Time, we both know, will decay You, and already I'm scared of our divorce: I've seen some horrid ones. Remember: when Le Bon Dieu says to You Leave him!, please, please, for His sake and mine, pay no attention to my piteous Dont's, but bugger off quickly.
April 1971
A LuHaby
The din of work is subdued, another day has westered and mantling darkness arrived. Peace! Peace! Devoid your portrait of its vexations and rest. Your daily round is done with, you've gotten the garbage out, answered some tiresome letters and paid a bill by return, all frettolosamente. Now you have licence to lie, naked, curled like a shrimplet, jacent in bed, and enjoy its cosy micro-climate: Sing, Big Baby, sing lullay.
The old Greeks got it all wrong: Narcissus is an oldie, tamed by time, released at last from lust for other bodies, rational and reconciled. For many years you envied the hirsute, the he-man type. No longer: now you fondle your almost feminine flesh with mettled satisfaction, imagining that you are sinless and all-sufficient, snug in the den of yourself, Madonna and Bambino: Sing, Big Baby, sing lullay.
Let your last thinks all be thanks: praise your parents who gave you a Super-Ego of strength
■W
that saves you so much bother, digit friends and dear them all, then pay fair attribution to your age, to having been born when you were. In boyhood you were permitted to meet beautiful old contraptions, soon to be banished from earth, saddle-tank loks, beam-engines and over-shot waterwheels. Yes, love, you have been lucky: Sing, Big Baby, sing lullay.
Now for oblivion: let
the belly-mind take over
down below the diaphragm,
the domain of the Mothers,
They who guard the Sacred Gates,
without whose wordless warnings
soon the verbalising I
becomes a vicious despot,
lewd, incapable of love,
disdainful, status-hungry.
Should dreams haunt you, heed them not,
for all, both sweet and horrid,
are jokes in dubious taste,
too jejune to have truck with.
Sleep, Big Baby, sleep your fill.
April 1972
99
A Thanksgiving
When pre-pubescent I felt that moorlands and woodlands were sacred: people seemed rather profane.
Thus, when I started to verse, I presently sat at the feet of Hardy and Thomas and Frost.
Falling in love altered that, now Someone, at least, was important: Yeats was a help, so was Graves.
Then, without warning, the whole Economy suddenly crumbled: there, to instruct me, was Brecht.
Finally, hair-raising things that Hitler and Stalin were doing forced me to think about God.
Why was I sure they were wrong? Wild Kierkegaard, Williams and Lewis guided me back to belief.
Now, as I mellow in years and home in a bountiful landscape, Nature allures me again.
Who are the tutors I need? Well, Horace, adroitest of makers, beeking in Tivoli, and
Goethe. devoted to stones, who guessed that—he never could prove it— Newton led Science astray.
Fondly I ponder You alclass="underline" without You I couldn't have managed even my weakest of lines.
7 May 1973
Archaeology
The archaeologist's spade delves into dwellings vacancied long ago,
unearthing evidence of life-ways no one would dream of leading now,
concerning which he has not much to say that he can prove: the lucky man!
Knowledge may have its purposes, but guessing is always more fun than knowing.
We do know that Man, from fear or affection, has always graved His dead.
What disastered a city, volcanic effusion, fluvial outrage,
or a human horde, agog for slaves and glory, is visually patent,
and we're pretty sure that, as soon as palaces were built, their rulers,
though gluttoned on sex and blanded by flattery, must often have yawned.
But do grain-pits signify a year of famine? Where a coin-series
peters out, should we infer some major catastrophe? Maybe. Maybe.
From murals and statues we get a glimpse of what the Old Ones bowed down to,
but cannot conceit
in what situations they blushed
or shrugged their shoulders.
Poets have learned us their myths, but just how did They take them? That's a stumper.
When Norsemen heard thunder, did they seriously believe Thor was hammering?
No, I'd say: I'd swear
that men have always lounged in myths
as Tall Stories,
that their real earnest has been to grant excuses for ritual actions.
Only in rites
can we renounce our oddities and be truly entired.
Not that all rites should be equally fonded: some are abominable.
There's nothing the Crucified would like less
than butchery to appease Him.
CODA
From Archaeology
one moral, at least, may be drawn,
to wit, that all
our school text-books lie. What they call History is nothing to vaunt of,
being made, as it is, by the criminal in us: goodness is timeless.
August 1973
A Note on the Text
The poems in this selection first appeared in Auden's published books as follows:
Poems (1930): No. 1-11
Poems (second edition 1933): No. 12-14
The Orators (1932): No. 15-16
The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935): No. 24-25
Look, Stranger! (1936, American title On This Island): No. 17-23,
26-30 Spain (1937): No. 34 Letters from Iceland (1937): No. 31-32 Journey to a War (1939): No. 40 Another Time (1940): No. 33, 35-39, 41-49
The Double Man (1941, British title New Year Letter): No. 52 For the Time Being (1944): No. 60
The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (1945, similar British edition
Collected Shorter Poems 1930-1944): No. 50-51, 53-59 The Age of Anxiety (1947): No. 61-62 Nones (1951): No. 63-69 (and no. 75, parts I and IV only) The Shield of Achilles (1955): No. 70-75
Homage to Clio (1960): No. 76-81 (and no. 86, part VIII only)
About the House (1965): No. 82-86
City Without Walls (1969): No. 87-93
Epistle to a Godson (1972): No. 94-97
Thank You, Fog (1974): No. 98-100
Auden excluded certain of his early poems from his later collections. Of the poems in this book, the following did not appear in Auden's final collected edition: no. 7, 17, 25, 34, 40 (parts IX, X, XIV, XX, XXVI only), 47. Other poems were extensively revised or abridged, notably no. 4, 10, 16, 20, 23, 24, 28, 31, 39, 40 (the remaining parts), 44, 54, 57. Most of the remaining poems have lesser revisions. The final versions may be found in Collected Poems (1976) or, for most of the important changes, in the paperback Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957 (1966).
As stated in the preface, the texts in this book are those of the first published editions, with misprints corrected on the basis of manuscripts, and with some minor revisions that Auden made shortly after first publication. Such revisions occur in only two or three poems, and only one instance amounts to more than a small adjustment in the meter. This exception is poem no. 8, where the present text adopts the cuts Auden made for the second edition (1933) of Poems (1930); these cuts can be dated in manuscript to about a year after the book was first published. In the same poem the present text incorporates for the first time a small change Auden made simultaneously with the cuts, but apparently forgot when preparing the new edition for the press more than a year later (the complicated textual history of this poem, published and unpublished, offers good reasons for assuming a lapse of memory on Auden's part); the revision occurs in line 17 of part IV, where "To censor the play"-clearly a superior reading in context- replaces "The intricate play".