Song of Myself #3

Song of Myself #2

Song of Myself #1

WH Auden: The Sea and the Mirror

(image credit)

THE POEM "The Sea and the Mirror" represents a diversity of Auden's intellectual and emotional interests, but as its subtitle indicates, it is first of all "A Commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest." Auden was drawn to The Tempest for many reasons. As he told a lecture audience in his course on Shakespeare at the New School for Social Research in 1947, The Tempest is a mythopoeic work, an example of a genre that encourages adaptations, including his own, inspiring "people to go on for themselves . . . to make up episodes that [the author] as it were, forgot to tell us." Auden also, like many critics before and since, understood The Tempest as a skeptical work. When he wrote that "The Sea and the Mirror" was his Art of Poetry, "in the same way" he believed The Tempest to be Shakespeare's, he added, "i.e. I am attempting something which in a way is absurd, to show in a work of art, the limitations of art." In the concluding lecture of his course at the New School, Auden especially praised Shakespeare for his consciousness of these limitations: "There's something a little irritating in the determination of the very greatest artists, like Dante, Joyce, Milton, to create masterpieces and to think themselves important. To be able to devote one's life to art without forgetting that art is frivolous is a tremendous achievement of personal character. Shakespeare never takes himself too seriously." Neither did Auden, and "The Sea and the Mirror," which he wrote in the shadow of war, is a testament to his own artistic humility.

"The Sea and the Mirror" is one of the most breathtaking poems I know, and it is WH Auden at his brilliant best and at his sweeping brilliance.
 

WH Auden: Lullaby

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.

Lullaby, by WH Auden

I could not find a reading of Lullaby on YouTube that I liked.  It's such a tender love poem, and some may scoff at the idea that Auden wrote it for a man.  I will give its reading a go at some point, but for now I want to simply post it.  I found the image and note above, plus the poem itself, on Genius.

 

WH Auden: In Praise of Limestone

If it form the one landscape that we, the inconstant ones,
Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly
Because it dissolves in water. Mark these rounded slopes
With their surface fragrance of thyme and, beneath,
A secret system of caves and conduits; hear the springs
That spurt out everywhere with a chuckle,
Each filling a private pool for its fish and carving
Its own little ravine whose cliffs entertain
The butterfly and the lizard; examine this region
Of short distances and definite places:
What could be more like Mother or a fitter background
For her son, the flirtatious male who lounges
Against a rock in the sunlight, never doubting
That for all his faults he is loved; whose works are but
Extensions of his power to charm? From weathered outcrop
To hill-top temple, from appearing waters to
Conspicuous fountains, from a wild to a formal vineyard,
Are ingenious but short steps that a child's wish
To receive more attention than his brothers, whether
By pleasing or teasing, can easily take.

Watch, then, the band of rivals as they climb up and down
Their steep stone gennels in twos and threes, at times
Arm in arm, but never, thank God, in step; or engaged
On the shady side of a square at midday in
Voluble discourse, knowing each other too well to think
There are any important secrets, unable
To conceive a god whose temper-tantrums are moral
And not to be pacified by a clever line
Or a good lay: for accustomed to a stone that responds,
They have never had to veil their faces in awe
Of a crater whose blazing fury could not be fixed;
Adjusted to the local needs of valleys
Where everything can be touched or reached by walking,
Their eyes have never looked into infinite space
Through the lattice-work of a nomad's comb; born lucky,
Their legs have never encountered the fungi
And insects of the jungle, the monstrous forms and lives
With which we have nothing, we like to hope, in common.
So, when one of them goes to the bad, the way his mind works
Remains incomprehensible: to become a pimp
Or deal in fake jewellery or ruin a fine tenor voice
For effects that bring down the house, could happen to all
But the best and the worst of us...
That is why, I suppose,
The best and worst never stayed here long but sought
Immoderate soils where the beauty was not so external,
The light less public and the meaning of life
Something more than a mad camp. `Come!' cried the granite wastes,
`How evasive is your humour, how accidental
Your kindest kiss, how permanent is death.' (Saints-to-be
Slipped away sighing.) `Come!' purred the clays and gravels,
`On our plains there is room for armies to drill; rivers
Wait to be tamed and slaves to construct you a tomb
In the grand manner: soft as the earth is mankind and both
Need to be altered.' (Intendant Caesars rose and
Left, slamming the door.) But the really reckless were fetched
By an older colder voice, the oceanic whisper:
`I am the solitude that asks and promises nothing;
That is how I shall set you free. There is no love;
There are only the various envies, all of them sad.'

They were right, my dear, all those voices were right
And still are; this land is not the sweet home that it looks,
Nor its peace the historical calm of a site
Where something was settled once and for all: A backward
And dilapidated province, connected
To the big busy world by a tunnel, with a certain
Seedy appeal, is that all it is now? Not quite:
It has a worldly duty which in spite of itself
It does not neglect, but calls into question
All the Great Powers assume; it disturbs our rights. The poet,
Admired for his earnest habit of calling
The sun the sun, his mind Puzzle, is made uneasy
By these marble statues which so obviously doubt
His anti-mythological myth; and these gamins,
Pursuing the scientist down the tiled colonnade
With such lively offers, rebuke his concern for Nature's
Remotest aspects: I, too, am reproached, for what
And how much you know. Not to lose time, not to get caught,
Not to be left behind, not, please! to resemble
The beasts who repeat themselves, or a thing like water
Or stone whose conduct can be predicted, these
Are our common prayer, whose greatest comfort is music
Which can be made anywhere, is invisible,
And does not smell. In so far as we have to look forward
To death as a fact, no doubt we are right: But if
Sins can be forgiven, if bodies rise from the dead,
These modifications of matter into
Innocent athletes and gesticulating fountains,
Made solely for pleasure, make a further point:
The blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from,
Having nothing to hide. Dear, I know nothing of
Either, but when I try to imagine a faultless love
Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur
Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.

In Praise of Limestone, by WH Auden
 

WH Auden (3) First Coming Down

Modern Poetry (ENGL 310) with Langdon Hammer [at Yale University]

This lecture presents the early poetry of WH Auden. In "From the Very First Coming Down," Auden's relationship to the reader is considered, as well as the role of economy, truth, and morality in his poetics. The political Auden is examined in "Spain" and "September 1, 1939," along with his later practice of revising controversial poems. Finally, his interest in traditional forms, his vision of love, and his characteristic perspectivism, are explored in "This Lunar Beauty" and "As I Walked Out One Evening."

00:00 - Chapter 1. Introduction: Wystan Hugh Auden
04:57 - Chapter 2. The Early W. H. Auden
12:08 - Chapter 3. W. H. Auden Poem: "From the Very First Coming Down"
20:39 - Chapter 4. W. H. Auden Poem: "Spain"
24:09 - Chapter 5. W. H. Auden Poem: "September 1, 1939"
30:58 - Chapter 6. W. H. Auden Poems: "This Lunar Beauty" and "Lullaby"
36:31 - Chapter 7. W. H. Auden Poem: "As I Walked Out One Evening"