I am stirred. I have a headspace to return to, for the extent of the poem and a few lingering seconds. Inevitably, the want to sustain (or at least do something with) this stirring takes over. I am sent to my notepad by longing and to Wikipedia by ignorance.

 

Genetically, she is probably not Etruscan, at least not entirely, if that’s even distinguishable today from Roman genes, if that ancestry wasn’t assimilated as was the mythology. Lawrence calls them a dead race, a denied nation. Denied by the Romans. She’s probably Roman. I might have been curious about the Etruscans anyways, how they came and went, about Tuscany and its history. Like how a quiz show is interesting. But now when I read

Tuscan cypresses,

the effect blossoms in my gut. It’s possible I’ve seen those same cypresses as Lawrence, certain I’ve seen the same cypresses as her, and possible that she’s seeing those cypresses now.

 

When, in October 2024, I search DH Lawrence Cypresses, I find not just that poem but various other times Lawrence mentioned cypresses. For example, from an essay:

It is so still and transcendent, the cypress trees poise like flames of forgotten darkness, that should have been blown out at the end of the summer. 

And from a funeral poem: 

...a father stands
With sunken head, and forgotten, folded hands...
...Between the avenue of cypresses,
The silence of the many villagers,
The candle-flames beside the surplices.

 

Which recall this, from Cypresses itself:

Among the sinuous, flame-tall cypresses
That swayed their length of darkness all around
Etruscan-dusky, wavering men of old Etruria:
Naked except for fanciful long shoes,
Going... about a forgotten business.

 

Lawrence repeatedly connects cypresses, flames and the forgotten, and I repeatedly enjoy it. It isn’t so much that his connection articulates my own – that I forget my ol’ flame, but cypresses remind me. It’s more that I like noticing Lawrence’s recurring weaknesses, his insistent fondnesses (I do also enjoy the odd once-appearing bunch of naked men in fanciful long shoes). There’s something calming about moving around in the space that is Lawrence, focussing not on the lone poem in a rogue book that touches my soul, not on the experience that speaks to me because it maps onto my life, but on the writer’s wider habits of mind. I’m half-lifted out of my own noise of thought without having to struggle. Instead of pinning down the pogo-stick mind to stop it jumping (bad idea), or telling myself off for the jumping (not very helpful), I bounce-drift unentangled through that Lawrence space, through thoughts and images mine but not mine.

This accidental broader reading of his affair with cypresses inclines me, with the help of three years, to take my own connections a little less personally (though no less sweetly) when they appear. I feel a little more peaceful, a little less agitated, as Lawrence reminds me (which he inevitably does) of cypresses, of Tuscany, of Matteo, of her.