A Whorl of Poetry

Index of Authors

A Garden, A City

W. H. Auden has written at least the following books:

Poems by W. H. Auden

We expected the beautiful or wise
Ready to see a charm in our childish fit
Please to find nothing but stones and
Able at once to create a garden

But those who come are not even children with
Those big indiscriminate eyes we had lost,

Occupying our narrow spaces
With their anarchist vivid abandon

They arrive, already adroit, having learned
Restraint at the table of a father's rage;

In a mother's distorting mirror
They discovered the meaning of knowledge.

These pioneers have long adapted themselves
To the night and the nightmare; they come equipped

To reply to terror with terror
With lies to unmask the least deception

* * *

O the striped and vigorous tiger can move
With style through the borough of murder; the ape

Is really at home in the parish
Of grimacing and licking: but we have

Failed as their pupils. Our tears well from a love
We have never outgrown; our cities predict

More than we hope; even our armies
Have to express our need of forgiveness.

-- From "They", April 1939.

Links:
  • The Yahoo Auden Category.
  • The Auden society site has links to several of his poems, plus a bibliography and (what a treat!) a real audio recording of Auden reading "On the Circuit".
  • Musee des Beaux Arts is online at Classic Poetry Pages.
  • Quotes from Auden: 10 wonderful lines of prose from this great poet. Online at Athens/Oracle/6517, the "Quotez" site.
  • Oh What is that Sound? (Athens/Parthenon/7813)
  • Two poems, "Anthem" and "The Shield of Achilles" (Athens/Troy/1787).
  • Eight Auden poems, including "Villanelle" and "O Tell Me The Truth About Love", at this wonderful anthology of love poetry.

    Other Auden, from "In Time of War":

    The life of man is never quite completed;
    The daring and the chatter will go on:
    But as an artist feels his power gone,
    These walk the earth and know themselves defeated.
    Some could not bear nor break the young and mourn for
    The wounded myths that once made nations good,
    Some lost a world they never understood,
    Some saw too clearly all that man was born for.
    Loss is their shadow-wife, Anxiety
    Receives them like a grand hotel; but where
    They may regret they must; their life, to hear
    The call of the forbidden cities, see
    The stranger watch them with a happy stare,
    And Freedom hostile in each home and tree.

  • Random House has a real audio file of Auden reading "The More Loving One" as well as Biographical Essay by Ernie Hilbert.
    		• When I look 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 fear 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.

    "The More Loving One"

    The Cave of Nakedness
    (For Louis and Emmie Kronenberger)

    Don Juan needs no bed, being far too impatient to undress,
    nor do Tristan and Isolda, much too in love to care
    for so mundane a matter, but unmythical
    mortals require one, and prefer to take their clothes off,
    if only to sleep. That is why bedroom farces
    must be incredible to be funny, why Peeping Toms
    are never praised, like novelists or bird watchers,
    for their keeness of observation : where there's a bed,
    be it a nun's restricted cot or an Emperor's
    baldachined and nightly-redamselled couch, there are no
    effable data. (Dreams may be repeatable
    but our deeds of errantry in the wilderness of wish
    so often turn out, when told, to be less romantic
    than our day's routine: besides, we cannot describe them
    without faking.) Lovers don't see their embraces
    as a viable theme for debate, nor a monk his prayers
    (do they, in fact, remember them?): O's of passion,
    interior acts of attention, not being a story
    in which the names don't matter but the way of telling,
    with a lawyer's wit or a nobleman's assurance,
    does, need a drawing room of their own. Bed-sitting-rooms
    soon drive us crazy, a dormitory even sooner
    turns us to brutes: bona fide architects know
    that doors are not emphatic enough, and interpose,
    as a march between two realms, so alien, so disjunct,
    the no-man's-land of a stair. The switch from personage,
    with a state number, a first and family name,
    to the naked Adam or Eve, and vice versa,
    should not be off-hand or abrupt: a stair retards it
    to a solemn procession.

    Since my infantile entrance
    at my mother's bidding into Edwardian England,
    I have suffered the transit over forty thousand times,
    usually, to my chagrin, by myself: about
    blended flesh, those midnight colloquia of Derbies and Joans,
    I know nothing therefore, about certain occult
    antipathies perhaps too much. Some perks belong, though,
    to all unwilling celibates: our rooms are seldom
    battlefields, we enjoy the pleasure of reading in bed
    (as we grow older, it's true, we may find it prudent
    to get nodding drunk first), we retain the right to choose
    our sacred image. (That I often start with sundry
    splendors at sundry times greened after, but always end
    aware of one, the same one, may be of no importance,
    but I hope it is.) Ordinary human unhappiness
    is life in its natural color, to cavil
    putting on airs: at day-wester to think of nothing
    benign to memorize is as rare as feeling
    no personal blemish, and Age, despite its damage,
    is well-off. When they look in their bedroom mirrors,
    Fifty-plus may be bored, but Seventeen is faced by
    a frowning failure, with no money, no mistress,
    no manner of his own, who never got to Italy
    nor met a great one: to say a few words at banquets,
    to attend a cocktail party in honor of N or M,
    can be severe, but Junior has daily to cope
    with ghastly family meals, with dear Papa and Mama
    being odd in the wrong way. (It annoys him to speak,
    and it hurts him not to.)

    When I disband from the world,
    and entrust my future to the Gospel Makers,
    I need not fear (not in neutral Austria) being called for
    in the waist of the night by deaf agents, never
    to be heard of on earth again: the assaults I would be spared
    are none of them princely--fire, nightmare, insomnia's
    Vision of Hell, when Nature's wholesome genial fabric
    lies utterly discussed and from a sullen vague
    wafts a contagious stench, her adamant minerals
    all corrupt, each life a worthless iteration
    of the general loathing (to know that, probably,
    its cause is chemical can degrade the panic,
    not stint it). As a rule, with pills to help them, the Holy Four
    exempt my nights from nuisance, and even wake me
    when I would be woken, when, audible here and there
    in the half-dark, members of an avian orchestra
    are already softly noodling, limbering up for
    an overture at sunrise, their efforts to express
    in the old convention they inherit that joy in beginning
    for which or species was created, and declare it
    good.
    We may not be obliged--though it is mannerly--to bless
    the Trinity that we are corporal contraptions,
    but only a villain will omit to thank Our Lady or
    her henwife, Dame Kind, as he, she, or both ensemble,
    emerge from a private cavity to be reborn,
    reneighbored in the Country of Consideration.

    June 1963
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