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 sensual 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 dreadful 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 sweetness show
Eye and knocking heart may bless.
Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness see you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.
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Auden's 'Lullaby'
From guest Bertram Workum (contact)
Auden's (Wystan Hugh Auden, b. 1907, d. 1973) own title for this poem is 'Lullaby,' and so it appears in "Collected Poems." In the poem, Auden apparently is writing to a homosexual lover -- perhaps a lover of one night (hence, "lay your sleeping head...on my faithless arm...."), as his long-term relationships were few until he met Chester Kallman in the United States during or just after World War II -- some years after 'Lullaby' was written (January 1937: "Collected Poems", but many critics believe it reflects his time in Berlin in the late 1920s, and later travels in Spain -- often in the company of one or another of the young men he had met in Berlin. Before Auden and his close friend from Oxford, the prosadist Christopher Isherwood ["Berlin Stories," "A Single Man," etc.] left Europe for the United States in 1939, Auden worked hard but in vain to keep one of those young men from being forced into the German Army) Kallman became his life companion, as well as collaborator on opera libretti, notaby "The Rake's Progress" for Stravinsky. When Auden died in 1973, TIME magazine called 'Lullaby' perhaps the greatest English language lyric poem of the 20th century. -
transfer of comments:
from a duplicated post:
sEXySnaiL on July 22, 2005
Wow, I love this. It is so beautifully written, and just wow. I'm so amazed. I don't think that I have read anything with such beautiful words all placed together before in my whole 18 years of living. There just isn't quite any words to explain the meaning that this poem has. Great write.
~Aubrey~
PoeticFlame on July 21, 2005
I love this love poem! It is so beautiful. I shall bookmark this poem as one of my favorites, and print a copy of it out for me to always read and enjoy. -
This has always been one of my most favorite classic poems. Auden is amazing.
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He sometimes sounds so stiff .. but the words are beautiful ..and I still can't help but be intrigued by his writing style.
Lisa
Thanks for having him this week.
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