Tag: W.H. Auden

Good morning! Continuing my travels through W. H. Auden’s Selected Poems, I arrived at this lovely verse. Auden seems to be channeling Shakespeare in this stage, with formal syntax and even in setting looking backwards (nothing like the American inventions of, say, William Carlos Williams et al.) But my, how he is finding his own interesting and inventive verse forms, rhythm, and rhyme.

Certainly, fidelity

On the stroke of midnight pass

Like vibrations of a bell,

And fashionable madmen raise

Their pedantic boring cry:

Every farthing of the cost,

All the dreaded cards foretell,

Shall be paid, but from this night

Not a whisper, not a thought,

Not a kiss nor look be lost.

#36, “Lay your sleeping head, my love,” January 1937

Lately I’ve been reading the Selected Poems of W.H. Auden and posting bits I find interesting or inspiring. Here are two. This first one is very sombre, and fits with our pandemic times, as it did with his world sliding toward World War II.

The sky is darkening like a stain,

Something is going to fall like rain

And it won’t be flowers

from “The Dog Beneath the Skin”; 1932

This next quote just expresses so perfectly what it is like to be shocked at a lover’s revelation, more excruciating for having just made love, as he writes the stanza before, “We kissed and I was glad/ At everything you did.” Oh, the heartbreak!

O but what worm of guilt

Or what malignant doubt

Am I the victim of;

That you then, unabashed,

Did what I never wished,

Confessed another love;

And I, submissive, felt

Unwanted and went out?

March 1936