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.
Once we had a country and we thought it fair

"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."

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:

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

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…

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…

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

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;

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

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

"The underground
Are, as the dead prefer them,
Always tortuous.""When he looked the cave in the eye,
Had a moment of doubt."Leaning out

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

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

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

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

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

Victor was a little baby,
Into this world he came;
His father took him on his knee and said:'Don't dishonour the family name.'Victor looked up at his
Looked up with big round eyes:

If it form the one landscape that we, the inconstant ones,
Are consistently homesick for, this is
Because it dissolves in water.
Mark these rounded slopes

For what as
For what thought small,
For what is
Because between,

(To JS/07/M/378/ This Marble
Is Erected by the State)He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct

This lunar
Has no
Is complete and early,
If beauty

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

We, too, had known golden
When body and soul were in tune,
Had danced with our true
By the light of a full moon,

Anthropos apteros for
Walked whistling round and round the Maze,
Relying happily
His temperment for getting on.