“We only hear some lover play / (If sighs he play) the sighing flute.”

For Poetry Monday, back to Auden -- with one of my favorites:


Lullaby, W.H. Auden

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit’s carnal ecstasy.

Certainty, 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.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.


This is Auden's best-known love poem, despite eschewing almost all standard conventions of love poetry, and for good reason -- the incantory blessing of that final stanza still makes my hair rise, after however many rereadings.* He wrote it in 1937 during the final stages of a love affair with a teenage boy (Auden was about 30 at the time) but, like most of Auden's love lyrics, the genders of speaker and beloved are carefully unmarked.


* Short shameful confession: the title and section titles of an early attempt at a YA fantasy novel were phrases swiped from this.

---L.

Subject quote from "Where three huge dogs are ramping yonder," Walter Landor.