Noons Of Dryness See You Fed            

      Found myself reading again some of the poems of W. H. (Wystan Hughes) Auden the other day, a poet that always seems to fly under the radar of one's memory despite probably being the most prolific poet between the end of WWII and the 60s. He's mainly remembered these days (if at all) for "The Shield Of Achilles," "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" (though many think much of Auden's steam for that poem was stolen by Yeats himself with his own self-elegy, "Under Ben Bulben"), "The Unknown Citizen" and "Musée des Beaux Arts." Thought I'd include some of his more immediately accessible poems here.

If I Could Tell You

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 are no fortunes to be told, although,
Because I love you more than I can say,
If I could tell you I would let you know.

The winds must come from somewhere when they blow,
There must be reasons why the leaves decay;
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

Perhaps the roses really want to grow,
The vision seriously intends to stay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

Suppose all the lions get up and go,
And all the brooks and soldiers run away;
Will Time say nothing but I told you so?
If I could tell you I would let you know.

Funeral Blues

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 crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

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
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guility, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's sensual ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing 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.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of sweetness show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find your mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness see you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

Their Lonely Betters

As I listened from a beach-chair in the shade
To all the noises that my garden made,
It seemed to me only proper that words
Should be withheld from vegetables and birds.

A robin with no Christian name ran through
The Robin-Anthem which was all it knew,
And rustling flowers for some third party waited
To say which pairs, if any, should get mated.

Not one of them was capable of lying,
There was not one which knew that it was dying
Or could have with a rhythm or a rhyme
Assumed responsibility for time.

Let them leave language to their lonely betters
Who count some days and long for certain letters;
We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep:
Words are for those with promises to keep.

And there's this magnificent poem from 1948, one of Auden's best and one worth reading and rereading:

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 system of caves and conduits; hear the springs
      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 distances and definite places:
What could be more like Mother or 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 power to charm? From weathered outcrop
      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.

Watch, then, the band of rivals as they climb up and down
      Their steep stone gennels 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
      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
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,
      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 incomprehensible: to become a pimp
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 here long but sought
Immoderate soils where the beauty was not so external,
      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,
"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 Caesars rose and
Left, slamming the door.) But the really reckless were fetched
      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
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 back ward
      And dilapidated province, connected
To the big busy world by a tunnel, with a certain
      Seedy appeal, is that all it is now? Not quite:
It has a worldy 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
The sun the sun, his mind Puzzle, is made uneasy
      By these marble statues which so obviously doubt
His antimythological myth; and these gamins,
      Pursuing the scientist down the tiled colonnade
With such lively offers, rebuke his concern for Nature's
      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
Are our common prayer, 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,
      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 are regarded from,
      Having nothing to hide. Dear, I know nothing of
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.

Damn, he was good. I'll leave my assessment of him there. Would love to hear what anybody else thinks of him anymore. The line "I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong" is somehow more devastating in Auden's hands than they might be in those of almost any other modern poet.