W. H. Auden
W. H. Auden
Wystan Hugh Audenwas an English poet, who later became an American citizen. He is best known for love poems such as "Funeral Blues," poems on political and social themes such as "September 1, 1939" and "The Shield of Achilles," poems on cultural and psychological themes such as The Age of Anxiety, and poems on religious themes such as "For the Time Being" and "Horae Canonicae." He was born in York, grew up in and near Birmingham in a professional middle-class...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth21 February 1907
running loneliness father
Alone, alone, about the dreadful wood / Of conscious evil runs a lost mankind, / Dreading to find its Father.
mother heart sleep
The nightingales are sobbing in The orchards of our mothers, And hearts that we broke long ago Have long been breaking others; Tears are round, the sea is deep: Roll them overboard and sleep.
art apples giving
To me Art's subject is the human clay, / And landscape but a background to a torso; / All Cezanne's apples I would give away / For one small Goya or a Daumier.
time told-you-so
Time will say nothing but I told you so...
dream heart eye
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 our mortal world enough; Noons of dryness find you fed By the involuntary powers, Nights of insult let you pass Watched by every human love.
lying rising done
Acts of injustice done Between the setting and the rising sun In history lie like bones, each one.
zero losing loser
In life the loser's score is always zero.
money
Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity.
heart crooked neighbour
You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart.
giving singing sake
The condition of mankind is, and always has been, so miserable and depraved that, if anyone were to say to the poet: "For God's sake stop singing and do something useful like putting on the kettle or fetching bandages," what just reason could he give for refusing?
absent occasions
What living occasion can, Be just to the absent?
nature woods climate
a culture is no better than its woods
looks crafts leap
Look if you like, but you will have to leap.
optimistic simple hard
To ask the hard question is simple.