Break It Down

How W. H. Auden Spends the Night in a Friend’s House:

The only one awake, the house quiet, the streets darkened, the cold pressing down through his covers, he is unwilling to disturb his hosts and thus, first, his fetal curl, his search for a warm hollow in the mattress …

Then his stealthy excursion over the floor for a chair to stand on and his unsteady reach for the curtains, which he lays over the other coverings on his bed …

His satisfaction in the new weight pressing down upon him, then his peaceful sleep …

On another occasion this wakeful visitor, cold again and finding no curtain in his room, steals out and takes up the hall carpet for the same purpose, bending and straightening in the dim hallway …

How its heaviness is a heavy hand on him and the dust choking his nostrils is nothing to how that carpet stifles his uneasiness …