Lullaby by W. H. Auden

 

 

Lullaby

 

 

by 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 our mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

 

 

 

1940

 

 

 

 

http://www.audensociety.org/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

W. H. Auden

 

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England, in 1907. He moved to Birmingham during childhood and was educated at Christ Church, Oxford. As a young man he was influenced by the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost, as well as William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Old English verse. At Oxford his precocity as a poet was immediately apparent, and he formed lifelong friendships with two fellow writers, Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood.

 

 

In 1928, Auden published his first book of verse, and his collection Poems, published in 1930, established him as the leading voice of a new generation. Ever since, he has been admired for his unsurpassed technical virtuosity and an ability to write poems in nearly every imaginable verse form; the incorporation in his work of popular culture, current events, and vernacular speech; and also for the vast range of his intellect, which drew easily from an extraordinary variety of literatures, art forms, social and political theories, and scientific and technical information. He had a remarkable wit, and often mimicked the writing styles of other poets such as Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, and Henry James. His poetry frequently recounts, literally or metaphorically, a journey or quest, and his travels provided rich material for his verse.

 

 

He visited Germany, Iceland, and China, served in the Spanish Civil war, and in 1939 moved to the United States, where he met his lover, Chester Kallman, and became an American citizen. His own beliefs changed radically between his youthful career in England, when he was an ardent advocate of socialism and Freudian psychoanalysis, and his later phase in America, when his central preoccupation became Christianity and the theology of modern Protestant theologians. A prolific writer, Auden was also a noted playwright, librettist, editor, and essayist. Generally considered the greatest English poet of the twentieth century, his work has exerted a major influence on succeeding generations of poets on both sides of the Atlantic.

 

 

W. H. Auden was a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1954 to 1973, and divided most of the second half of his life between residences in New York City and Austria. He died in Vienna in 1973.

 

 

 

 

 

 

W. H. Auden (right) with Christopher Isherwood.

Photograph by Carl Van Vechten, February 6, 1936.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

 

 

 

 

http://www.glbtq.com/literature/auden_wh.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Selected Bibliography

 

 

Poetry

 

About the House About the House (1965)
Academic Graffiti (1971)
Another Time (1940)
City without Walls (1969)
Collected Longer Poems (1968)
Collected Poems (1991)
Collected Poetry (1945)
Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957 (1966)
Collected Shorter Poems 1930-1944 (1950)
Epistle to a Godson (1972)
For the Time Being (1944)
Homage to Clio (1960)
Look, Stranger! in America: on This Island (1936)
Nones (1952)
Poems (1930)
Selected Poems (1979)
Selected Poetry (1956)
Spain (1937)
Thank You, Fog: Last Poems (1974)
The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (1947)
The Double Man (1941)
The Old Man's Road (1956)
The Orators prose and verse (1932)
The Quest (1941)
The Sea and the Mirror (1944)
The Shield of Achilles (1955)

 

 

Prose

 

Enchaféd Flood (1950)
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)
Journey to a War (1939)
Letters from Iceland (1937)
Selected Essays (1964)
The Dyer's Hand (1962)

 

 

Anthology

 

Selected Poems by Gunnar Ekelöf (1972)

 

 

Drama

 

On the Frontier (1938)
Paid on Both Sides (1928)
The Ascent of F.6 (1936)
The Dance of Death (1933)
The Dog Beneath the Skin: or, Where is Francis? (1935)

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/120