W. H. Auden: Three Poems

IN MEMORY OF W. B. YEATS

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 through the evergreen forests,

The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;

By mourning tongues

The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,

An afternoon of nurses and rumours;

The provinces of his body revolted,

The squares of his mind were empty,

Silence invaded the suburbs,

The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities

And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,

To find his happiness in another kind of wood

And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.

The words of a dead man

Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow

When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,

And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,

And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,

A few thousand will think of this day

As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree

The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

     You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:

     The parish of rich women, physical decay,

     Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

     Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,

     For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

     In the valley of its making where executives

     Would never want to tamper, flows on south

     From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,

     Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,

     A way of happening, a mouth.

III

          Earth, receive an honoured guest:

          William Yeats is laid to rest.

          Let the Irish vessel lie

          Emptied of its poetry.

          In the nightmare of the dark

          All the dogs of Europe bark,

          And the living nations wait,

          Each sequestered in its hate;

          Intellectual disgrace

          Stares from every human face,

          And the seas of pity lie

          Locked and frozen in each eye.

          Follow, poet, follow right

          To the bottom of the night,

          With your unconstraining voice

          Still persuade us to rejoice;

          With the farming of a verse

          Make a vineyard of the curse,

          Sing of human unsuccess

          In a rapture of distress;

          In the deserts of the heart

          Let the healing fountain start,

          In the prison of his days

          Teach the free man how to praise.

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939

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 the whole offence

From Luther until now

That has driven a culture mad,

Find what occurred at Linz,

What huge imago made

A psychopathic god:

I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew

All that a speech can say

About Democracy,

And what dictators do,

The elderly rubbish they talk

To an apathetic grave;

Analysed all in his book,

The enlightenment driven away,

The habit-forming pain,

Mismanagement and grief:

We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air

Where blind skyscrapers use 

Their full height to proclaim 

The strength of Collective Man, 

Each language pours its vain 

Competitive excuse:

But who can live for long

In an euphoric dream;

Out of the mirror they stare, 

Imperialism's face

And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar

Cling to their average day:

The lights must never go out,

The music must always play,

All the conventions conspire

To make this fort assume

The furniture of home;

Lest we should see where we are, 

Lost in a haunted wood,

Children afraid of the night

Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash 

Important Persons shout

Is not so crude as our wish: 

What mad Nijinsky wrote 

About Diaghilev

Is true of the normal heart; 

For the error bred in the bone 

Of each woman and each man 

Craves what it cannot have, 

Not universal love

But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark

Into the ethical life

The dense commuters come,

Repeating their morning vow;

'I will be true to the wife,

I'll concentrate more on my work,'

And helpless governors wake

To resume their compulsory game: 

Who can release them now,

Who can reach the dead,

Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice

To undo the folded lie,

The romantic lie in the brain

Of the sensual man-in-the-street 

And the lie of Authority

Whose buildings grope the sky: 

There is no such thing as the State 

And no one exists alone;

Hunger allows no choice

To the citizen or the police;

We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night

Our world in stupor lies;

Yet, dotted everywhere,

Ironic points of light

Flash out wherever the Just

Exchange their messages:

May I, composed like them

Of Eros and of dust,

Beleaguered by the same

Negation and despair,

Show an affirming flame.

 

   THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

    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 eat and nowhere to sit down, 

   Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood

   An unintelligible multitude,

A million eyes, a million boots in line, 

Without expression, waiting for a sign.

Out of the air a voice without a face

   Proved by statistics that some cause was just

In tones as dry and level as the place:

   No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;

   Column by column in a cloud of dust

They marched away enduring a belief

Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

     She looked over his shoulder

      For ritual pieties,

     White flower-garlanded heifers,

      Libation and sacrifice,

     But there on the shining metal

      Where the altar should have been,

     She saw by his flickering forge-light

      Quite another scene.

Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot

   Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)

And sentries sweated for the day was hot:

   A crowd of ordinary decent folk

   Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke

As three pale figures were led forth and bound

To three posts driven upright in the ground.

The mass and majesty of this world, all

   That carries weight and always weighs the same

Lay in the hands of others; they were small

   And could not hope for help and no help came:

   What their foes like to do was done, their shame

Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride

And died as men before their bodies died.

     She looked over his shoulder

      For athletes at their games,

     Men and women in a dance

      Moving their sweet limbs

     Quick, quick, to music,

      But there on the shining shield

     His hands had set no dancing-floor

      But a weed-choked field.

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone, 

   Loitered about that vacancy; a bird

Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:

   That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,

   Were axioms to him, who'd never heard

Of any world where promises were kept,

Or one could weep because another wept.

     The thin-lipped armorer,

      Hephaestos, hobbled away,

     Thetis of the shining breasts

      Cried out in dismay

     At what the god had wrought

      To please her son, the strong

     Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles

      Who would not live long.