W.H.AUDEN
,Selected PoemsA
^ /
NEW EDITION
Edited by EDWARD MENDELSON
VINTAGE BOOKS A Division of Random House New York
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Auden, Wystan Hugh, 1907-1973. Selected poems. I. Mendelson, Edward. PS3501.U55A17 1979 821'.9'12 78-55719
ISBN 0-394-72506-9
Manufactured in the United States of America
98765432
\N\Y-L0. PS
350( ■U55 /(17
Book design: Charlotte Staub
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jyH 141979
Contents
Preface ix
Who stands, the crux left of the watershed 1
From the very first coming down 2
Control of the passes was, he saw, the key 3
Taller to-day, we remember similar evenings 3
Watch any day his nonchalant pauses, see 4 , J
Will you turn a deaf ear 5 '
Sir, no man's enemy, forgiving all 7
It was Easter as I walked in the public gardens 7
Since you are going to begin to-day 12
Consider this and in our time 14
This lunar beauty 16
To ask the hard question is simple 17
Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle 18
What's in your mind, my dove, my coney 19
"0 where are you going?" said reader to rider 20
Though aware of our rank and alert to obey orders 20
O Love, the interest itself in thoughtless Heaven 25
O what is that sound which so thrills the ear 26 JLg.^earing of harvests rotting in the valleys 28
v,20..Out on the lawn I lie in bed 29
A shilling life will give you all the facts 32
Our hunting fathers told the story 33
Easily, my dear, you move, easily your head 33
The Summer holds: upon its glittering lake 36
Now through night's caressing grip 41
O for doors to be open and an invite
with gilded edges 42
Look, stranger, at this island now 43
Now the leaves are falling fast 43
Dear, though the night is gone 44
Casino 45
Journey to Iceland 46
"0 who can ever gaze his fill" 48
Lay your sleeping head, my love 50
Spam 51
Orpheus 55
Miss Gee 55
Wrapped in a yielding air, beside 59 '38. As I walked out one evening 60
Oxford 63
In Time of War 64
The Capital 78
Musee des Beaux Arts 79
Epitaph on a Tyrant 80
In Memory of W. B. Yeats 80
Refugee Blues 83
The Unknown Citizen 85
September 1,1939 86
Law, say the gardeners, is the sun 89
In Memory of Sigmund Freud 91
Lady, weeping at the crossroads 95
Song for St. Cecilia's Day 96
The Quest 99
But I Can't 110
In Sickness and in Health 111
Jumbled in the common box 115
Atlantis 116
At the Grave of Henry James 119
Mundus et Infans 123
The Lesson 125
The Sea and the Mirror 127
Noon 175
Lament for a Lawgiver 176
Under Which Lyre 178
The Fall of Rome 183
In Praise of Limestone 184
Song 187
A Walk After Dark 188
Memorial for the City 190
Under Sirius 195
Fleet Visit 197
The Shield of Achilles 198
The Willow-Wren and the Stare 200
Nocturne 201
Bucolics 202
Horae Canonicae 216
Homage to Clio 232
First Things First 236
The More Loving One 237
Friday's Child 237
Good-bye to the Mezzogiorno 239
Dame Kind 242
You 245
After Reading a Child's Guide to Modern Physics 246
On the Circuit 248
Et in Arcadia Ego 250
Thanksgiving for a Habitat 252
Epithalamium 278
Fairground 280
River Profile 282
Prologue at Sixty 284
Forty Years On 287
Ode to Terminus 289
August 1968 291
A New Year Greeting 292
Moon Landing 294
Old People's Home 295
Talking to Myself 296
A Lullaby 299
A Thanksgiving 300 100. Archaeology 302
A Note on the Text 305
I i
Index of Titles and First Lines 307 f
Preface
Auden was the first poet writing in English who felt at home in the twentieth century. He welcomed into his poetry all the disordered conditions of his time, all its variety of language and event. In this, as in almost everything else, he differed from his modernist predecessors such as Yeats, Lawrence, Eliot or Pound, who had turned nostalgically away from a flawed present to some lost illusory Eden where life was unified, hierarchy secure, and the grand style a natural extension of the vernacular. All of this Auden rejected. His continuing subject was the task of the present moment: erotic and political tasks in his early poems, ethical and religious ones later. When Auden looked back into history, it was to seek the causes of his present condition, that he might act better and more effectively in the future. The-past his poems envisioned was never a southern classical domain of unreflective elegance, as it was for the modernists, but a past that had always been ruined, a northern industrial landscape marred by the same violence and sorrow that marred his own.
P"
Everything that is most distinctive about Auden can be traced to his absorption in the present: even, in what might seem a paradox, his revival of the poetic forms and meters that modernism had pronounced dead a few years earlier. Auden was able to find them still alive and well, and as effective as they had always been. In Auden's unbroken vision of history, the ancient discontents survived in contemporary forms, but so did the ancient sources of personal and literary vitality. Modernism, disfranchised from the past by its own sense of isolated "modernity," could bring its literary tradition into the present only as'battered ironic fragments (as in Eliot) or by visionary heroic efforts (like Pound's) to "make
it new." For Auden, it had never grown old. A laconic Old English toughness thrived in his poetry, as did an Augustan civility. One might even find, in the shape of Auden's career, traces of an ambitious recapitulation of a thousand years of European literary history: his earliest poems use the Icelandic }
sagas as their major source; then in the thirties Dante is heard insistently in the background of his work; followed by Shakespeare in the forties; and in the sixties, Goethe.
Modernism tended to look back toward the lost reigns of a native aristocracy; too often, it found the reflected glory of ;
ancient "tradition" in political leaders who promised to restore social grandeur and unity through coercive force. Auden's refusal to idealize the past saved him from comparable fits of mistaken generosity. His poems and essays present the idea of the good society as, at best, a possibility, never |
actually to be achieved, but towards which one must always work. In Auden's poems from the thirties, this idea took form in a vision of history as the product of unconscious but purposive forces, of which social-democratic movements were potentially the conscious agents; one was free either to reject these forces or to ally oneself with them, but the choice was less a moral one than a choice between ultimate victory and J