2 h 53 minAudiobook7 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What changes when a fig, a mosquito and a snake stop being scenery and demand your attention?
In Birds, Beasts and Flowers, D. H. Lawrence meets the natural world as something alive, strange and full of mystery. This collection of poems moves from pomegranates, peaches and figs to trees, flowers, reptiles, birds and beasts. He talks to a fig, scolds a mosquito and bows before a snake: each encounter challenges the habit of putting human life first.
Lawrence writes in loose, speaking free verse, with lines that stretch or shorten as his thoughts move. A baby tortoise makes its first small crawl; a turkey cock struts with ancient pride. Fruit becomes bodily and strange, while trees and flowers hold a quieter life. Throughout, the poems ask what we lose when we treat nature as a backdrop.
What you’ll discover
- Fruit with hidden depths Meet pomegranates, peaches and figs in poems that make familiar fruit feel strange.
- A snake commands respect Follow an encounter that brings a human speaker face to face with another creature’s mystery.
- The tortoise’s small beginning Watch a baby tortoise crawl into poems attentive to its separate, unfamiliar life.
- Trees and flowers grow quieter Enter a gentler mood without losing the strong feeling that runs through these poems.
- Thought becomes living speech Feel free verse follow a thinking voice, without neat rhyme or regular lines.
Who will love it
Readers who love close attention to animals, plants and the body will find a companion here. It suits anyone drawn to Italian light, desert mountains, old myth, and poems that speak in a bold, argumentative voice.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- Fruits of Tuscany hold the secrets of desire
- Trees and flowers keep a wild, unbroken life
- Politics and religion meet a sharp, comic tongue
- Other creatures are strangers we must admit
- A tortoise sequence follows life from birth to mating
- Animals mirror human longing, often with laughter
- New Mexico brings old ghosts and wild beasts
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- Paperback
- 6 × 9 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Hardcover
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- Large print paperback
- 8.5 × 11 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Large print hardcover
- 8.5 × 11 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
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Read and hear Aves, bestias y flores in 25 languages and switch at any time. Or read two side by side, paragraph by paragraph: the way to learn a language with a book you love.
Aves, bestias y flores
by D. H. Lawrence · 1923
A snake drinks at a Sicilian water trough, and a man must choose between fear and wonder.
Medium level2–5 hours to read25 languages
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In short
What does a fig know that you do not? D.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
Fruits of Tuscany hold the secrets of desire
The collection opens with fruit, written at San Gervasio near Florence. Pomegranate, Peach, Medlars and Sorb-Apples, Figs and Grapes treat each fruit as a body with a hidden life. The poet argues that nature is never smooth and finished, and that its cracks and wounds are where beauty shows.
In Pomegranate, the split skin shows glittering seeds, and the speaker defends the fissure against a scolding listener. Peach asks why a peach is grooved and heavy instead of round like a billiard ball, and answers that a made thing is dull beside a grown one. Medlars and Sorb-Apples turns decay into a taste of the underworld, linked to Orpheus and Dionysos.
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What is Birds, Beasts and Flowers about?
It is a collection of poems by D. H. Lawrence about fruit, trees, flowers, birds and animals. Each poem looks closely at a living thing, often in Italy, Sicily or New Mexico, and finds in it a life and a mystery of its own.
Where did Lawrence write these poems?
They follow Lawrence's travels through Italy, Sicily, Germany, Ceylon, Australia and New Mexico, and many are set on the spot named under each poem.
What is the poem Snake about?
A poet finds a golden snake drinking at his water trough on a hot Sicilian day. He feels honored by the visit, yet his upbringing tells him to kill it. The poem follows that conflict and what he does next.
The author
D. H. Lawrence
1885–1930 · English novelist and poet
D. H. Lawrence was an English novelist and poet, among the most controversial and influential writers of the early twentieth century. Lady Chatterley's Lover, long banned for its frankness, became a landmark in the fight against literary censorship.
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