H. Auden
H. Auden
men dead-man rate
A dead man who never caused others to die seldom rates a statue.
insane world facts
A person incapable of imaging another world than given to him by his senses would be subhuman, and a person who identifies his imaginary world with the world of sensory fact has become insane.
pay told-you-so if-i-could
Time will say nothing but I told you so, Time only knows the price we have to pay; If I could tell you I would let you know.
earth
We were put on this earth to make things.
thinking let-me knows
Let me see what I wrote so I know what I think
rivers mourning tongue
Far from his illness The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays; By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
stars ocean love-you
As I walked out one evening, Walking down Bristol Street, The crowds upon the pavement Were fields of harvest wheat. And down by the brimming river I heard a lover sing Under an arch of the railway: 'Love has no ending. 'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you Till China and Africa meet, And the river jumps over the mountain And the salmon sing in the street, 'I'll love you till the ocean Is folded and hung up to dry And the seven stars go squawking Like geese about the sky.
memories believe men
Christ did not enchant men; He demanded that they believe in Him: except on one occasion, the Transfiguration. For a brief while, Peter, James, and John were permitted to see Him in His glory. For that brief while they had no need of faith. The vision vanished, and the memory of it did not prevent them from all forsaking Him when He was arrested, or Peter from denying that he had ever known Him.
men honor ifs
Let us honor if we can the vertical man, though we value none but the horizontal one
luxury soul stones
Cathedrals, luxury liners laden with souls, Holding to the east their hulls of stone.
sorry maturity years
My poetry doesn't change from place to place - it changes with the years. It's very important to be one's age. You get ideas you have to turn down - 'I'm sorry, no longer'; 'I'm sorry, not yet.
suffering sorrow eating
About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters; How well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.
dream men order
A man is a form of life that dreams in order to act and acts in order to dream.
hair self hands
That the speech of self-disclosure should be translatable seems to me very odd, but I am convinced that it is. The conclusion that I draw is that the only quality which all human being without exception possess is uniqueness: any characteristic, on the other hand, which one individual can be recognized as having in common with another, like red hair or the English language, implies the existence of other individual qualities which this classification excludes.