W. H. Auden – In Memory of Sigmund Freud

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 was never enough but

   hoped to improve a little by living.

Such was this doctor: still at eighty he wished

to think of our life from whose unruliness

     so many plausible young futures

   with threats or flattery ask obedience,

but his wish was denied him: he closed his eyes

upon that last picture, common to us all,

     of problems like relatives gathered

   puzzled and jealous about our dying. 

For about him till the very end were still

those he had studied, the fauna of the night,

     and shades that still waited to enter

   the bright circle of his recognition

turned elsewhere with their disappointment as he

was taken away from his life interest

     to go back to the earth in London,

   an important Jew who died in exile.

Only Hate was happy, hoping to augment

his practice now, and his dingy clientele

     who think they can be cured by killing

   and covering the garden with ashes.

They are still alive, but in a world he changed

simply by looking back with no false regrets;

     all he did was to remember

   like the old and be honest like children.

He wasn't clever at all: he merely told

the unhappy Present to recite the Past

     like a poetry lesson till sooner

   or later it faltered at the line where

long ago the accusations had begun,

and suddenly knew by whom it had been judged,

     how rich life had been and how silly,

   and was life-forgiven and more humble,

able to approach the Future as a friend

without a wardrobe of excuses, without

     a set mask of rectitude or an 

   embarrassing over-familiar gesture.

No wonder the ancient cultures of conceit

in his technique of unsettlement foresaw

     the fall of princes, the collapse of

   their lucrative patterns of frustration:

if he succeeded, why, the Generalised Life

would become impossible, the monolith

     of State be broken and prevented

   the co-operation of avengers.

Of course they called on God, but he went his way

down among the lost people like Dante, down

     to the stinking fosse where the injured

   lead the ugly life of the rejected,

and showed us what evil is, not, as we thought,

deeds that must be punished, but our lack of faith,

     our dishonest mood of denial,

   the concupiscence of the oppressor.

If some traces of the autocratic pose,

the paternal strictness he distrusted, still

     clung to his utterance and features,

   it was a protective coloration

for one who'd lived among enemies so long:

if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd,

     to us he is no more a person

   now but a whole climate of opinion

under whom we conduct our different lives:

Like weather he can only hinder or help,

     the proud can still be proud but find it

   a little harder, the tyrant tries to

make do with him but doesn't care for him much:

he quietly surrounds all our habits of growth

     and extends, till the tired in even

   the remotest miserable duchy

have felt the change in their bones and are cheered

till the child, unlucky in his little State,

     some hearth where freedom is excluded,

   a hive whose honey is fear and worry,

feels calmer now and somehow assured of escape,

while, as they lie in the grass of our neglect, 

     so many long-forgotten objects

   revealed by his undiscouraged shining

are returned to us and made precious again;

games we had thought we must drop as we grew up,

     little noises we dared not laugh at,

   faces we made when no one was looking.

But he wishes us more than this. To be free

is often to be lonely. He would unite

     the unequal moieties fractured

   by our own well-meaning sense of justice,

would restore to the larger the wit and will 

the smaller possesses but can only use

     for arid disputes, would give back to

   the son the mother's richness of feeling:

but he would have us remember most of all 

to be enthusiastic over the night,

     not only for the sense of wonder

   it alone has to offer, but also

because it needs our love. With large sad eyes

its delectable creatures look up and beg

     us dumbly to ask them to follow:

   they are exiles who long for the future

that lives in our power, they too would rejoice

if allowed to serve enlightenment like him,

     even to bear our cry of 'Judas', 

   as he did and all must bear who serve it.

One rational voice is dumb. Over his grave

the household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved:

     sad is Eros, builder of cities,

   and weeping anarchic Aphrodite.

W. H. Auden – On the Circuit

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 local sense has jelled,

From talking-site to talking-site

Am jet-or-prop-propelled.

Though warm my welcome everywhere,

I shift so frequently, so fast,

I cannot now say where I was 

The evening before last,

Unless some singular event

Should intervene to save the place,

A truly asinine remark,

A soul-bewitching face,

Or blessed encounter, full of joy,

Unscheduled on the Giesen Plan,

With, here, an addict of Tolkien,

There, a Charles Williams fan.

Since Merit but a dunghill is,

I mount the rostrum unafraid:

Indeed, 'twere damnable to ask

If I am overpaid.

Spirit is willing to repeat

Without a qualm the same old talk,

But Flesh is homesick for our snug

Apartment in New York.

A sulky fifty-six, he finds

A change of mealtime utter hell,

Grown far too crotchety to like

A luxury hotel.

The Bible is a goodly book

I always can peruse with zest,

But really cannot say the same

For Hilton's Be My Guest.

Nor bear with equanimity

The radio in students' cars,

Muzak at breakfast, or--dear God!--

Girl-organists in bars.

Then, worst of all, the anxious thought,

Each time my plane begins to sink

And the No Smoking sign comes on:

What will there be to drink?

Is this a milieu where I must

How grahamgreeneish!  How infra dig!

Snatch from the bottle in my bag 

An analeptic swig?

Another morning comes: I see,

Dwindling below me on the plane,

The roofs of one more audience

I shall not see again.

God bless the lot of them, although

I don't remember which was which:

God bless the U.S.A., so large,

So friendly, and so rich.

W. H. Auden – Grub First, Then Ethics

Should the shade of Plato

Visit us, anxious to know

how anthropos is, we could say to him: "Well,

we can read to ourselves, our use

of holy numbers would shock you, and a poet

may lament—'Where is Telford

whose bridged canals are still a Shropshire glory

where Muir who on a Douglas Spruce

rode out a storm and called an earthquake noble,

where Mr. Vynyian Board,

thanks to whose life-long fuss the hunted whale now suffers

a quicker death?'—without being

called an idiot, though none of them bore arms or

made a public splash," then "Look!"

we would point, for a dig at Athens, "Here

is the place where we cook."

Though built in Lower Austria

do-it-yourself America

prophetically blueprinted this

palace kitchen for kingdoms

where royalty would be incognito, for an age when

Courtesy might think: "From your voice

and the back of your neck I know we shall get on

but cannot tell from your thumbs

who is to give the orders." The right note is harder

to hear than in the Age of Poise

when She talked shamelessly to her maid and sang

noble lies with Him, but struck

it can be still in New Knossos where if I am

banned by a shrug it is my fault,

not Father's, as it is my taste whom

I put below the salt.

The prehistoric hearthstone,

round as a birthday-button

and sacred to Granny, is as old

stuff as the bowel-loosening

nasal war cry, but this all-electric room

where ghosts would feel uneasy,

a witch at a loss, is numinous and again

the centre of a dwelling

not, as lately it was, an abhorrent dungeon

where the warm unlaundered meiny

belched their comic prose and from a dream of which

chaste Milady awoke blushing.

House-proud, deploring labor, extolling work,

these engines politely insist

that banausics can be liberals,

a cook a pure artist

who moves Everyman

at a deeper level than

Mozart, for the subject of the verb

to-hunger is never a name:

dear Adam and Eve had different bottoms,

but the neotene who marches

upright and can subtract reveals a belly

like a serpent's with the same

vulnerable look. Jew, Gentile, or Pigmy,

he must get his calories

before he can consider her profile or

his own, attack you or play chess,

and take what there is however hard to get down:

then surely those in whose creed

God is edible may call a fine

omelet a Christian deed.

The sin of Gluttony

is ranked among the Deadly

Seven, but in murder mysteries

one can be sure the gourmet

didn't do it: children, brave warriors out of a job,

can weigh pounds more than they should

and one can dislike having to kiss them yet,

compared with the thin-lipped, they

are seldom detestable. Some waiter grieves

for the worst dead bore to be a good

trencherman, and no wonder chefs mature into

choleric types, doomed to observe

Beauty peck at a master-dish, their one reward

to behold the mutually hostile

mouth and eyes of a sinner married

at the first bite of a smile.

The houses of our City

are real enough but they lie

haphazardly scattered over the earth,

and Her vagabond forum

is any space where two of us happen to meet

who can spot a citizen

without papers. So, too, can her foes. Where the

power lies remains to be seen,

the force, though, is clearly with them: perhaps only

by falling can She become

Her own Vision, but we have sworn under four eyes

to keep Her up—all we ask for,

should the night come when comets blaze and meres break,

is a good dinner, that we

may march in high fettle, left foot first,

to hold her Thermopylae.

W. H. Auden – The More Loving One

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 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.

W. H. Auden – In Memory of W. B. Yeats

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 through the evergreen forests,

The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;

By mourning tongues

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,

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 wood

And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.

The words of a dead man

Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow

When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the bourse,

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 one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree

The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:

The parish of rich women, physical decay,

Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,

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,

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.

In the nightmare of the dark

All the dogs of Europe bark,

And the living nations wait,

Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace

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,

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

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.