W H Auden

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

Around them boomed the rhetoric of time,
The smells and furniture of the known
Where conscience worshipped an aesthetic
And what was unsuccessful was condemned;

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

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,

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

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come

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 With their surface fragrance of thyme and, beneath,
A secret system of caves a...

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;

Here war is simple like a monument:
A telephone is speaking to a man;
Flags on a map assert that troops were sent;
A boy brings milk in bowls

For us like any other fugitive,
Like the numberless flowers that cannot
And all the beasts that need not remember,
It is today in which we live

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

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