Shadow Shot Sunday - Ou Phrontis....or do you?

"The little things creep out to patch themselves hovels/in the marred shadow/Of your gift."

Clouds Hill is the tiny cottage in Dorset to which T.E. Lawrence escaped to after his adventures in Arabia to revise his manuscript for Seven Pillars of Wisdom. When we visited last summer, I felt no sense of this austere little house being a home, despite the pretty blue door, the sun-washed walls and the gentle coo of wood-pigeons in the surrounding wood. Over the door are the Greek words Ou Phrontis which mean “Don’t care”. I left Clouds Hill wondering what was really meant by that meticulously chiselled phrase. Lawrence never really lived anywhere. His was a restless soul, which seemed to demand a contradictory desire to lock itself away. The cottage is essentially a man’s den, owned by a man who in a way never grew beyond his solitary childhood, although he saw and experienced much more than most men ever do.

Even his dedication in Seven Pillars of Wisdom remains a mystery. Who, or what, is “S.A”?

To S.A.


I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands

and wrote my will across the sky in stars

To earn you Freedom, the seven pillared worthy house,

that your eyes might be shining for me
When we came.

Death seemed my servant on the road, till we were near

and saw you waiting:

When you smiled, and in sorrowful envy he outran me

and took you apart:

Into his quietness.

Love, the way-weary, groped to your body, our brief wage

ours for the moment

Before earth's soft hand explored your shape, and the blind

worms grew fat upon

Your substance.

Men prayed me that I set our work, the inviolate house,

as a memory of you.

But for fit monument I shattered it, unfinished: and now
The little things creep out to patch themselves hovels

in the marred shadow

Of your gift.

~ T.E. Lawrence


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