The sailors come ashore 197
The snow, less intransigeant than their marble 119
The Summer holds: upon its glittering lake 36
They are and suffer; that is all they do 73
They carry terror with them like a purse 74
They died and entered the closed life like nuns 69
They noticed that virginity was needed 104
They wondered why the fruit had been forbidden 65
Third Temptation, The 103
This is an architecture for the odd 103
This lunar beauty 16
Though aware of our rank and alert to obey orders 20 Thumping old tunes gives a voice to its whereabouts 280 Time will say nothing but I told you so 110 To ask the hard question is simple 17
Tonight at Seven-Thirty 271 Tower, The 103 Traveller, The 101 Trinculo 146
Under Sirius 195 Under Which Lyre 178 Unknown Citizen, The 85 Up There 260 Useful, The 106
Vespers 227 Vocation 105
Walk After Dark, A 188
Wandering lost upon the mountains of our choice 77 Watch any day his nonchalant pauses, see 4 Waters, The 109 Way, The 106
Weep no more but pity me 174
What does the song hope for? And the moved hands 55 What we know to be not possible 223 What's in your mind, my dove, my coney 19 When all the apparatus of report 76 When pre-pubescent I felt 300
When there are so many we shall have to mourn 91
Who, now, seeing Her so 250
Who stands, the crux left of the watershed 1
Will you turn a deaf ear 5
Willow-Wren and the Stare, The 200
Winds 202
Within these gates all opening begins 110
Woken, I lay in the arms of my own warmth and listened 236
Woods 204
Wrapped in a yielding air, beside 59
Yes, these are the dog-days, Fortunatus 195 Yes, we are going to suffer, now; the sky 71 Yesterday all the past. The language of size 51 You 245
You need not see what someone is doing 219
WYSTAN HUGH AUDEN was born in York, England, on February 21, 1907. He studied at Gresham's School, Holt, and Christ Church, Oxford, after which he lived for a year in a Berlin slum. In the early nineteen-thirties he taught school at Helensburgh, in Scotland, and then at the Downs School, near Malvern. In the later thirties he worked as a free-lance writer, and published travel books on Iceland (with Louis MacNeice) and the Sino-Japanese War (with Christopher Isherwood). Also in collaboration with Isher- wood, he wrote three plays for the Group Theatre, London: The Dog Beneath the Skin, The Ascent of F6, and On the Frontier. In 1939 he left England for the United States, where he became a citizen in 1946. In America he lived in New York until 1941, then taught at Michigan and Swarth- more. In 1945 he served in Germany with the U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey, and, when he returned, again took an apartment in New York. From 1948 to 1972 he spent his winters in America and his summers in Europe, first in Ischia, then, from 1958, in a house he owned in Kirchstetten, Austria. During this period he wrote four opera libretti with Chester Kallman: The Rake's Progress (for Igor Stravinsky), Elegy for Young Lovers and The Bassarids (both for Hans Werner Henze), and Love's Labour's Lost (for Nicolas Nabokov). In 1950 he published a book of essays, The Enchofed Flood, or, The Romantic Iconography of the Sea. Further essays are gathered in two large collections, The Dyer's Hand (1962) and Forewords and Afterwords (1973), as well as in the shorter Secondary Worlds (1968). His commonplace book A Certain World, which he called "a sort of autobiography," was published in 1970. From 1956 to 1960 he spent a few months of each year in Oxford as the elected Professor of Poetry. In 1972 he left his winter home in New York to return to Oxford. He died in Vienna on September 29. 1973.
EDWARD MENDELSON, the editor of this selection. is the literary executor of the Estate of W. H. Auden.