Friday’s Child by W H Auden
He told us we were free to choose But, children as we were, we thought— “Paternal Love will only use Force in the last resort On those too bumptious to repent.” Accustomed to religious dread, It never crossed our minds He meant Exactly what He said. Perhaps He frowns, perhaps He grieves, But it seems […]
Friday’s Child by W H Auden
He told us we were free to choose But, children as we were, we thought— “Paternal Love will only use Force in the last resort On those too bumptious to repent.” Accustomed to religious dread, It never crossed our minds He meant Exactly what He said. Perhaps He frowns, perhaps He grieves, But it seems […]
For What As Easy by W H Auden
For what as easy For what thought small, For what is well Because between, To you simply From me I mean. Who goes with who The bedclothes say, As I and you Go kissed away, The data given, The senses even. Fate is not late, Nor the speech rewritten, Nor one word forgotten, Said at […]
Five Songs – II by W H Auden
That night when joy began Our narrowest veins to flush, We waited for the flash Of morning’s levelled gun. But morning let us pass, And day by day relief Outgrows his nervous laugh, Grown credulous of peace, As mile by mile is seen No trespasser’s reproach, And love’s best glasses reach No fields but are […]
Fish in the Unruffled Lakes by W H Auden
Fish in the unruffled lakes Their swarming colours wear, Swans in the winter air A white perfection have, And the great lion walks Through his innocent grove; Lion, fish and swan Act, and are gone Upon Time’s toppling wave. We, till shadowed days are done, We must weep and sing Duty’s conscious wrong, The Devil […]
Eyes Look Into The Well by W H Auden
Eyes look into the well, Tears run down from the eye; The tower cracked and fell From the quiet winter sky. Under a midnight stone Love was buried by thieves; The robbed heart begs for a bone, The damned rustle like leaves. Face down in the flooded brook With nothing more to say. Lies One […]
Eyes Look Into The Well by W H Auden
Eyes look into the well, Tears run down from the eye; The tower cracked and fell From the quiet winter sky. Under a midnight stone Love was buried by thieves; The robbed heart begs for a bone, The damned rustle like leaves. Face down in the flooded brook With nothing more to say. Lies One […]
Edward Lear by W H Auden
Left by his friend to breakfast alone on the white Italian shore, his Terrible Demon arose Over his shoulder; he wept to himself in the night, A dirty landscape-painter who hated his nose. The legions of cruel inquisitive They Were so many and big like dogs: he was upset By Germans and boats; affection was […]
Doggerel by a Senior Citizen by W H Auden
Our earth in 1969 Is not the planet I call mine, The world, I mean, that gives me strength To hold off chaos at arm’s length. My Eden landscapes and their climes Are constructs from Edwardian times, When bath-rooms took up lots of space, And, before eating, one said Grace. The automobile, the aeroplane, Are […]
Deftly, Admiral, Cast Your Fly by W H Auden
Deftly, admiral, cast your fly Into the slow deep hover, Till the wise old trout mistake and die; Salt are the deeps that cover The glittering fleets you led, White is your head. Read on, ambassador, engrossed In your favourite Stendhal; The Outer Provinces are lost, Unshaven horsemen swill The great wines of the Chateaux […]
Two Songs for Hedli Anderson by W. H. Auden
I Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead, Put crêpe bows round the white necks of […]
The Shield of Achilles by W. H. Auden
She looked over his shoulder For vines and olive trees, Marble well-governed cities And ships upon untamed seas, But there on the shining metal His hands had put instead An artificial wilderness And a sky like lead. A plain without a feature, bare and brown, No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood, Nothing to […]
The More Loving One by W. H. Auden
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 […]
The Fall of Rome by W. H. Auden
(for Cyril Connolly) The piers are pummelled by the waves; In a lonely field the rain Lashes an abandoned train; Outlaws fill the mountain caves. Fantastic grow the evening gowns; Agents of the Fisc pursue Absconding tax-defaulters through The sewers of provincial towns. Private rites of magic send The temple prostitutes to sleep; All the […]
September 1, 1939 by W. H. Auden
I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odour of death Offends the September night. Accurate scholarship can Unearth […]
On the Circuit by W. H. Auden
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 […]
In Memory of W. B. Yeats by W. H. Auden
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 […]
In Memory of Sigmund Freud by W. H. Auden
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 […]
If I could tell you by W. H. Auden
Time will say nothing but I told you so, Time only knows the price we have to pay; If I could tell you I would let you know. If we should weep when clowns put on their show, If we should stumble when musicians play, Time will say nothing but I told you so. There […]
For Friends Only by W. H. Auden
(for John and Teckla Clark) Ours yet not ours, being set apart As a shrine to friendship, Empty and silent most of the year, This room awaits from you What you alone, as visitor, can bring, A weekend of personal life. In a house backed by orderly woods, Facing a tractored sugar-beet country, Your working […]
Epitaph on a Tyrant by W. H. Auden
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; He knew human folly like the back of his hand, And was greatly interested in armies and fleets; When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets. […]
Death’s Echo by W H Auden
“O who can ever gaze his fill,” Farmer and fisherman say, “On native shore and local hill, Grudge aching limb or callus on the hand? Father, grandfather stood upon this land, And here the pilgrims from our loins will stand.” So farmer and fisherman say In their fortunate hey-day: But Death’s low answer drifts across […]
Consider This And In Our Time by W H Auden
As the hawk sees it or the helmeted airman: The clouds rift suddenly – look there At cigarette-end smouldering on a border At the first garden party of the year. Pass on, admire the view of the massif Through plate-glass windows of the Sport hotel; Join there the insufficient units Dangerous, easy, in furs, in […]
The Common Life by W H Auden
A living-room, the catholic area you (Thou, rather) and I may enter without knocking, leave without a bow, confronts each visitor with a style, a secular faith: he compares its dogmas with his, and decides whether he would like to see more of us. (Spotless rooms where nothing’s left lying about chill me, so do […]
Cocaine Lil and Morphine Sue by W H Auden
Did you ever hear about Cocaine Lil? She lived in Cocaine town on Cocaine hill, She had a cocaine dog and a cocaine cat, They fought all night with a cocaine rat. She had cocaine hair on her cocaine head. She had a cocaine dress that was poppy red: She wore a snowbird hat and […]
Christmas Oratio by W H Auden
Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree, Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes — Some have got broken — and carrying them up to the attic. The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt, And the children got ready for school. There are enough Left-overs to […]
Carry Her Over the Water by W H Auden
Carry her over the water, And set her down under the tree, Where the culvers white all days and all night, And the winds from every quarter, Sing agreeably, agreeably, agreeably of love. Put a gold ring on her finger, And press her close to your heart, While the fish in the lake snapshots take, […]
Canzone by W H Auden
When shall we learn, what should be clear as day, We cannot choose what we are free to love? Although the mouse we banished yesterday Is an enraged rhinoceros today, Our value is more threatened than we know: Shabby objections to our present day Go snooping round its outskirts; night and day Faces, orations, battles, […]
Calypso by W H Auden
Driver drive faster and make a good run Down the Springfield Line under the shining sun. Fly like an aeroplane, don’t pull up short Till you brake for Grand Central Station, New York. For there in the middle of the waiting-hall Should be standing the one that I love best of all. If he’s not […]
Base Words Are Uttered by W H Auden
Base words are uttered only by the base And can for such at once be understood, But noble platitudes:-ah, there’s a case Where the most careful scrutiny is needed To tell a voice that’s genuinely good From one that’s base but merely has succeeded. ————— The End And that’s the End of the Poem © Poetry […]
Autumn Song by W H Auden
Now the leaves are falling fast, Nurse’s flowers will not last; Nurses to the graves are gone, And the prams go rolling on. Whispering neighbours, left and right, Pluck us from the real delight; And the active hands must freeze Lonely on the separate knees. Dead in hundreds at the back Follow wooden in our […]
August 1968 by W H Auden
The Ogre does what ogres can, Deeds quite impossible for Man, But one prize is beyond his reach, The Ogre cannot master Speech: About a subjugated plain, Among its desperate and slain, The Ogre stalks with hands on hips, While drivel gushes from his lips. ————— The End And that’s the End of the Poem […]
Atlantis by W H Auden
Being set on the idea Of getting to Atlantis, You have discovered of course Only the Ship of Fools is Making the voyage this year, As gales of abnormal force Are predicted, and that you Must therefore be ready to Behave absurdly enough To pass for one of The Boys, At least appearing to love […]
As I Walked Out One Evening by W. H. Auden
As I walked out one evening, Walking down Bristol Street, The crowds upon the pavement Were fields of harvest wheat. And down by the brimming river I heard a lover sing Under an arch of the railway: ‘Love has no ending. ‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you Till China and Africa meet, And the […]
As We Like It by W H Auden
Certainly our city with its byres of poverty down to The river’s edge, its cathedral, its engines, its dogs; Here is the cosmopolitan cooking And the light alloys and the glass. Built by the conscience-stricken, the weapon-making, By us. Wild rumours woo and terrify the crowd, Woo us. Betrayers thunder at, blackmail Us. But where […]
As the poets have mournfully sung by W H Auden
As the poets have mournfully sung, Death takes the innocent young, The rolling-in-money, The screamingly-funny, And those who are very well hung. ————— The End And that’s the End of the Poem © Poetry Monster, 2021. Poems by topic and subject. Poetry Monster — the ultimate repository of world poetry. Poetry Monster — the multilingual library […]
Are You There? by W H Auden
Each lover has some theory of his own About the difference between the ache Of being with his love, and being alone: Why what, when dreaming, is dear flesh and bone That really stirs the senses, when awake, Appears a simulacrum of his own. Narcissus disbelieves in the unknown; He cannot join his image in […]
After Reading a Child’s Guide to Modern Physics by W. H. Auden
If all a top physicist knows About the Truth be true, Then, for all the so-and-so’s, Futility and grime, Our common world contains, We have a better time Than the Greater Nebulae do, Or the atoms in our brains. Marriage is rarely bliss But, surely it would be worse As particles to pelt At thousands […]
Academic Graffiti by W H Auden
Henry Adams Was mortally afraid of Madams: In a disorderly house He sat quiet as a mouse. Mallarmé Had too much to say: He could never quite Leave the paper white. Thomas the Rymer Was probably a social climber: He should have known Fairy Queens Were beyond his means. Paul Valéry Earned a meagre salary […]
A Walk After Dark by W H Auden
A cloudless night like this Can set the spirit soaring: After a tiring day The clockwork spectacle is Impressive in a slightly boring Eighteenth-century way. It soothed adolescence a lot To meet so shameless a stare; The things I did could not Be so shocking as they said If that would still be there After […]