Selected Poems
from
MODERN POEMS
An Introduction to Poetry
edited by
Richard Ellmann & Robert O'Clair
-----
The Letter1
From the very first coming down
Into a new valley with a frown
Because of the sun and a lost way,
You certainly remain: to-day
I, crouching behind a sheep-pen,
heard
5
Travel across a sudden bird,
Cry out against the storm, and found
The year's arc a completed round
And love's worn circuit re-begun,
Endless with no dissenting
turn.
10
Shall see, shall pass, as we have seen
The swallow on the tile, Spring's green
Preliminary shiver, passed
A solitary truck, the last
Of shunting in the Autumn. But
now,
15
To interrupt the homely brow,
Thought warmed to evening through and through
Your letter comes, speaking as you,
Speaking of much but not to come.
Nor speech is close nor fingers
numb
20
If love not seldom has received
An unjust answer, was deceived.
I, decent with the seasons, move
Different or with a different love,
Nor question overmuch the
nod,
25
The stone smile of this country god2
That never was more reticent,
Always afraid to say more than it meant.
1928
1. This
poem was first published with the title "The Love Letter.
2. Love.
__________
Prologue3
By landscape reminded once of his mother's figure
The mountain heights he remembers get bigger and bigger:
With the finest of mapping pens he fondly traces
All the family names on the familiar places.
Among green pastures straying he walks by
still waters;4
5
Surely a swan he seems to earth's unwise daughters,
Bending a beautiful head, worshipping not lying,
'Dear' the dear beak in the dear concha5 crying.
Under the trees the summer bands were
playing;
'Dear boy, be brave as these roots', he heard them
saying:
10
Carries the good news gladly to a world in danger,
Is really to argue, he smiles, with any stranger.
And yet this prophet, homing the day is
ended,
Receives odd welcome from the country he so defended:
The band roars "Coward, Coward', in his human
fever.
15
The giantess shuffles nearer, cries 'Deceiver'.
1932
3. Auden
wrote this poem as prologue to The Orators: An English Study. He
reprinted it later by itself with the title "Adolescence."
4. Psalms 23:2 ---
"He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; He leadeth me beside the
still waters."
5. The Central concavity in the
external ear.
__________
The Wanderer6
Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle.7
Upon what man it fall
In spring, day-wishing flowers appearing,
Avalanche sliding, white snow from rock-face,
That he should leave his
house,
5
No cloud-soft hand can hold him, restraint by women;
But ever that man goes
Through place-keepers, through forest trees,
A stranger to strangers over undried sea,
Houses for fishes, suffocating
water,
10
Or lonely on fell as chat,8
By pot-holed becks9
A bird stone-haunting, an unquit bird.
There head falls forward, fatigued at
evening,
And dreams of
home,
15
Waving from window, spread of welcome,
Kissing of wife under single sheet;
But waking sees
Bird-flocks nameless to him, through doorway voices
Of new men making another
love.
20
Save him from hostile capture.
From sudden tiger's spring at corner;
Protect his house,
His anxious house where days are counted
From thunderbolt
protect,
25
From gradual ruin spreading like a stain;
Converting number from vague to certain,
Bring joy, bring day of his returning,
Lucky with day approaching, with leaning dawn.
1933
6. This
poem was first published with the title, "Something Is Bound to
Happen."
7. Adapted from a Middle English
West Midland homily, "Sawles Warde" probably written in the
thirteenth century, where there is reference to God's judgments as
"his dooms that are secret and deeper than any sea dingle." A
dingle is an abyss. The rest of the poem owes something to an Old English
poem also entitled "The Wanderer," from which Richard Hoggart
translates these relevant lines: "Often the solitary man prays for
favor, for the mercy of the Lord, though, sad at heart, he must needs stir
with his hands for a weary while the icy sea across the watery wastes,
must journey the paths of exile; settled in truth is fate! So spoke the
wanderer, mindful of hardshipe. . . . He knows who puts it to the test how
cruel a comrade is sorrow for him who has few dear protectors; his is the
path of exile, in no wise the twisted gold; a chill body, in no wise the
riches of the earth; he thinks of retainers in hall and the receiving of
treasure, of how in his youth his gold-friend was kind to him at the
feast. The joy has all perished. . . . Then the friendless man wakes
again, sees before him the dark waves, the sea-birds bathing, spreading
their feathers; frost and snow falling mingles with hail. Then heavier are
the wounds in his heart, sore for his beloved; sorrow is renewed."
8. A kind of bird, a warbler. A
fell is a moorland ridge.
9. Stony brooks.
__________
Our Hunting Fathers10
Our hunting fathers11 told the story
Of the sadness of the creatures,
Pitied the limits and the lack
Set in their finished features;
Saw in the lion's intolerant
look,
5
Behind the quarry's dying glare,
Love raging for the personal glory
That reason's gift would add,
The liberal appetite and power,
The rightness of a
god.
10
Who, nurtured in that fine tradition,
Predicted the result,
Guessed Love by nature suited to
The intricate ways of guilt,
That human ligaments could
so
15
His southern gestures modify
and make it his mature ambition
To think no thought but ours,
To hunger, work illegally,
And be anonymous?12
20
1935
10. This
poem was originally published with the title, "In Father's
Footsteps."
11. Auden refers to the period,
presumably in the late nineteenth-century, when "our hunting
fathers" could complacently pity the lower animals, who showed
passions comparable to human ones, but lacked that quality of reason which
enables men to become individual and godlike.
12. In our time human love, instead of making us
pretend to be lords of the universe, finds expression in revolutionary
activity which brings us to behave like those very beasts whom our fathers
patronized.
__________
Who's Who
A shilling life13 will give you all the facts:
How Father beat him, how he ran away,
What were the struggles of his youth, what acts
Made him the greatest figure of his day:
Of how he fought, fished, hunted, worked all
night,
5
Though giddy, climbed new mountains; named a sea;
Some of the last researchers even write
Love made him weep his pints like you and me.
With all his honours on, he sighed for one
Who, say astonished critics, lived at
home;
10
Did little jobs about the house with skill
And nothing else; could whistle; would sit still
Or potter round the garden; answered some
Of his long marvellous letters but kept none.
1936
13. A
cheap biographical pamphlet.
__________
[Fish in the
Unruffled Lakes]
Fish in the unruffled lakes
The swarming colours wear,
Swans in the winter air
A white perfection
have,
And the great lion walks
5
Through his innocent grove;
Lion, fish, and swan
Act, and are gone
Upon Time's toppling wave.
We till shadowed days are
done,
10
We must weep and sing
Duty's conscious wrong,
The Devil in the clock,
The Goodness carefully worn
For atonement or for
luck;
15
We must lose our loves,
On each best and bird that moves
Turn an envious look.
Sighs for folly said and done
Twist our narrow
days;
20
But I must bless, I must praise
That you, my swan, who have
All gifts that to the swan
Impulsive Nature
gave,
25
The majesty and pride,
Last night should add
Your voluntary love.
1936
__________
Lullaby
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the
grave
5
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
10
Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus14
sends
15
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's carnal
ecstasy.
20
Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring
cry:
25
Every fathering15 of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be
lost.
30
Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show
Eye and knocking heart may
bless,
35
Find our mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human
love.
40
1940
14. Venus
is the Roman goddess of love.
15. A coin, no longer in use,
worth on quarter of a penny.
__________
Musée des Beaux
Arts16
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully
along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately
waiting
5
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
on a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its
course
10
anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel's Icarus,17 for
instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman
may
15
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the
sky,
20
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
1940
16. Museum
of Fine Arts (Fr).
17. Pieter Brueghel's painting,
"The Fall of Icarus," hangs in the Palace of the Royal Museums
of Painting and Sculpture in Brussels, Auden borrows the detail of the
horse scratching its behind from another Brueghel painting, "The
Massacre of the Innocents." Icarus flew using the wings his father
Daedalus had made of feathers and wax, but recklessly went too close to
the sun; the wax melted and he fell into the sea.
__________
Our Bias
The hour-glass whispers to the lion's roar,
The clock-towers tell the gardens day and night
How many errors Time has patience for,
How wrong they are in being always right.
Yet Time, however loud its chimes or
deep.
5
However fast its falling torrent flows,
Has never put one lion off his leap
Nor shaken the assurance of a rose.
For they, it seems, care only for
success:
10
While we choose words according to their sound
And judge a problem by its awkwardness;
And Time with us was always popular.
When have we not preferred some going round
To going straight to where we are?
1940
__________
In Memory of W. B.
Yeats
(d. Jan. 1939)
I
He disappeared in the dead of winter:18
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
5
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
10
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,
15
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 wood19
20
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.20
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
But in the importance and noise of tomorrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,21
25
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 on thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.
What instruments we have
agree
30
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
II
You were silly like us;22 you
gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women,23 physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather
still,
35
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,
40
A way of happening, a mouth.
III
Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.24
45
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,25
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;
Intellectual
disgrace
50
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,
55
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
60
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.
65
1940
18. Yeats
died on January 28, 1939, in Roquebrune in southern France.
19. An allusion to the beginning
of the Inferno, where Dante himself, in middle life, "in a
dark wood." Yeats, by dying, enters a realm of being where poets
survive only in their poems.
20. A glance at Yates's Irish
nationalism. The foreign code to which he must now submit is the judgment
of the living.
21. Stock exchange (Fr).
22. In prose writings, Auden has
registered various objections to Yates's thought, especially to his
occultism.
23. Yeats as a young man accepted
some financial help, later repaid, from Lady Gregory. He was friendly with
other wealthy women later.
24. Following this line Auden
originally included three stanzas in which Time, which is said to worship
language and forgive "everyone by whom [language] lives," is
expected to pardon "Kipling and his [imperialistic] views / And will
pardon Paul Claudel 0a French writer of extreme political conservatism], /
Pardon him [Yates, whose antidemocratic stance was antipathetic to Auden's
own] for writing well." These stanzas were deleted in the 1966
edition of Collected Shorter Poems.
25. The Second World War was to
begin in September 1939.
__________
New Year Letter26
O Unicorn among the cedars,
To whom no magic charm can lead us,
White childhood moving like a sigh
Through the green woods unharmed in thy
Sophisticated
innocence,
1655
To call thy true love to the dance,27
O Dove of science and of light,28
Upon the branches of the night,
O Ichthus playful in the deep
Sea-lodges that forever
keep
1660
Their secret of excitement hidden,
O sudden Wind that blows unbidden,
Parting the quiet reeds, O Voice
Within the labyrinth of choice
Only the passive listener
hears,
1665
O Clock and Keeper of the years,
O Source of equity and rest,
Quando non fuerit, non est,29
It without image, paradigm
Of matter, motion, number,
time,
1670
The grinning gap of Hell, the hill
Of Venus and the stairs of Will,
Disturb our negligence and chill,
Convict our pride of its offence
In all things, even
penitence,
1675
Instruct us in the civil art
Of making from the muddled heart
A desert and a city where
The thoughts that have to labour there
May find locality and
peace,
1680
And pent-up feelings their release,
Send strength sufficient for our day,
And point out knowledge on its way,30
O da quod jubes, Domine.31
o
o o
1941
26. This
long poem is dated January 1, 1940, and was written in the United States,
to which Auden had emigrated in 1939. The poem's closing lines are an
invocation to the Holy Trinity, the members of which are addressed as
traditional Christian symbols; thus is the Unicorn and Ichthus (the fish),
the Holy Ghost is the Wind and the Dove, and God is the Voice. Soon after
its composition Auden joined the Church of England.
27. "Tomorrow shall be my
dancing day / I would my true love did so chance / To see the legend of my
play / To call my true love to the dance. / Sing O my love, O my love, my
love, my love, / This have I done for my true love. (English Carol.)"
(Auden's note). Edward Callan has pointed out that in this medieval lyric
the speaker is Christ.
28. "O God of science and of
light. / Apollo, by thy greate myght / This litel laste book thou gye
(Chaucer. The House of Fame.)" (Auden's note).
29. The source of this quotation
is Chapter 2, "About Christ," from First Principles by
Origen (c.185-c.253), a great early writer on Christianity. It is
translated, "There is not [a time] when he was not" ---
"he" being Christ, and the statement means that the Son of God
is co-eternal with God. Auden likely found this phrase and its explication
in The Descent of the Dove (1939), by Charles Williams; he knew the
book and its author well and has acknowledged the strong influence of
Williams' thought on his.
30. Auden's not gives a passage
from John Donne's "The Litany" as a parallel prayer to God
to give direction to human knowledge: "That learning, thine
Ambassador, / From thine allegeance wee never tempt, / That beauty,
paradise flower / For physicke [medicine] made, from poyson be exempt, /
That wit, borne apt high good to doe, / By dwelling lazily / On Natures
nothing, be not nothing too, / That our affections kill us not, nor dye, /
Heare us, weak ecchoes, O thou eare, and cry."
31. "v. St. Augustine Confessions.
Book X" (Auden's note). Charles Williams translates this, "Give
what thou commandest, Lord." The full phrase asks, "Give (me)
what you command; command (of me) what you will."
__________
In Praise of
Limestone
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 of caves and conduits; hear the
springs
5
That spurt out everywhere with a chuckle,
Each filling a private pool for its fish and carving
Its own little ravine whose cliffs entertain
The butterfly and the lizard; examine this region
Of short distance and definite
places;
10
What could be more like Mother of a fitter background
For her son, the flirtatious male who lounges
Against a rock in the sunlight, never doubting
That for all his faults he is loved; whose works are but
Extensions of his poer to charm? From weathered
outcrop
15
To hill-top temple, from appearing waters to
Conspicuous fountains, from a wild to a formal vineyard,
Are ingenious but short steps that a child's wish
To receive more attention than his brothers, whether
By pleasing or teasing, can easily
take.
20
Watch, then, the band of rivals as they climb
up and down
Their steep stone gennels32 in twos and
threes, at times
Arm in arm, but never, thank God, in step; or engaged
On the shady side of a square at midday in
Voluble discourse, knowing each other too well to
think
25
There are any important secrets, unable
To conceive a god whose temper-tantrums are moral
And not to be pacified by a clever line
Or a good lay: for, accustomed to a stone that responds,
They have never had to veil their faces in
awe
30
Of a crater whose blazing fury could not be fixed;
Adjusted to the local needs of valleys
Where everything can be touched or reached by walking,
Their eyes have never looked into infinite space
Through the lattice-work of a nomad's comb; born
lucky,
35
Their legs have never encountered the fungi
And insects of the jungle, the monstrous forms and lives
With which we have nothing, we like to hope, in common.
So, when one of them goes to the bad, the way his mind works
Remains comprehensive: to become a
pimp
40
Or deal in fake jewellery or ruin a fine tenor voice
For effects that bring down the house, could happen to
all
But the best and the worst of us . . .
That is why, I suppose,
The best and worst never stayed her long but sought
Immoderate soils where the beauty was not so
external,
45
The light less public and the meaning of life
Something more than a mad camp. 'Come!' cried the granite wastes,
'How evasive is your humour, how accidental
Your kindest kiss, how permanent is death.' (Saints-to-be
Slipped away sighing.) 'Come!' purred the clays and
gravels.
50
'On our plains there is room for armies to drill; rivers
Wait to be tamed and slaves to construct you a tomb
In the grand manner: soft as the earth is mankind and both
Need to be altered.' (Intendant Caesrs rose and
Left, slamming the door.)33 But the really reckless were
fetched
55
By an older colder voice, the oceanic whisper:
'I am the solitude that asks and promises nothing;
That is how I shall set you free. There is no love;
There are only the various envies, all of them sad.'
They were right, my dear, all those voices were
right
60
And still are; this land is not the sweet home that it looks,
Nor its peace the historical calm of a site
Where something was settled once and for all: A backward
And dilapidated province, connected
To the big busy world by a tunnel, with a
certain
65
Seedy appeal, is that all it is now? Not quite:
It has a worldly duty which in spite of itself
It does not neglect, but calls into question
All the great Powers assume; it disturbs our rights. The poet,
admired for his earnest habit of
calling
70
The sun the sun, his mind Puzzle, is made uneasy
By these marble statues which so obviously doubt
His antimythological myth; and these gamins,34
Pursuing the scientist down the tiled colonnade
With such lively offers, rebuke his concern for
Nature's
75
Remotest aspects: I, too, am reproached, for what
And how much you know. Not to lose time, not to get caught,
Not to be left behind, not, please! to resemble
The beasts who repeat themselves, or a thing like water
Or stone whose conduct can be predicted,
these
80
Are our Common Prayer,35 whose greatest comfort is music
Which can be made anywhere, is invisible,
And does not smell. In so far as we have to look forward
To death as a fact, no doubt we are right: But if
Sins can be forgiven, if bodies rise from the
dead,
85
These modifications of matter into
Innocent athletes and gesticulating fountains,
Made solely for pleasure, make a further point:
The blessed will not care what angle they they are regarded from,
Having nothing to hide. Dear, I know nothing
of
90
Either, but when I try to imagine a faultless love
Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur
Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.
1951
32. A
narrow passage between houses or, as her, rocks.
33. John Fuller suggests that
this is an allusion to a remark by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda
minister and, in 1945, his successor: "If we are defeated, we shall
slam the doors of history behind us."
34. Urchins.
35. The Book of Common Prayer is
a collection of prayers in English; assembled during the 16th century, it
standardizes the devotions of the Church of England.
__________
Ellmann, Richard and Robert O'Clair. Modern Poems: An
Introduction to
Poetry. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973,
pp. 276-288.
-----
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