Nocturne by W H Auden
Now through night’s caressing grip Earth and all her oceans slip, Capes of China slide away From her fingers into day And th’Americas incline Coasts towards her shadow line. Now the ragged vagrants creep Into crooked holes to sleep: Just and unjust, worst and best, Change their places as they rest: Awkward lovers like in […]
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 […]
Let A Florid Music Praise by W H Auden
Let a florid music praise, The flute and the trumpet, Beauty’s conquest of your face: In that land of flesh and bone, Where from citadels on high Her imperial standards fly, Let the hot sun Shine on, shine on. O but the unloved have had power, The weeping and striking, Always: time will bring their […]
Law, Like Love by W H Auden
Law, say the gardeners, is the sun, Law is the one All gardeners obey To-morrow, yesterday, to-day. Law is the wisdom of the old, The impotent grandfathers feebly scold; The grandchildren put out a treble tongue, Law is the senses of the young. Law, says the priest with a priestly look, Expounding to an unpriestly […]
At Last the Secret is Out by W H Auden
At last the secret is out, as it always must come in the end, the delicious story is ripe to tell to tell to the intimate friend; over the tea-cups and into the square the tongues has its desire; still waters run deep, my dear, there’s never smoke without fire. Behind the corpse in the […]
Lady Weeping at the Crossroads by W H Auden
Lady, weeping at the crossroads, Would you meet your love In the twilight with his greyhounds, And the hawk on his glove? Bribe the birds then on the branches, Bribe them to be dumb, Stare the hot sun out of heaven That the night may come. Starless are the nights of travel, Bleak the winter […]
It’s No Use Raising A Shout by W H Auden
It’s no use raising a shout. No, Honey, you can cut that right out. I don’t want any more hugs; Make me some fresh tea, fetch me some rugs. Here am I, here are you:But what does it mean? What are we going to do? A long time ago I told my mother I was […]
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, […]
In Praise Of Limestone by W H Auden
If it form the one landscape that we, the inconstant ones, Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly Because it dissolves in water. Mark these rounded slopes With their surface fragrance of thyme and, beneath, A secret system of caves and conduits; hear the springs That spurt out everywhere with a chuckle, Each filling a […]
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 […]
from In Time of War by W H Auden
I So from the years the gifts were showered; each Ran off with his at once into his life: Bee took the politics that make a hive, Fish swam as fish, peach settled into peach. And were successful at the first endeavour; The hour of birth their only time at college, They were content with […]
Friday’s Child by W H Auden
He told us we were free to choose But, children as we were, we thought— “Paternal Love will only use Force in the last resort On those too bumptious to repent.” Accustomed to religious dread, It never crossed our minds He meant Exactly what He said. Perhaps He frowns, perhaps He grieves, But it seems […]
Friday’s Child by W H Auden
He told us we were free to choose But, children as we were, we thought— “Paternal Love will only use Force in the last resort On those too bumptious to repent.” Accustomed to religious dread, It never crossed our minds He meant Exactly what He said. Perhaps He frowns, perhaps He grieves, But it seems […]
For What As Easy by W H Auden
For what as easy For what thought small, For what is well Because between, To you simply From me I mean. Who goes with who The bedclothes say, As I and you Go kissed away, The data given, The senses even. Fate is not late, Nor the speech rewritten, Nor one word forgotten, Said at […]
Five Songs – II by W H Auden
That night when joy began Our narrowest veins to flush, We waited for the flash Of morning’s levelled gun. But morning let us pass, And day by day relief Outgrows his nervous laugh, Grown credulous of peace, As mile by mile is seen No trespasser’s reproach, And love’s best glasses reach No fields but are […]
Fish in the Unruffled Lakes by W H Auden
Fish in the unruffled lakes Their swarming colours wear, Swans in the winter air A white perfection have, And the great lion walks Through his innocent grove; Lion, fish and swan Act, and are gone Upon Time’s toppling wave. We, till shadowed days are done, We must weep and sing Duty’s conscious wrong, The Devil […]
Eyes Look Into The Well by W H Auden
Eyes look into the well, Tears run down from the eye; The tower cracked and fell From the quiet winter sky. Under a midnight stone Love was buried by thieves; The robbed heart begs for a bone, The damned rustle like leaves. Face down in the flooded brook With nothing more to say. Lies One […]
Eyes Look Into The Well by W H Auden
Eyes look into the well, Tears run down from the eye; The tower cracked and fell From the quiet winter sky. Under a midnight stone Love was buried by thieves; The robbed heart begs for a bone, The damned rustle like leaves. Face down in the flooded brook With nothing more to say. Lies One […]
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 […]
Doggerel by a Senior Citizen by W H Auden
Our earth in 1969 Is not the planet I call mine, The world, I mean, that gives me strength To hold off chaos at arm’s length. My Eden landscapes and their climes Are constructs from Edwardian times, When bath-rooms took up lots of space, And, before eating, one said Grace. The automobile, the aeroplane, Are […]
Deftly, Admiral, Cast Your Fly by W H Auden
Deftly, admiral, cast your fly Into the slow deep hover, Till the wise old trout mistake and die; Salt are the deeps that cover The glittering fleets you led, White is your head. Read on, ambassador, engrossed In your favourite Stendhal; The Outer Provinces are lost, Unshaven horsemen swill The great wines of the Chateaux […]
Two Songs for Hedli Anderson by W. H. Auden
I Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead, Put crêpe bows round the white necks of […]
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 […]
September 1, 1939 by 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 […]
On the Circuit by 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 […]
In Memory of W. B. Yeats by 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 […]
In Memory of Sigmund Freud by 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 […]
If I could tell you by W. H. Auden
Time will say nothing but I told you so, Time only knows the price we have to pay; If I could tell you I would let you know. If we should weep when clowns put on their show, If we should stumble when musicians play, Time will say nothing but I told you so. There […]
For Friends Only by W. H. Auden
(for John and Teckla Clark) Ours yet not ours, being set apart As a shrine to friendship, Empty and silent most of the year, This room awaits from you What you alone, as visitor, can bring, A weekend of personal life. In a house backed by orderly woods, Facing a tractored sugar-beet country, Your working […]
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. […]
Death’s Echo by W H Auden
“O who can ever gaze his fill,” Farmer and fisherman say, “On native shore and local hill, Grudge aching limb or callus on the hand? Father, grandfather stood upon this land, And here the pilgrims from our loins will stand.” So farmer and fisherman say In their fortunate hey-day: But Death’s low answer drifts across […]
Consider This And In Our Time by W H Auden
As the hawk sees it or the helmeted airman: The clouds rift suddenly – look there At cigarette-end smouldering on a border At the first garden party of the year. Pass on, admire the view of the massif Through plate-glass windows of the Sport hotel; Join there the insufficient units Dangerous, easy, in furs, in […]
The Common Life by W H Auden
A living-room, the catholic area you (Thou, rather) and I may enter without knocking, leave without a bow, confronts each visitor with a style, a secular faith: he compares its dogmas with his, and decides whether he would like to see more of us. (Spotless rooms where nothing’s left lying about chill me, so do […]
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 […]
Christmas Oratio by W H Auden
Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree, Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes — Some have got broken — and carrying them up to the attic. The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt, And the children got ready for school. There are enough Left-overs to […]