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

[larryhammer]

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.

Comments

[sartorias]

wow, that is so powerful. So many phrases snag the emotions and give a resonating yank.

[larryhammer]

When Auden was on, he was very, very good. And a surprisingly humane writer.

[sovay]

the incantory blessing of that final stanza

It reminds me of The Tempest. The measure of Beauty, midnight, vision dies makes me hear Juno and Ceres:

Honour, riches, marriage-blessing,
Long continuance, and increasing,
Hourly joys be still upon you!
Juno sings her blessings upon you.

Earth's increase, foison plenty,
Barns and garners never empty,
Vines and clustering bunches growing,
Plants with goodly burthen bowing;
Spring come to you at the farthest
In the very end of harvest.

(And because my favorite version of The Tempest is Derek Jarman's, then I hear these words recited by an Ariel who looks like a thin, tired, ageless man in a rumpled white boiler suit and the white gloves of a mime, rocking the rhythm of the quatrains back and forth on the wooden horse in Miranda's old playroom; it is almost certainly foretelling and chances are good it's benevolently meant, but it's hard to say kindly or affectionately because Karl Johnson's is such an alien Ariel that you don't know if he knows what those words mean, or if he would make a difference to him if he did. So now he's in the last stanza of Auden's poem, too. Mortal world and human love would be his ways of speaking.)

[larryhammer]

Tempest and Puck's final blessings in Midsummer, both -- for me, anyway. (Which means I've got a bit of Stanley Tucci in there now.) (Plus Noons of dryness find you fed / By the involuntary powers looks forward to the imagery of the conclusion of In Memory of W.B. Yeats, a few years later, using a similar measure.)

And as we know from The Sea and the Mirror (and his university course on Shakespeare), Auden knew The Tempest quite well.

[sovay]

(Plus Noons of dryness find you fed / By the involuntary powers looks forward to the imagery of the conclusion of In Memory of W.B. Yeats, a few years later, using a similar measure.)

That's the second Auden poem I can remember reading. (The first was "The Shield of Achilles.") Eventually we get Seamus Heaney's "Audenesque," which is one of his late poems that doesn't really work for me, but I always have trouble remembering if the dust which is the food of the dead is part of "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" or not, so I guess he did one thing right.

And as we know from The Sea and the Mirror (and his university course on Shakespeare), Auden knew The Tempest quite well.

I don't think it's a flaw in the poem. Just that I got though three stanzas thinking it was very classic Auden (and a little Housman) and then all of a sudden wham, Shakespeare.

[edit] I can't remember—did you ever see Alan Bennett's The Habit of Art? The original National Theatre production never did come out on DVD that I know of, but it got a lot of livecast at the time and of course I expect it to have been staged by other companies since 2010.

[larryhammer]

"Audenesque" doesn't quite work for me, either -- I like what it's trying to do, but it needs editing to compress and balance the structure. And reduce the ringing of that hammer.

I have not seen that. I'd forgotten your post about it, too. Looks like the script was indeed published -- in the UK.