And in 1813 Shelley wrote in his ‘Queen Medb’ of a giant oak!

‘Thus have I stood, -through a wild waste of years
Struggling with whirlwinds of mad agony,
Yet peaceful, and serene, and self-enshrined,
Mocking my powerless tyrant’s horrible curse
With stubborn and unalterable will,
Even as a giant oak, which heaven’s fierce flame
Had scathèd in the wilderness, to stand
A monument of fadeless ruin there;
Yet peacefully and movelessly it braves
The midnight conflict of the wintry storm,
As in the sunlight’s calm it spreads
Its worn and withered arms on high
To meet the quiet of a summer’s noon …

And the fair oak, whose leafy dome affords
A temple where the vows of happy love
Are registered, are equal in thy sight;
No love, no hate thou cherishest; revenge
And favoritism, and worst desire of fame
Thou knowest not; all that the wide world contains
Are but thy passive instruments, and thou
Regard’st them all with an impartial eye,
Whose joy or pain thy nature cannot feel,
Because thou hast not human sense,
Because thou art not human mind …

A shrine is raised to thee …

If you will go down into yourself, under your surface personality you will find you have a great desire to drink life direct from the source, not out of bottle and bottled personal vessels …

Life from the source, unadulterated with the human taint …

The cool, cool truth of pure vitality pouring into the veins from the direct contact with the source. Uncontaminated by even the beginning of a lie …

And the passion of truth is the embrace between man and his god in the sheer coition of the life-flow, stark and unlying.

(from ‘The Primal Passions’ D H Lawrence b. 1885)

Osip Mandelstam (b. 1891) celebrates the primal passions in his ‘Silentium‘

She has not yet been born: she is music and word, and therefore the un-torn, fabric of what is stirred.

Silent the ocean breathes. Madly day’s glitter roams. Spray of pale lilac foams, in a bowl of grey-blue leaves.

May my lips rehearse the primordial silence, like a note of crystal clearness, sounding, pure from birth!

Stay as foam Aphrodite – Art – and return, Word, where music begins: and, fused with life’s origins, be ashamed heart, of heart!