Sunday, June 14, 2009

"Lay your sleeping head, my love"

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 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 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. -- W.H.Auden

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