D. H. Lawrence: "Mystic"

They call all experience of the senses mystic, when the
       experience is considered.
So an apple becomes mystic when I taste in it
the summer and the snows, the wild welter of earth
and the insistence of the sun.

All of which things I can surely taste in a good apple.
Though some apples taste preponderantly of water, wet and sour
and some of too much sun, brackish sweet
like lagoon-water, that has been too much sunned.

If I say I taste these things in an apple, I am called mystic, which
       means a liar.
The only way to eat an apple is to hog it down like a pig
and taste nothing
that is real.

But if I eat an apple, I like to eat it with all my senses awake.
Hogging it down like a pig I call the feeding of corpses.



 
"Mystic" by D. H. Lawrence. Text as published in D. H. Lawrence: Complete Poems (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics, 1994).

Art credit: Detail of "Pig Eating Apples In Barnyard Blue Sky," photograph by Lynn M. Stone/KimballStock.