We’re Late by W H Auden
Clocks cannot tell our time of day For what event to pray Because we have no time, because We have no time until We know what time we fill, Why time is other than time was. Nor can our question satisfy The answer in the statue’s eye: Only the living ask whose brow May wear […]
They Wondered Why the Fruit had Been Forbidden by W H Auden
They wondered why the fruit had been forbidden: It taught them nothing new. They hid their pride, But did not listen much when they were chidden: They knew exactly what to do outside. They left. Immediately the memory faded Of all they known: they could not understand The dogs now who before had always aided; […]
The Waters by W H Auden
Poet,oracle and wit Like unsuccessful anglers by Th ponds of apperception sit, Baiting with the wrong request The vectors of their interest; At nightfall tell the angler’s lie. With time in tempest everywhere, To rafts of frail assumption cling The saintly and the insincere; Enraged phenonmena bear down In overwhelming waves to drown Both sufferer […]
The Two by W H Auden
You are the town and we are the clock. We are the guardians of the gate in the rock. The Two. On your left and on your right In the day and in the night, We are watching you. Wiser not to ask just what has occurred To them who disobeyed our word; To those […]
The Quest XII (Vocation) by W H Auden
Incredulous, he stared at the amused Official writing down his name among Those whose request to suffer was refused. The pen ceased scratching: though he came too late To join the martyrs, there was still a place Among the tempters for a caustic tongue. To test the resolution of the young With tales of the […]
The Labyrinth by W H Auden
Anthropos apteros for days Walked whistling round and round the Maze, Relying happily upon His temperment for getting on. The hundredth time he sighted, though, A bush he left an hour ago, He halted where four alleys crossed, And recognized that he was lost. “Where am I?” Metaphysics says No question can be asked unless […]
The Hidden Law by W H Auden
The Hidden Law does not deny Our laws of probability, But takes the atom and the star And human beings as they are, And answers nothing when we lie. It is the only reason why No government can codify, And verbal definitions mar The Hidden Law. Its utter patience will not try To stop us […]
The Geography of the House by W H Auden
(for Christopher Isherwood) Seated after breakfast In this white-tiled cabin Arabs call the House where Everybody goes, Even melancholics Raise a cheer to Mrs. Nature for the primal Pleasure She bestows. Sex is but a dream to Seventy-and-over, But a joy proposed un- -til we start to shave: Mouth-delight depends on Virtue in the cook, […]
Song Of The Master And Boatswain by W H Auden
At Dirty Dick’s and Sloppy Joe’s We drank our liquor straight, Some went upstairs with Margery, And some, alas, with Kate; And two by two like cat and mouse The homeless played at keeping house. There Wealthy Meg, the Sailor’s Friend, And Marion, cow-eyed, Opened their arms to me but I Refused to step inside; […]
At the Party by W H Auden
Unrhymed, unrhythmical, the chatter goes: Yet no one hears his own remarks as prose. Beneath each topic tunelessly discussed The ground-bass is reciprocal mistrust. The names in fashion shuttling to and fro Yield, when deciphered, messages of woe. You cannot read me like an open book. I’m more myself than you will ever look. Will […]
Old People’s Home by W H Auden
All are limitory, but each has her own nuance of damage. The elite can dress and decent themselves, are ambulant with a single stick, adroit to read a book all through, or play the slow movements of easy sonatas. (Yet, perhaps their very carnal freedom is their spirit’s bane: intelligent of what has happened and […]
A New Age by W H Auden
So an age ended, and its last deliverer died In bed, grown idle and unhappy; they were safe: The sudden shadow of a giant’s enormous calf Would fall no more at dusk across their lawns outside. They slept in peace: in marshes here and there no doubt A sterile dragon lingered to a natural death, […]
Like A Vocation by W H Auden
Not as that dream Napoleon, rumour’s dread and centre, Before who’s riding all the crowds divide, Who dedicates a column and withdraws, Nor as that general favourite and breezy visitor To whom the weather and the ruins mean so much, Nor as any of those who always will be welcome, As luck or history or […]
In the Time of War, XII by W H Auden
And the age ended, and the last deliverer died. In bed, grown idle and unhappy; they were safe: The sudden shadow of the giant’s enormous calf Would fall no more at dusk across the lawn outside. They slept in peace: in marshes here and there no doubt A sterile dragon lingered to a natural death, […]
Here War Is Simple by W H Auden
Here war is simple like a monument: A telephone is speaking to a man; Flags on a map assert that troops were sent; A boy brings milk in bowls. There is a plan For living men in terror of their lives, Who thirst at nine who were to thirst at noon, And can be lost […]
Give me a doctor by W H Auden
Give me a doctor partridge-plump, Short in the leg and broad in the rump, An endomorph with gentle hands Who’ll never make absurd demands That I abandon all my vices Nor pull a long face in a crisis, But with a twinkle in his eye Will tell me that I have to die. ————— The […]
from The Cave of Making by W H Auden
Who would, for preference, be a bard in an oral culture, obliged at drunken feasts to improvise a eulogy of some beefy illiterate burner, giver of rings, or depend for bread on the moods of a Baroque Prince, expected, like his dwarf, to amuse? After all, it’s rather a privilege amid the affluent traffic to […]
Edward Lear by W H Auden
Left by his friend to breakfast alone on the white Italian shore, his Terrible Demon arose Over his shoulder; he wept to himself in the night, A dirty landscape-painter who hated his nose. The legions of cruel inquisitive They Were so many and big like dogs: he was upset By Germans and boats; affection was […]
The Shield of Achilles by 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 […]
The More Loving One by 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 […]
The Fall of Rome by W. H. Auden
(for Cyril Connolly) The piers are pummelled by the waves; In a lonely field the rain Lashes an abandoned train; Outlaws fill the mountain caves. Fantastic grow the evening gowns; Agents of the Fisc pursue Absconding tax-defaulters through The sewers of provincial towns. Private rites of magic send The temple prostitutes to sleep; All the […]
Epitaph on a Tyrant by W. H. Auden
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; He knew human folly like the back of his hand, And was greatly interested in armies and fleets; When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets. […]
Cocaine Lil and Morphine Sue by W H Auden
Did you ever hear about Cocaine Lil? She lived in Cocaine town on Cocaine hill, She had a cocaine dog and a cocaine cat, They fought all night with a cocaine rat. She had cocaine hair on her cocaine head. She had a cocaine dress that was poppy red: She wore a snowbird hat and […]
Base Words Are Uttered by W H Auden
Base words are uttered only by the base And can for such at once be understood, But noble platitudes:-ah, there’s a case Where the most careful scrutiny is needed To tell a voice that’s genuinely good From one that’s base but merely has succeeded. ————— The End And that’s the End of the Poem © Poetry […]
August 1968 by 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. ————— The End And that’s the End of the Poem […]
As the poets have mournfully sung by W H Auden
As the poets have mournfully sung, Death takes the innocent young, The rolling-in-money, The screamingly-funny, And those who are very well hung. ————— The End And that’s the End of the Poem © Poetry Monster, 2021. Poems by topic and subject. Poetry Monster — the ultimate repository of world poetry. Poetry Monster — the multilingual library […]
Academic Graffiti by W H Auden
Henry Adams Was mortally afraid of Madams: In a disorderly house He sat quiet as a mouse. Mallarmé Had too much to say: He could never quite Leave the paper white. Thomas the Rymer Was probably a social climber: He should have known Fairy Queens Were beyond his means. Paul Valéry Earned a meagre salary […]
A New Year Greeting by W H Auden
On this day tradition allots to taking stock of our lives, my greetings to all of you, Yeasts, Bacteria, Viruses, Aerobics and Anaerobics: A Very Happy New Year to all for whom my ectoderm is as Middle-Earth to me. For creatures your size I offer a free choice of habitat, so settle yourselves in the […]
Continual Conversation With A Silent Man by Wallace Stevens
The old brown hen and the old blue sky, Between the two we live and die– The broken cartwheel on the hill. As if, in the presence of the sea, We dried our nets and mended sail And talked of never-ending things, Of the never-ending storm of will, One will and many wills, and the […]
Bantams In Pine-Woods by Wallace Stevens
Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan Of tan with henna hackles, halt! Damned universal cock, as if the sun Was blackamoor to bear your blazing tail. Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal. Your world is you. I am my world. You ten-foot poet among inchlings. Fat! Begone! An inchling bristles in these pines, […]
Gray Room by Wallace Stevens
Although you sit in a room that is gray, Except for the silver Of the straw-paper, And pick At your pale white gown; Or lift one of the green beads Of your necklace, To let it fall; Or gaze at your green fan Printed with the red branches of a red willow; Or, with one […]
A Postcard From The Volcano by Wallace Stevens
Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill; And that in autumn, when the grapes Made sharp air sharper by their smell These had a being, breathing frost; And least will guess that with our bones We left much more, left what still is […]
A High-Toned Old Christian Woman by Wallace Stevens
Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame. Take the moral law and make a nave of it And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus, The conscience is converted into palms, Like windy citherns hankering for hymns. We agree in principle. That’s clear. But take The opposing law and make a peristyle, And from the peristyle […]
A Rabbit As King Of The Ghosts by Wallace Stevens
The difficulty to think at the end of day, When the shapeless shadow covers the sun And nothing is left except light on your fur— There was the cat slopping its milk all day, Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk And August the most peaceful month. To be, in the grass, in the […]
Final Soliloquy Of The Interior Paramour by Wallace Stevens
Light the first light of evening, as in a room In which we rest and, for small reason, think The world imagined is the ultimate good. This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous. It is in that thought that we collect ourselves, Out of all the indifferences, into one thing: Within a single thing, a single […]
Domination Of Black by Wallace Stevens
At night, by the fire, The colors of the bushes And of the fallen leaves, Repeating themselves, Turned in the room, Like the leaves themselves Turning in the wind. Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks Came striding. And I remembered the cry of the peacocks. The colors of their tails Were like the […]
Disillusionment Of Ten O’clock by Wallace Stevens
The houses are haunted By white night-gowns. None are green, Or purple with green rings, Or green with yellow rings, Or yellow with blue rings. None of them are strange, With socks of lace And beaded ceintures. People are not going To dream of baboons and periwinkles. Only, here and there, an old sailor, Drunk […]
Not Ideas About The Thing But The Thing Itself by Wallace Stevens
At the earliest ending of winter, In March, a scrawny cry from outside Seemed like a sound in his mind. He knew that he heard it, A bird’s cry, at daylight or before, In the early March wind. The sun was rising at six, No longer a battered panache above snow… It would have been […]
Metaphors Of A Magnifico by Wallace Stevens
Twenty men crossing a bridge, Into a village, Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges, Into twenty villages, Or one man Crossing a single bridge into a village. This is old song That will not declare itself . . . Twenty men crossing a bridge, Into a village, Are Twenty men crossing a bridge Into a […]
Looking Across The Fields And Watching The Birds Fly by Wallace Stevens
Among the more irritating minor ideas Of Mr. Homburg during his visits home To Concord, at the edge of things, was this: To think away the grass, the trees, the clouds, Not to transform them into other things, Is only what the sun does every day, Until we say to ourselves that there may be […]