W. H. Auden - Poems

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Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly,
The spot on your skin is a shocking disease.

W. H. Auden
Beloved, we are always in the wrong, Handling so clumsily our stupid lives, Suffering too little or too long, Too careful even in our selfish loves: The decorative manias we obey Die in grimaces round us every day, Yet through their tohu-bohu comes a voice Which utters an absurd command - Rejoice.

W. H. Auden
When Statesmen gravely say, We must be realistic,
The chances are they're weak and, therefore, pacifistic,
But when they speak of Principles, look out:: perhaps
Their generals are already poring over maps.

W. H. Auden
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

W. H. Auden
To me Art's subject is the human clay, / And landscape but a background to a torso; / All Cezanne's apples I would give away / For one small Goya or a Daumier.

W. H. Auden
Cathedrals, luxury liners laden with souls, Holding to the east their hulls of stone.

W. H. Auden
Encased in talent like a uniform, The rank of every poet is well known; They can amaze us like a thunderstorm, Or die so young, or live for years alone.

W. H. Auden
Though one cannot always Remember exactly why one has been happy, There is no forgetting that one was.

W. H. Auden
We till shadowed days are done,
We must weep and sing
Duty's conscious wrong,
The Devil in the clock

W. H. Auden
Blessed be all metrical rules that forbid automatic responses, force us to have second thoughts, free us from the fetters of Self.

W. H. Auden
We who must die demand a miracle.
How could the Eternal do a temporal act,
The Infinite become a finite fact?
Nothing can save us that is possible:
We who must die demand a miracle.

W. H. Auden
Put the car away; when life fails
What's the good of going to Wales?
Here am I, here are you:
But what does it mean? What are we going to do?

W. H. Auden
Long ago the accusations had begun,
And suddenly knew by whom it had been judged

W. H. Auden
Thou shalt not answer questionnaires Or quizzes upon world affairs, Nor with compliance Take any test. Thou shalt not sit with statisticians nor commit A social science.

W. H. Auden
Few can remember
clearly when innocence came
to a sudden end,
the moment at which we ask
for the first time: Am I loved?

W. H. Auden
There was still gold and silver in the mountains,
And hunger was a more immediate sorrow

W. H. Auden
For time is inches
And the heart's changes,
Where ghost has haunted
Lost and wanted.

W. H. Auden
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

W. H. Auden
The camera may do justice to laughter, but must degrade sorrow.

W. H. Auden
The most difficult problem in personal knowledge, whether of oneself or of others, is the problem of guessing when to think as a historian and when to think as an anthropologist.

W. H. Auden
God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good.

W. H. Auden
Desire, even in its wildest tantrums, can neither persuade me it is love nor stop me from wishing it were.

W. H. Auden
I will love you forever" swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. "I will love you at 4:15 pm next Tuesday" - Is that still as easy?

W. H. Auden
Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links, Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks, Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.

W. H. Auden
Let us honor if we can
The vertical man
Though we value none
But the horizonal one.

W. H. Auden
Dance till the stars come down from the rafters
Dance, Dance, Dance 'till you drop.

W. H. Auden
To ask the hard question is simple,
The simple act of the confused will.

W. H. Auden
Clear, unscaleable ahead, Rise the mountains of instead From whose cold, cascading streams None may drink except in dreams

W. H. Auden
Say this city has ten million souls, Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes: Yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's no place for us.

W. H. Auden
Healing,
Papa would tell me,
'is not a science,
but the intuitive art of wooing Nature.'

W. H. Auden