Written by
Wystan Hugh (W H) Auden |
As I walked out one evening, Walking down Bristol Street, The crowds upon the pavement Were fields of harvest wheat. And down by the brimming river I heard a lover sing Under an arch of the railway: 'Love has no ending. 'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you Till China and Africa meet, And the river jumps over the mountain And the salmon sing in the street, 'I'll love you till the ocean Is folded and hung up to dry And the seven stars go squawking Like geese about the sky. 'The years shall run like rabbits, For in my arms I hold The Flower of the Ages, And the first love of the world. ' But all the clocks in the city Began to whirr and chime: 'O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time. 'In the burrows of the Nightmare Where Justice naked is, Time watches from the shadow And coughs when you would kiss. 'In headaches and in worry Vaguely life leaks away, And Time will have his fancy To-morrow or to-day. 'Into many a green valley Drifts the appalling snow; Time breaks the threaded dances And the diver's brilliant bow. 'O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist; Stare, stare in the basin And wonder what you've missed. 'The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the tea-cup opens A lane to the land of the dead. 'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes And the Giant is enchanting to Jack, And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer, And Jill goes down on her back. 'O look, look in the mirror, O look in your distress: Life remains a blessing Although you cannot bless. 'O stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start; You shall love your crooked neighbour With your crooked heart. ' It was late, late in the evening, The lovers they were gone; The clocks had ceased their chiming, And the deep river ran on.
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Written by
Wystan Hugh (W H) Auden |
The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach,
The Ogre cannot master Speech:
About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.
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Written by
Wystan Hugh (W H) Auden |
I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odour of death Offends the September night. Accurate scholarship can Unearth the whole offence From Luther until now That has driven a culture mad, Find what occurred at Linz, What huge imago made A psychopathic god: I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return. Exiled Thucydides knew All that a speech can say About Democracy, And what dictators do, The elderly rubbish they talk To an apathetic grave; Analysed all in his book, The enlightenment driven away, The habit-forming pain, Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again. Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse: But who can live for long In an euphoric dream; Out of the mirror they stare, Imperialism's face And the international wrong. Faces along the bar Cling to their average day: The lights must never go out, The music must always play, All the conventions conspire To make this fort assume The furniture of home; Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good. The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart; For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have, Not universal love But to be loved alone. From the conservative dark Into the ethical life The dense commuters come, Repeating their morning vow; "I will be true to the wife, I'll concentrate more on my work," And helpless governors wake To resume their compulsory game: Who can release them now, Who can reach the deaf, Who can speak for the dumb? All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of Authority Whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die. Defenceless under the night Our world in stupor lies; Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame.
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Written by
Wystan Hugh (W H) Auden |
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be One against whom there was no official complaint, And all the reports on his conduct agree That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint, For in everything he did he served the Greater Community. Except for the War till the day he retired He worked in a factory and never got fired, But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc. Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views, For his Union reports that he paid his dues, (Our report on his Union shows it was sound) And our Social Psychology workers found That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink. The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way. Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured, And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured. Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan And had everything necessary to the Modern Man, A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire. Our researchers into Public Opinion are content That he held the proper opinions for the time of year; When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went. He was married and added five children to the population, Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation. And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education. Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd: Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
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Written by
Wystan Hugh (W H) Auden |
I He disappeared in the dead of winter: The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted, And snow disfigured the public statues; The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day. What instruments we have agree The day of his death was a dark cold day. Far from his illness The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays; By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems. But for him it was his last afternoon as himself, An afternoon of nurses and rumours; The provinces of his body revolted, The squares of his mind were empty, Silence invaded the suburbs, The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers. Now he is scattered among a hundred cities And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections, To find his happiness in another kind of wood And be punished under a foreign code of conscience. The words of a dead man Are modified in the guts of the living. But in the importance and noise of to-morrow When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse, And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed, And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom, A few thousand will think of this day As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual. What instruments we have agree The day of his death was a dark cold day.
You were silly like us; your gift survived it all: The parish of rich women, physical decay, Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth.
Earth, receive an honoured guest: William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry.
In the nightmare of the dark All the dogs of Europe bark, And the living nations wait, Each sequestered in its hate; Intellectual disgrace Stares from every human face, And the seas of pity lie Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice; With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress; In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise.
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Written by
Wystan Hugh (W H) Auden |
When there are so many we shall have to mourn, when grief has been made so public, and exposed to the critique of a whole epoch the frailty of our conscience and anguish, of whom shall we speak? For every day they die among us, those who were doing us some good, who knew it was never enough but hoped to improve a little by living. Such was this doctor: still at eighty he wished to think of our life from whose unruliness so many plausible young futures with threats or flattery ask obedience, but his wish was denied him: he closed his eyes upon that last picture, common to us all, of problems like relatives gathered puzzled and jealous about our dying. For about him till the very end were still those he had studied, the fauna of the night, and shades that still waited to enter the bright circle of his recognition turned elsewhere with their disappointment as he was taken away from his life interest to go back to the earth in London, an important Jew who died in exile. Only Hate was happy, hoping to augment his practice now, and his dingy clientele who think they can be cured by killing and covering the garden with ashes. They are still alive, but in a world he changed simply by looking back with no false regrets; all he did was to remember like the old and be honest like children. He wasn't clever at all: he merely told the unhappy Present to recite the Past like a poetry lesson till sooner or later it faltered at the line where long ago the accusations had begun, and suddenly knew by whom it had been judged, how rich life had been and how silly, and was life-forgiven and more humble, able to approach the Future as a friend without a wardrobe of excuses, without a set mask of rectitude or an embarrassing over-familiar gesture. No wonder the ancient cultures of conceit in his technique of unsettlement foresaw the fall of princes, the collapse of their lucrative patterns of frustration: if he succeeded, why, the Generalised Life would become impossible, the monolith of State be broken and prevented the co-operation of avengers. Of course they called on God, but he went his way down among the lost people like Dante, down to the stinking fosse where the injured lead the ugly life of the rejected, and showed us what evil is, not, as we thought, deeds that must be punished, but our lack of faith, our dishonest mood of denial, the concupiscence of the oppressor. If some traces of the autocratic pose, the paternal strictness he distrusted, still clung to his utterance and features, it was a protective coloration for one who'd lived among enemies so long: if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd, to us he is no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion under whom we conduct our different lives: Like weather he can only hinder or help, the proud can still be proud but find it a little harder, the tyrant tries to make do with him but doesn't care for him much: he quietly surrounds all our habits of growth and extends, till the tired in even the remotest miserable duchy have felt the change in their bones and are cheered till the child, unlucky in his little State, some hearth where freedom is excluded, a hive whose honey is fear and worry, feels calmer now and somehow assured of escape, while, as they lie in the grass of our neglect, so many long-forgotten objects revealed by his undiscouraged shining are returned to us and made precious again; games we had thought we must drop as we grew up, little noises we dared not laugh at, faces we made when no one was looking. But he wishes us more than this. To be free is often to be lonely. He would unite the unequal moieties fractured by our own well-meaning sense of justice, would restore to the larger the wit and will the smaller possesses but can only use for arid disputes, would give back to the son the mother's richness of feeling: but he would have us remember most of all to be enthusiastic over the night, not only for the sense of wonder it alone has to offer, but also because it needs our love. With large sad eyes its delectable creatures look up and beg us dumbly to ask them to follow: they are exiles who long for the future that lives in our power, they too would rejoice if allowed to serve enlightenment like him, even to bear our cry of 'Judas', as he did and all must bear who serve it. One rational voice is dumb. Over his grave the household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved: sad is Eros, builder of cities, and weeping anarchic Aphrodite.
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Written by
Wystan Hugh (W H) Auden |
Perfectly happy now, he looked at his estate.
An exile making watches glanced up as he passed
And went on working; where a hospital was rising fast,
A joiner touched his cap; an agent came to tell
Some of the trees he'd planted were progressing well.
The white alps glittered. It was summer. He was very great.
Far off in Paris where his enemies
Whsipered that he was wicked, in an upright chair
A blind old woman longed for death and letters. He would write,
"Nothing is better than life. " But was it? Yes, the fight
Against the false and the unfair
Was always worth it. So was gardening. Civilize.
Cajoling, scolding, screaming, cleverest of them all,
He'd had the other children in a holy war
Against the infamous grown-ups; and, like a child, been sly
And humble, when there was occassion for
The two-faced answer or the plain protective lie,
But, patient like a peasant, waited for their fall.
And never doubted, like D'Alembert, he would win:
Only Pascal was a great enemy, the rest
Were rats already poisoned; there was much, though, to be done,
And only himself to count upon.
Dear Diderot was dull but did his best;
Rousseau, he'd always known, would blubber and give in.
Night fell and made him think of women: Lust
Was one of the great teachers; Pascal was a fool.
How Emilie had loved astronomy and bed;
Pimpette had loved him too, like scandal; he was glad.
He'd done his share of weeping for Jerusalem: As a rule,
It was the pleasure-haters who became unjust.
Yet, like a sentinel, he could not sleep. The night was full of wrong,
Earthquakes and executions: soon he would be dead,
And still all over Europe stood the horrible nurses
Itching to boil their children. Only his verses
Perhaps could stop them: He must go on working: Overhead,
The uncomplaining stars composed their lucid song.
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Written by
Wystan Hugh (W H) Auden |
She looked over his shoulder For vines and olive trees, Marble well-governed cities And ships upon untamed seas, But there on the shining metal His hands had put instead An artificial wilderness And a sky like lead. A plain without a feature, bare and brown, No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood, Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down, Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood An unintelligible multitude, A million eyes, a million boots in line, Without expression, waiting for a sign. Out of the air a voice without a face Proved by statistics that some cause was just In tones as dry and level as the place: No one was cheered and nothing was discussed; Column by column in a cloud of dust They marched away enduring a belief Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.
She looked over his shoulder For ritual pieties, White flower-garlanded heifers, Libation and sacrifice, But there on the shining metal Where the altar should have been, She saw by his flickering forge-light Quite another scene. Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke) And sentries sweated for the day was hot: A crowd of ordinary decent folk Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke As three pale figures were led forth and bound To three posts driven upright in the ground. The mass and majesty of this world, all That carries weight and always weighs the same Lay in the hands of others; they were small And could not hope for help and no help came: What their foes like to do was done, their shame Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride And died as men before their bodies died.
She looked over his shoulder For athletes at their games, Men and women in a dance Moving their sweet limbs Quick, quick, to music, But there on the shining shield His hands had set no dancing-floor But a weed-choked field. A ragged urchin, aimless and alone, Loitered about that vacancy; a bird Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone: That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third, Were axioms to him, who'd never heard Of any world where promises were kept, Or one could weep because another wept.
The thin-lipped armorer, Hephaestos, hobbled away, Thetis of the shining breasts Cried out in dismay At what the god had wrought To please her son, the strong Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles Who would not live long.
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Written by
Wystan Hugh (W H) Auden |
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell, But on earth indifference is the least We have to dread from man or beast. How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me. Admirer as I think I am Of stars that do not give a damn, I cannot, now I see them, say I missed one terribly all day. Were all stars to disappear or die, I should learn to look at an empty sky And feel its total dark sublime, Though this might take me a little time.
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Written by
Wystan Hugh (W H) Auden |
Among pelagian travelers, Lost on their lewd conceited way To Massachusetts, Michigan, Miami or L. A. , An airborne instrument I sit, Predestined nightly to fulfill Columbia-Giesen-Management's Unfathomable will, By whose election justified, I bring my gospel of the Muse To fundamentalists, to nuns, to Gentiles and to Jews, And daily, seven days a week, Before a local sense has jelled, From talking-site to talking-site Am jet-or-prop-propelled. Though warm my welcome everywhere, I shift so frequently, so fast, I cannot now say where I was The evening before last, Unless some singular event Should intervene to save the place, A truly asinine remark, A soul-bewitching face, Or blessed encounter, full of joy, Unscheduled on the Giesen Plan, With, here, an addict of Tolkien, There, a Charles Williams fan. Since Merit but a dunghill is, I mount the rostrum unafraid: Indeed, 'twere damnable to ask If I am overpaid. Spirit is willing to repeat Without a qualm the same old talk, But Flesh is homesick for our snug Apartment in New York. A sulky fifty-six, he finds A change of mealtime utter hell, Grown far too crotchety to like A luxury hotel. The Bible is a goodly book I always can peruse with zest, But really cannot say the same For Hilton's Be My Guest. Nor bear with equanimity The radio in students' cars, Muzak at breakfast, or--dear God!-- Girl-organists in bars. Then, worst of all, the anxious thought, Each time my plane begins to sink And the No Smoking sign comes on: What will there be to drink? Is this a milieu where I must How grahamgreeneish! How infra dig! Snatch from the bottle in my bag An analeptic swig? Another morning comes: I see, Dwindling below me on the plane, The roofs of one more audience I shall not see again. God bless the lot of them, although I don't remember which was which: God bless the U. S. A. , so large, So friendly, and so rich.
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