H. Auden
H. Auden
regret hands water
O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist; Stare, stare in the basin And wonder what you've missed.
picnics life-is precipice
Life is a picnic on a precipice.
friendship friends imaginary
All the literati keep An imaginary friend.
poetry poet humiliated
You will be a poet because you will always be humiliated.
poetry vineyards farming
With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse
miracle demand facts
We who must die demand a miracle. How could the Eternal do a temporal act, The Infinite become a finite fact? Nothing can save us that is possible: We who must die demand a miracle.
faces wiser
Private faces in public places Are wiser and nicer Than public faces in private places.
hope fear clever
I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade
dirty writing islands
The poet who writes "free" verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor.
remember forget has-beens
Though one cannot always Remember exactly why one has been happy, There is no forgetting that one was.
grateful joy generations
To my generation no other English poet seemed so perfectly to express the sensibility of a male adolescent. If I do not now turn to him very often, I am eternally grateful to him for the joy he gave me in my youth.
grief passion men
Most poetry is the utterance of a man in some state of passion, love, joy, grief, rage, etc., and no doubt this is as it should be. But no man is perpetually in a passion and those states in which he is amused and amusing, detached and irreverent, if less important, are no less amusing. If there were no poets who, like Byron, express these states, Poetry would lack something.
poet said reader
What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves.
time heart ghost
For time is inches And the heart's changes, Where ghost has haunted Lost and wanted.