The rest of W.H.Audens Poems



11. On This Island

Look, stranger, on this island now
The leaping light for your delight discovers,
Stand stable here
And silent be,
That through the channels of the ear
May wander like a river
The swaying sound of the sea.

Here at the small field’s ending pause
When the chalk wall falls to the foam and its tall ledges
Oppose the pluck
And knock of the tide,
And the shingle scrambles after the suck-
ing surf,
And the gull lodges
A moment on its sheer side.

Far off like floating seeds the ships
Diverge on urgent voluntary errands.
And the full view
Indeed may enter
And move in memory as now these clouds do,
That pass the harbour mirror
And all the summer through the water saunter.

12.Their Lonely Betters

As I listened from a beach – chair in the shade
To all the noises that my garden made,
It seemed to me only proper that words
Should be withheld from vegetables and birds.

A robin with no Christian name ran through
The Robin- Anthem which was all it knew,
And rustling flowers for some third party waited
To say which pairs, if any, should get mated.

Not one of them was capable of lying,
There was not one which knew that it was dying
Or could have with a rhythm or a rhyme
Assumed responsibility for time.

Let them leave language to their lonely betters
Who count some days and long for certain letters;
We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep,
Words are for those with promises to keep.

13. Our Bias

The hour-glass whispers to the lion’s roar,
The clock-towers tell the gardens day and night,
How many errors Time has patience for,
How wrong they are in being always right.

Yet Time, however loud its chimes or deep,
However fast its falling torrent flows,
Has never put one lion off his leap
Nor shaken the assurance of a rose.

For they, it seems, care only for success;
While we chose words according to their sound
And judge a problem by its awkwardness;


14.
At the Grave of Henry James

And time with us was always popular.
When have we not preferred some going round
To going straight to where we are?
The snow, less intransigent than their marble,
Has left the defense of whiteness to these tombs,
And all the pools at my feet
Accommodate blue now, echo such clouds as occur
To the sky, and whatever bird or mourner the passing
Moment remarks they repeat.

While rocks, named after singular spaces
Within which images wandered once that caused
All to tremble and offend,
Stand here in an innocent stillness, each marking the spot
Where one more series of errors lost its uniqueness
And novelty came to an end.

To whose real advantage were such transactions,
When worlds of reflection were exchanged for trees?
What living occasion can
Be just to the absent? Noon but reflects on itself,
And the small taciturn stone, that is the only witness
To a great and talkative man,

Has no more judgment than my ignorant shadow
Of odious comparisons or distant clocks
Which challenge and interfere
With the hearts instantaneous reading of time, time that is
A warm enigma no longer to you for whom I
Surrender my private cheer,

As I stand awake on our solar fabric,
That primary machine, the earth, which gendarmes, banks
And aspirin presuppose,
On which the clumsy and sad may all sit down, and any who will
Say their aha to the beautiful, the common locus
Of the Master and the rose.

Shall I not especially bless you as, vexed with
My little inferior questions, I stand
Above the bed where you rest,
Who opened such passionate arms to your Bon when It ran
Toward you with its overwhelming reasons pleading
All beautifully in Its breast?

With what an innocence your hand submitted
To those formal rules that help a child to play,
While your heart, fastidious as
A delicate nun, remained true to the rare noblesse
Of your lucid gift and, for its love, ignored the
Resentful muttering Mass,

Whose ruminant hatred of all that cannot
Be simplified of stolen is yet al large:
No death can assuage its lust
To vilify the landscape of Distinction and see
The heart of the Personal brought to a systolic standstill,
The Tall to diminished dust.

Preserve me, Master, from its vague incitement;
Yours be the disciplinary image that holds
Me back from agreeable wrong
And the clutch of eddying Muddle lest Proportion shed
The alpine chill of her shrugging editorial shoulder
On my loose impromptu song.

All will be judged. Master of nuance and scruple,
Pray for me and for all writers, living or dead;
Because there are many whose works
Are in better taste than their lives, because there is no end
To the vanity of our calling, make intercession
For the treason of all clerks.


















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