W H Auden

O what is that sound which so thrills the
Down in the valley drumming, drumming
Only the scarlet soldiers, dear,
The soldiers coming

"The underground
Are, as the dead prefer them,
Always tortuous
""When he looked the cave in the eye,

All are limitory, but each has her ownnuance of damage
The elite can dress and decent themselves, are ambulant with a single stick, adroitto read a book all through, or play the slow movements of easy sonatas
(Yet, perhaps their verycarn...

The Hidden Law does not
Our laws of probability,
But takes the atom and the
And human beings as they are,

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn
Individual beauty

Give me a doctor partridge-plump,
Short in the leg and broad in the rump,
An endomorph with gentle
Who'll never make absurd

My dear one is mine as mirrors are lonely,
As the poor and sad are real to the good king,
And the high green hill sits always by the sea
Up jumped the Black Man behind the elder tree,

"O where are you going
" said reader to rider, "That valley is fatal where furnaces burn, Yonder's the midden whose odours will madden, That gap is the grave where the tall return
" "O do you imagine," said ...

Lady, weeping at the crossroads,
Would you meet your
In the twilight with his greyhounds,
And the hawk on his glove

Sir, no man's enemy, forgiving all But will his negative inversion, be prodigal:
Send to us power and light, a sovereign touch Curing the intolerable neural itch,
The exhaustion of weaning, the liar's quinsy,
And the distortions of ...

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they
Its human position; how it takes
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

Clocks cannot tell our time of
For what event to
Because we have no time,
We have no time

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
Once we had a country and we thought it fair,

They wondered why the fruit had been forbidden:
It taught them nothing new
They hid their pride,
But did not listen much when they were chidden:

Some thirty inches from my
The frontier of my Person goes,
And all the untilled air
Is private pagus or demesne

Looking up at the stars,
I know quite
That, for all they care,
I can go to hell,