Wystan Hugh Auden Poems

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

At last the secret is out,
as it always must come in the end,
the delicious story is ripe to tell
to tell to the intimate friend;
...

Dear, though the night is gone,
Its dream still haunts today,
That brought us to a room
Cavernous, lofty as
...

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

Unrhymed, unrhythmical, the chatter goes:
Yet no one hears his own remarks as prose.

Beneath each topic tunelessly discussed
...

(for Cyril Connolly)

The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
...

I
This is the night mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
...

(To JS/07/M/378/ This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
...

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

(for John and Teckla Clark)

Ours yet not ours, being set apart
As a shrine to friendship,
...