Sex-mad D H Lawrence

In his poem Tortoise Shout, D H Lawrence describes tortoise sex from the perspective of the male.

‘Mounted and tense’, as though nailed to the cross, he ‘cleaves behind the hovel wall of the dense female’ and, with his wrinkled neck and long limbs vulnerably ‘extruded’, curves his ‘deep, secret, all-penetrating tail’ beneath her carapace ‘’til suddenly, in the spasm of coition, tupping like a jerking leap, and oh!’ It is the only description I know of tortoise orgasm.

Lawrence liked tortoises, but this poem is about himself and not only because he and his wife also carried their homes upon their backs (the Lawrences never stayed put for more than a few months). The Lawrentian heroes who or Mellors in , are domineering sex gods but, in , the fragile party is the male of the species, smaller than the female and impaled upon her like a martyr.