Selected Poems

where ghosts would feel uneasy, a witch at a loss, is numinous and again

the center of a dwelling not, as lately it was, an abhorrent dungeon where the warm unlaundered meiny

belched their comic prose and from a dream of which

chaste Milady awoke blushing. House-proud, deploring labor, extolling work, these engines politely insist that banausics can be liberals, a cook a pure artist

who moves everyman - at a deeper level than Mozart, for the subject of the verb to-hunger is never a name: dear Adam and Eve had different bottoms,

but the neotene who marches upright and can subtract reveals a belly

like the serpent's with the same vulnerable look. Jew, Gentile or pigmy,

he must get his calories before he can consider her profile or

his own, attack you or play chess, and take what there is however hard to get down: then surely those in whose creed God is edible may call a fine omelette a Christian deed.

The sin of Gluttony is ranked among the Deadly Seven, but in murder mysteries one can be sure the gourmet didn't do it: children, brave warriors out of a job,

can weigh pounds more than they should and one can dislike having to kiss them yet,

compared with the thin-lipped, they are seldom detestable. Some waiter grieves

for the worst dead bore to be a good trencherman, and no wonder chefs mature into

choleric types, doomed to observe Beauty peck at a master-dish, their one reward to behold the mutually hostile mouth and eyes of a sinner married at the first bite by a smile.

The houses of our City are real enough but they lie haphazardly scattered over the earth, and her vagabond forum is any space where two of us happen to meet

who can spot a citizen without papers. So, too, can her foes. Where the

power lies remains to be seen, the force, though, is clearly with them: perhaps only

by falling can She become Her own vision, but we have sworn under four eyes

to keep Her up—all we ask for, should the night come when comets blaze and meres break, is a good dinner, that we may march in high fettle, left foot first, to hold her Thermopylae.

1958

IX For Friends Only

(FOR JOHN AND TECKLA CLARK)

Ours yet not ours, being set apart

As a shrine to friendship,

Empty and silent most of the year,

This room awaits from you

What you alone, as visitor, can bring,

A weekend of personal life.

In a house backed by orderly woods, Facing a tractored sugar-beet country, Your working hosts engaged to their stint, You are unlike to encounter Dragons or romance: were drama a craving, You would not have come.

Books we do have for almost any Literate mood, and notepaper, envelopes, For a writing one (to "borrow" stamps Is a mark of ill-breeding): Between lunch and tea, perhaps a drive; After dinner, music or gossip.

Should you have troubles (pets will die, Lovers are always behaving badly) And confession helps, we will hear it, Examine and give our counsel: If to mention them hurts too much, We shall not be nosey.

Easy at first, the language of friendship

Is, as we soon discover,

Very difficult to speak well, a tongue

With no cognates, no resemblance

To the galimatias of nursery and bedroom,

Court rhyme or shepherd's prose,

And, unless often spoken, soon goes rusty. Distance and duties divide us, But absence will not seem an evil If it make our re-meeting A real occasion. Come when you can: Your room will be ready.

In Tum-Turn's reign a tin of biscuits On the bedside table provided

For nocturnal munching. Now weapons have changed, And the fashion in appetites: There, for sunbathers who count their calories, A bottle of mineral water.

Felicissima notte! May you fall at once

Into a cordial dream, assured

That whoever slept in this bed before

Was also someone we like,

That within the circle of our affection

Also you have no double.

June 1964

X Tonight at Seven-Thirty

(FOR M. F. K. FISHER)

The life of plants is one continuous solitary meal, and ruminants hardly interrupt theirs to sleep or to mate, but most

predators feel ravenous most of the time and competitive always, bolting such morsels as they can contrive to snatch from the more terrified: pack-hunters do

dine en famille, it is true, with protocol and placement, but none of them play host to a stranger whom they help first. Only man,

supererogatory beast, Dame Kind's thoroughbred lunatic, can do the honors of a feast,

and was doing so before the last Glaciation when he offered mammoth-marrow and, perhaps, Long Pig, will continue till Doomsday

when at God's board the saints chew pickled Leviathan. In this age farms are no longer crenellated, only cops port arms, but the Law of the Hearth is unchanged : a brawler may not

be put to death on the spot, but he is asked to quit the sacral dining area instanter, and a foul-mouth gets the cold

shoulder. The right of a guest to standing and foster is as old as the ban on incest.

For authentic comity the gathering should be small and unpublic: at mass banquets where flosculent speeches are made

in some hired hall we think of ourselves or nothing. Christ's cenacle seated a baker's dozen, King Arthur's rundle the same, but today, when one's host may well be his own

chef, servitor and scullion, when the cost of space can double in a decade, even that holy Zodiac number is

too large a frequency for us: in fact, six lenient semble sieges, none of them perilous,

is now a Perfect Social Number. But a dinner party, however select, is a worldly rite that nicknames or endearments or family

diminutives would profane: two doters who wish to tiddle and curmurr between the soup and fish belong in restaurants, all children should be fed

earlier and be safely in bed. Well-liking, though, is a must: married maltalents engaged in some covert contrast can spoil

an evening like the glance of a single failure in the toil of his bosom grievance.

Not that a god, immune to grief, would be an ideal guest: he would be too odd to talk to and, despite his imposing presence, a bore,

for the funniest mortals and the kindest are those who are most aware of the baffle of being, don't kid themselves our care is consolable, but believe a laugh is less heartless than tears, that a hostess

prefers it. Brains evolved after bowels, therefore, great assets as fine raiment and good looks

can be on festive occasions, they are not essential like artful cooks and stalwart digestions.

I see a table at which the youngest and oldest present keep the eye grateful for what Nature's bounty and grace of Spirit can create:

for the ear's content one raconteur, one gnostic with amazing shop, both in a talkative mood but knowing when to stop, and one wide-traveled worldling to interject now and then

a sardonic comment, men and women who enjoy the cloop of corks, appreciate dapatical fare, yet can see in swallowing

a sign act of reverence, in speech a work of re-presenting the true olamic silence.

? Spring 1963

XI The Cave of Nakedness

(FOR LOUIS AND EMMIE K R O N E N B E R G E R )

Don Juan needs no bed, being far too impatient to undress, nor do Tristan and Isolda, much too in love to care

for so mundane a matter, but unmythical mortals require one, and prefer to take their clothes off,

if only to sleep. That is why bedroom farces must be incredible to be funny, why Peeping Toms are never praised, like novelists or bird watchers, for their keenness of observation: where there's a bed,

be it a nun's restricted cot or an Emperor's baldachined and nightly-redamselled couch, there are no effable data. (Dreams may be repeatable,

■ M

but our deeds of errantry in the wilderness of wish so often turn out, when told, to be less romantic than our day's routine: besides, we cannot describe them

without faking.) Lovers don't see their embraces as a viable theme for debate, nor a monk his prayers

(do they, in fact, remember them?): O's of passion, interior acts of attention, not being a story

in which the names don't matter but the way of telling, with a lawyer's wit or a nobleman's assurance,

does, need a drawing room of their own. Bed-sitting-rooms soon drive us crazy, a dormitory even sooner

turns us to brutes: bona fide architects know that doors are not emphatic enough, and interpose,

as a march between two realms, so alien, so disjunct, the no-man's-land of a stair. The switch from personage,

with a state number, a first and family name, to the naked Adam or Eve, and vice versa,

should not be off-hand or abrupt: a stair retards it to a solemn procession.

Since my infantile entrance at my mother's bidding into Edwardian England, I have suffered the transit over forty thousand times,

usually, to my chagrin, by myself: about blended flesh, those midnight colloquia of Derbies and Joans,

I know nothing therefore, about certain occult antipathies perhaps too much. Some perks belong, though,

to all unwilling celibates: our rooms are seldom battlefields, we enjoy the pleasure of reading in bed

(as we grow older, it's true, we may find it prudent to get nodding drunk first), we retain the right to choose

our sacred image. (That I often start with sundry splendors at sundry times greened after, but always end aware of one, the same one, may be of no importance, but I hope it is.) Ordinary human unhappiness

is life in its natural color, to cavil putting on airs: at day-wester to think of nothing

benign to memorize is as rare as feeling no personal blemish, and Age, despite its damage,

is well-off. When they look in their bedroom mirrors, Fifty-plus may be bored, but Seventeen is faced by

a frowning failure, with no money, no mistress, no manner of his own,- who never got to Italy

nor met a great one: to say a few words at banquets, to attend a cocktail party in honor of N or M, can be severe, but Junior has daily to cope with ghastly family meals, with dear Papa and Mama

being odd in the wrong way. (It annoys him to speak, and it hurts him not to.)

When I disband from the world, and entrust my future to the Gospel Makers, I need not fear (not in neutral Austria) being called for

in the waist of the night by deaf agents, never to be heard of on earth again: the assaults I would be spared

are none of them princely—fire, nightmare, insomnia's Vision of Hell, when Nature's wholesome genial fabric

lies utterly discussed and from a sullen vague wafts a contagious stench, her adamant minerals

all corrupt, each life a worthless iteration of the general loathing (to know that, probably,

its cause is chemical can degrade the panic, not stint it). As a rule, with pills to help them, the Holy Four

exempt my nights from nuisance, and even wake me when I would be woken, when, audible here and there

in the half-dark, members of an avian orchestra are already softly noodling, limbering up for

an overture at sunrise, their effort to express in the old convention they inherit that joy in beginning

for which our species was created, and declare it good.

We may not be obliged—though it is mannerly—to bless the Trinity that we are corporal contraptions, but only a villain will omit to thank Our Lady or

her henwife, Dame Kind, as he, she, or both ensemble, emerge from a private cavity to be reborn,

reneighbored in the Country of Consideration.

June 1963

XII The Common Life

(FOR CHESTER KALLMAN)

A living room, the catholic area you

(Thou, rather) and I may enter without knocking, leave without a bow, confronts each visitor with a style,

a secular faith: he compares its dogmas

with his, and decides whether he would like to see more of us. (Spotless rooms where nothing's left lying about

chill me, so do cups used for ashtrays or smeared

with lipstick: the homes I warm to, though seldom wealthy, always convey a feeling of bills being promptly settled

with checks that don't bounce.) There's no We at an instant,

only Thou and I, two regions of protestant being which nowhere overlap: a room is too small, therefore,

if its occupants cannot forget at will

that they are not alone, too big if it gives them any excuse in a quarrel for raising their voices. What,

quizzing ours, would Sherlock Holmes infer? Plainly,

ours is a sitting culture in a generation which prefers comfort (or is forced to prefer it)

to command, would rather incline its buttocks

on a well-upholstered chair than the burly back of a slave: a quick glance at book titles would tell him

that we belong to the clerisy and spend much

on our food. But could he read what our prayers and jokes are about, what creatures frighten us most, or what names

head our roll call of persons we would least like

to go to bed with? What draws singular lives together in the first place, loneliness, lust, ambition,

or mere convenience, is obvious, why they drop

or murder one another clear enough: how they create, though, a common world between them, like Bombelli's

impossible yet useful numbers, no one

has yet explained. Still, they do manage to forgive impossible behavior, to endure by some miracle

conversational tics and larval habits without wincing (were you to die, I should miss yours). It's a wonder that neither has been butchered by accident,

or, as lots have, silently vanished into

History's criminal noise unmourned for, but that, after twenty-four years, we should sit here in Austria

as cater-cousins, under the glassy look

of a Naples Bambino, the portrayed regards of Strauss and Stravinsky, doing British crossword puzzles,

is very odd indeed. I'm glad the builder gave

our common-room small windows through which no observed outsider can observe us: every home should be a fortress,

equipped with all the very latest engines

for keeping Nature at bay, versed in all ancient magic, the arts of quelling the Dark Lord and his hungry

animivorous chimeras. (Any brute

can buy a machine in a shop, but the sacred spells are secret to the kind, and if power is what we wish

they won't work.) The ogre will come in any case:

so Joyce has warned us. Howbeit, fasting or feasting, we both know this: without the Spirit we die, but life

without the Letter is in the worst of taste,

and always, though truth and love can never really differ, when they seem to, the subaltern should be truth.

? July 1963

87

Epithalamium

(FOR PETER MUDFORD AND RITA AUDEN, MAY 15, 1965)

All folk-tales mean by ending

with a State Marriage,

feast and fireworks, we wish you,

Peter and Rita,

two idiosyncrasies

who opt in this hawthorn month

to common your lives.

A diffy undertaking,

for to us, whose dreams

are odorless, what is real

seems a bit smelly:

strong nerves are an advantage,

an accurate wrist-watch too

can be a great help.

May Venus, to whose caprice all blood must buxom, take such a shine to you both that, by her gifting, your palpable substances may re-ify those delights they are purveyed for:

cool Hymen from Jealousy's

teratoid phantasms,

sulks, competitive headaches,

and Pride's monologue

that won't listen but demands

tautological echoes,

ever refrain you.

As genders, married or not, who share with all flesh a left-handed twist, your choice reminds us to thank Mrs. Nature for doing (our ugly looks are our own] the handsome by us.

We are better built to last than tigers, our skins don't leak like the ciliates', our ears can detect quarter-tones, even our most myopic have good enough vision for courtship:

and how uncanny it is we're here to say so. that life should have got to us up through the City's destruction layers after surviving the inhuman Permian purges.

Wherefore, as Mudfords, Audens, Seth-Smiths, Bonnergees, with civic spear and distaff we hail a gangrel Paleocene pseudo-rat, the Ur-Papa of princes and crossing-sweepers:

as Adams, Eves, commanded

to nonesuch being,

answer the One for Whom all

enantiomorphs

are super-posable, yet

Who numbers each particle

by its Proper Name.

April 1965

88

Fairground

Thumping old tunes give a voice to its whereabouts long before one can see the dazzling archway of colored lights, beyond which household proverbs cease to be valid,

a ground sacred to the god of vertigo and his cult of disarray: here jeopardy, panic, shock, are dispensed in measured doses by fool-proof engines.

As passive objects, packed tightly together on Roller-Coaster or Ferris-Wheel, mortals taste in their solid flesh the volitional joys of a seraph.

Soon the Roundabout ends the clumsy conflict of Right and Left: the riding mob melts into one spinning sphere, the perfect shape performing the perfect motion.

Mopped and mowed at, as their trainworms through a tunnel, by ancestral spooks, caressed by clammy cobwebs, grinning initiates emerge into daylight as tribal heroes.

Fun for Youth who knows his libertine spirit is not a copy of Father's, but has yet to learn that the tissues which lend it stamina, like Mum's, are bourgeois.

Those with their wander-years behind them, who are rather relieved that all routes of escape are spied on, all hours of amusement counted, requiring caution, agenda,

keep away:—to be found in coigns where, sitting in silent synods, they play chess or cribbage, games that call for patience, foresight, manoeuvre, like war, like marriage.

June 1966

River Profile

Our body is a moulded river Navalis

Out of a bellicose fore-time, thundering head-on collisions of cloud and rock in an up-thrust, crevasse-and-avalanche, troll country, deadly to breathers,

it whelms into our picture below the melt-line, where tarns lie frore under frowning cirques, goat-bell, wind-breaker, fishing-rod, miner's-lamp country, already at ease with

the mien and gestures that become its kindness, in streams, still anonymous, still jumpable, down a steep stair, penstock-and-turbine country, in probing spirals.

Soon of a size to be named and the cause of dirty in-fighting among rival agencies, down a steep stair, penstock-and-turbine country, it plunges ram-starn,

to foam through a wriggling gorge incised in softer strata, hemmed between crags that nauntle heaven, robber-baron, tow-rope, portage-way country, nightmare of merchants.

Disembogueing from foothills, now in hushed meanders, now in riffling braids, it vaunts across a senile plain, well-entered, chateau-and-cider-press country, its regal progress

gallanted for a while by quibbling poplars, then by chimneys: led off to cool and launder retort, steam-hammer, gasometer country, it changes color.

Polluted, bridged by girders, banked by concrete, now it bisects a polyglot metropolis, ticker-tape, taxi, brothel, foot-lights country, a la mode always.

Broadening or burrowing to the moon's phases, turbid with pulverized wastemantle, on through flatter, duller, hotter, cotton-gin country it scours, approaching

the tidal mark where it puts off majesty, disintegrates, and through swamps of a delta, punting-pole, fowling-piece, oyster-tongs country, wearies to its final

act of surrender, effacement, atonement in a huge amorphous aggregate no cuddled attractive child ever dreams of, non-country, image of death as

a spherical dew-drop of life. Unlovely monsters, our tales believe, can be translated too, even as water, the selfless mother of all especials.

July 1966

Prologue At Sixty

(FOR FRIEDRICH HEER)

Dark-green upon distant heights the stationary flocks foresters tend, blonde and fertile the fields below them: browing a hog-back, an oak stands post-alone, light-demanding.

Easier to hear, harder to see,

limbed lives, locomotive,

automatic and irritable,

social or solitary, seek their foods,

mates and territories while their time lasts.

Radial republics, rooted to spots, bilateral monarchies, moving frankly, stoic by sort and self-policing, enjoy their rites, their realms of data, live well by the Law of their Flesh.

All but the youngest of the yawning mammals, Name-Giver, Ghost-Fearer, maker of wars and wise-cracks, a rum creature, in a crisis always, the anxious species to which I belong,

whom chance and my own choice have arrived to bide here yearly from bud-haze to leaf-blush, dislodged from elsewhere, by blood barbarian, in bias of view a Son of the North, outside the limes.

Rapacious pirates my people were, crude and cruel, but not calculating, never marched in step nor made straight roads, nor sank like senators to a slave's taste for grandiose buildings and gladiators.

But the Gospel reached the unroman lands. I can translate what onion-towers of five parish churches preach in Baroque: to make One, there must be Two, Love is substantial, all Luck is good,

Flesh must fall through fated time from birth to death, both unwilled, but Spirit may climb counterwise from a death, in faith freely chosen, to resurrection, a re-beginning.

And the Greek Code got to us also: a Mind of Honor must acknowledge the happy eachness of all things, distinguish even from odd numbers, and bear witness to what-is-the-case.

East, West, on the Autobahn motorists whoosh, on the Main Line a far-sighted express will snake by, through a gap granted by grace of nature: still today, as in the Stone Age,

our sandy vale is a valued passage. Alluvial flats. flooded often, lands of outwash, lie to the North, to the South litters of limestone alps embarrass the progress of path-seekers.

Their thoughts upon ski-slope or theatre-opening,

few who pass us pay attention

to our squandered hamlets where at harvest time

chugging tractors, child-driven,

shamble away down sheltered lanes.

Quiet now but acquainted too with unwelcome visitors, violation, scare and scream, the scathe of battle: Turks have been here, Boney's legions, Germans, Russians, and no joy they brought.

Though the absence of hedge-rows is odd to me (no Whig landlord, the landscape vaunts, ever empired on Austrian ground), this unenglish tract after ten years into my love has looked itself,

added its names to my numinous map of the Solihull gas-works, gazed at in awe by a bronchial boy, the Blue John Mine, the Festiniog railway, the Rhayader dams, Cross Fell, Keld and Cauldron Snout,

of sites made sacred by something read there, a lunch, a good lay, or sheer lightness of heart, the Fiirbringer and the Friedrich Strasse, Isafjordur, Epomeo, Poprad, Basel, Bar-!e-Duc,

of more modern holies, Middagh Street, Carnegie Hall and the Con-Ed stacks on First Avenue. Who am I now? An American? No, a New Yorker, who opens his Times at the obit page,

whose dream images date him already, awake among lasers, electric brains, do-it-yourself sex manuals. bugged phones, sophisticated weapon-systems and sick jokes.

Already a helpless orbited dog has blinked at our sorry conceited 0,

where many are famished, few look good, and my day turned out torturers who read Hilke in their rest periods.

Now the Cosmocrats are crashed through time-zones

in jumbo jets to a Joint Conference:

nor sleep nor shit have our shepherds had,

and treaties are signed (with secret clauses)

by Heads who are not all there.

Can Sixty make sense to Sixteen-Plus? What has my camp in common with theirs, with buttons and beards and Be-Ins? Much, I hope. In Acts it is written Taste was no problem at Pentecost.

To speak is human because human to listen,

beyond hope, for an Eighth Day,

when the creatured Image shall become the Likeness:

Giver-of-Life, translate for me

till I accomplish my corpse at last.

April 1967

91

Forty Years On

Except where blast-furnaces and generating-stations

have inserted their sharp profiles or a Thru-Way slashes harshly across them, Bohemia's contours

look just as amiable now as when I saw them first (indeed, her coast is gentler,

for tame hotels have ousted the havocking bears), nor have her dishes lost their flavor since Florizel was thwacked into exile

and we and Sicily discorded, fused into rival amalgams,

in creed and policy oppugnant. Only to the ear is it patent something drastic has happened,

that orators no more speak of primogeniture, prerogatives of age and sceptre:

(for our health we have had to learn the fraternal shop of our new Bonzen, but that was easy.)

For a useful technician I lacked the schooling, for a bureaucrat the Sitz-Fleisch: all I had

was the courtier's agility to adapt my rogueries to the times. It sufficed. I survived and prosper

better than I ever did under the old lackadaisical economy: it is many years now

since I picked a pocket (how deft my hand was then!), or sang for pennies, or travelled on foot.

(The singing I miss, but today's audience would boo my ballads: it calls for Songs of Protest,'

and wants its bawdry straight not surreptitious.) A pedlar still, for obvious reasons

I no longer cry my wares, but in ill-lit alleys coaxingly whisper to likely clients: Anything you cannot buy In the stores I wiIl supply, English foot-wear, nylon hose, Or transistor radios; Come to me for the Swiss Francs Unobtainable in banks; For a price I can invent Any official document, Work-Permits, Driving-Licences, Any Certificate you please: Believe me, I know all the tricks, There is nothing I can't fix. Why, then, should I badger? No rheum has altered my gait, as ever my cardiac muscles

are undismayed, my cells perfectly competent, and by now I am far too rich for the thought of the hangman's noose

to make me oggle. But how glib all the faces I see around me

seem suddenly to have become, and how seldom I feel like a hay-tumble. For

three nights running now I have had the same dream of a suave afternoon in Fall. I am standing on high ground

looking out westward over a plain, run smoothly by Jaguar farmers. In the eloignment,

a-glitter in the whelking sun, a sheer bare cliff concludes the vista. At its base I see,

black, shaped like a bell-tent, the mouth of a cave by which (I know in my dream) I am to

make my final exit, its roof so low it will need an awkward duck to make it.

"Well, will that be so shaming?", I ask when awake. Why should it be? When has Autolycus ever solemned himself?

1968

92

Ode to Terminus

The High Priests of telescopes and cyclotrons keep making pronouncements about happenings on scales too gigantic or dwarfish to be noticed by our native senses,

discoveries which, couched in the elegant euphemisms of algebra, look innocent,

harmless enough but, when translated into the vulgar anthropomorphic

tongue, will give no cause for hilarity to gardeners or housewives: if galaxies bolt like panicking mobs, if mesons riot like fish in a feeding-frenzy,

it sounds too like Political History to boost civil morale, too symbolic of

the crimes and strikes and demonstrations we are supposed to gloat on at breakfast.

How trite, though, our fears beside the miracle that we're here to shiver, that a Thingummy so addicted to lethal violence should have somehow secreted a placid

tump with exactly the right ingredients to start and to cocker Life, that heavenly

freak for whose manage we shall have to give account at the Judgement, our Middle-

Earth, where Sun-Father to all appearances moves by day from orient to occident, and his light is felt as a friendly

presence not a photonic bombardment,

where all visibles do have a definite outline they stick to, and are undoubtedly at rest or in motion, where lovers recognize each other by their surface,

where to all species except the talkative have been allotted the niche and diet that become them. This, whatever micro­biology may think, is the world we

really live in and that saves our sanity, who know all too well how the most erudite mind behaves in the dark without a surround it is called on to interpret,

how, discarding rhythm, punctuation, metaphor, it sinks into a driveling monologue, too literal to see a joke or distinguish a penis from a pencil.

Venus and Mars are powers too natural to temper our outlandish extravagance: You alone. Terminus the Mentor, ' can teach us how to alter our gestures.

God of walls, doors and reticence, nemesis overtakes the sacrilegious technocrat,

but blessed is the City that thanks you for giving us games and grammar and metres.

By whose grace, also. every gathering of two or three in confident amity repeats the pentecostal marvel, as each in each finds his right translator.

In this world our colossal immodesty has plundered and poisoned, it is possible

You still might save us. who by now have learned this: that scientists. to be truthful,

must remind us to take all they say as a tall story, that abhorred in the Heav'ns are all self-proclaimed poets who, to wow an audience, utter some resonant lie.

May 1968

93

August 1968

The Ogre does what ogres can, Deeds quite impossible for Man, But one prize is beyond his reach, The Ogre cannot master Speech: About a subjugated plain. Among its desperate and slain, The Ogre stalks with hands on hips, While drivel gushes from his lips.

September 1968

A New Year Greeting

(After an Article by Mary J. Marples in Scientific American, January 1969)

(FOR VASSILY YANOWSKY)

On this day tradition allots

to taking stock of our lives, my greetings to all of you, Yeasts,

Bacteria, Viruses, Aerobics and Anaerobics:

A Very Happy New Year to all for whom my ectoderm is as Middle-Earth to me.

For creatures your size I offer

a free choice of habitat, so settle yourselves in the zone

that suits you best, in the pools of my pores or the tropical

forests of arm-pit and crotch, in the deserts of my fore-arms,

or the cool woods of my scalp.

Build colonies: I will supply

adequate warmth and moisture, the sebum and lipids you need,

on condition you never do me annoy with your presence,

but behave as good guests should, not rioting into acne

or athlete's-foot or a boil.

Does my inner weather affect

the surfaces where you live? Do unpredictable changes

record my rocketing plunge from fairs when the mind is in tift

and relevant thoughts occur to fouls when nothing will happen and no one calls and it rains.

I should like to think that I make

a not impossible world, but an Eden it cannot be:

my games. my purposive acts, may turn to catastrophes there.

If you were religious folk, how would your dramas justify unmerited suffering?

By what myths would your priests account

for the hurricanes that come twice every twenty-four hours,

each time I dress or undress, when, clinging to keratin rafts,

whole cities are swept away to perish in space. or the Flood

that scalds to death when I bathe?

Then. sooner or later, will dawn

a day of Apocalypse, when my mantle suddenly turns too cold. too rancid. for you, appetising to predators

of a fiercer sort, and I am stripped of excuse and nimbus, a Past, subject to Judgement.

May 1969

Moon Landing

It's natural the Boys should whoop it up for so huge a phallic triumph, an adventure it would not have occurred to women to think worth while, made possible only

because we like huddling in gangs and knowing the exact time: yes, our sex may in fairness hurrah the deed, although the motives that primed it were somewhat less than menschJich.

A grand gesture. But what does it period? What does it osse? We were always adroiter with objects than lives, and more facile at courage than kindness: from the moment

the first flint was flaked this landing was merely a matter of time. But our selves, like Adam's, still don't fit us exactly, modern only in this—our lack of decorum.

Homer's heroes were certainly no braver than our Trio, but more fortunate: Hector was excused the insult of having his valor covered by television.

Worth going to see? I can well believe it. Worth seeing? Mneh! I ance rode through a desert and was not charmed: give me a watered lively garden, remote from blatherers

about the New, the von Brauns and their ilk, where on August mornings I can count the morning glories, where to die has a meaning, and no engine can shift my perspective.

Unsmudged, thank God, my Moon still queens the Heavens as She ebbs and fulls, a Presence to glop at, Her Old Man, made of grit not protein, still visits my Austrian several

with His old detachment, and the old warnings still have power to scare me: Hybris comes to an ugly finish, Irreverence is a greater oaf than Superstition.

Our apparatniks will continue making the usual squalid mess called History: all we can pray for is that artists, chefs and saints may still appear to blithe it.

August 1969

96

Old People's Home

All are limitory, but each has her own nuance of damage. The elite can dress and decent themselves,

are ambulant with a single stick, adroit to read a book all through, or play the slow movements of

easy sonatas. (Yes, perhaps their very carnal freedom is their spirit's bane: intelligent

of what has happened and why, they are obnoxious to a glum beyond tears.) Then come those on

wheels, the average majority, who endure T.V. and, led by lenient therapists, do community-singing, then

the loners, muttering in Limbo, and last the terminally incompetent, as improvident, unspeakable, impeccable as the plants they parody. (Plants may sweat profusely but never sully themselves.) One tie, though, unites them: all

appeared when the world, though much was awry there,

was more

spacious, more comely to look at, its Old Ones with an audience and secular station. Then a child,

in dismay with Mamma, could refuge with Gran to be revalued and told a story. As of now,

we all know what to expect, but their generation is the first to fade like this, not at home but assigned

to a numbered frequent ward, stowed out of conscience as unpopular luggage.

As I ride the subway to spend half-an-hour with one, I revisage who she was in the pomp and sumpture of her hey-day,

when week-end visits were a presumptive joy, not a good work. Am I cold to wish for a speedy

painless dormition, pray, as I know she prays, that God or Nature will abrupt her earthly function?

April 1970

97

Talking to Myself

(FOR OLIVER SACKS)

Spring this year in Austria started off benign,

the heavens lucid, the air stable, the about

sane to all feeders, vegetate or bestial:

the deathless minerals looked pleased with their regime,

where what is not forbidden is compulsory.

Shadows of course there are, Porn-Ads, with-it clergy, and hubby next door has taken to the bottle, but You have preserved Your poise, strange rustic object, whom I, made in God's Image but already warped, a malapert will-worship, must bow to as Me.

My mortal manor, the carnal territory alloted to my manage, my fosterling too, I must earn cash to support, my tutor also, but for whose neural instructions I could never acknowledge what is or imagine what is not.

Instinctively passive, I guess, having neither fangs nor talons nor hooves nor venom, and therefore too prone to let the sun go down upon Your funk, a poor smeller, or rather a censor of smells, with an omnivore palate that can take hot food.

Unpredictably, decades ago, You arrived among that unending cascade of creatures spewed from Nature's maw. A random event, says Science. Random my bottom! A true miracle, say I, for who is not certain that he was meant to be?

As You augmented and developed a profile, I looked at Your looks askance. His architecture should have been much more imposing: I've been let down! By now, though, I've gotten used to Your proportions and, all things considered, I might have fared far worse.

Seldom have You been a bother. For many years You were, I admit, a martyr to horn-colic (it did no good to tell You—But I'm not in love!): how stoutly, though, You've repelled all germ invasions, but never chastised my tantrums with a megrim.

You are the Injured Party for, if short-sighted,

I am the book-worm who tired You, if short-winded

as cigarette addicts are, I was the pusher

who got You hooked. (Had we been both a bit younger,

I might well have mischiefed You worse with a needle.)

I'm always amazed at how little I know You. Your coasts and outgates I know, for I govern there, but what-goes on inland, the rites, the social codes,

Your torrents, salt and sunless, remain enigmas: what I believe is on doctors' hearsay only.

Our marriage is a drama, but no stage-play where what is not spoken is not thought: in our theatre all that I cannot syllable You will pronounce in acts whose raison-d'etre escapes me. Why secrete fluid when I dole, or stretch Your lips when I joy?

Demands to close or open, include or eject,

must come from Your corner, are no province of mine

(all I have done is to provide the time-table

of hours when You may put them): but what is Your work

when I librate between a glum and a frolic?

For dreams I, quite irrationally, reproach You. All I know is that I don't choose them: if I could, they would conform to some prosodic discipline, mean just what they say. Whatever point nocturnal manias make, as a poet I disapprove.

Thanks to Your otherness, Your jocular concords, so unlike my realm of dissonance and anger, You can serve me as my emblem for the Cosmos: for human congregations, though, as Hobbes perceived, the apposite sign is some ungainly monster.

Whoever coined the phrase The Body Politic? All States we've lived in, or historians tell of, have had shocking health, psychosomatic cases, physicked by sadists or glozing expensive quacks: when I read the papers, You seem an Adonis.

Time, we both know, will decay You, and already I'm scared of our divorce: I've seen some horrid ones. Remember: when Le Bon Dieu says to You Leave him!, please, please, for His sake and mine, pay no attention to my piteous Dont's, but bugger off quickly.

April 1971

A LuHaby

The din of work is subdued, another day has westered and mantling darkness arrived. Peace! Peace! Devoid your portrait of its vexations and rest. Your daily round is done with, you've gotten the garbage out, answered some tiresome letters and paid a bill by return, all frettolosamente. Now you have licence to lie, naked, curled like a shrimplet, jacent in bed, and enjoy its cosy micro-climate: Sing, Big Baby, sing lullay.

The old Greeks got it all wrong: Narcissus is an oldie, tamed by time, released at last from lust for other bodies, rational and reconciled. For many years you envied the hirsute, the he-man type. No longer: now you fondle your almost feminine flesh with mettled satisfaction, imagining that you are sinless and all-sufficient, snug in the den of yourself, Madonna and Bambino: Sing, Big Baby, sing lullay.

Let your last thinks all be thanks: praise your parents who gave you a Super-Ego of strength

■W

that saves you so much bother, digit friends and dear them all, then pay fair attribution to your age, to having been born when you were. In boyhood you were permitted to meet beautiful old contraptions, soon to be banished from earth, saddle-tank loks, beam-engines and over-shot waterwheels. Yes, love, you have been lucky: Sing, Big Baby, sing lullay.

Now for oblivion: let

the belly-mind take over

down below the diaphragm,

the domain of the Mothers,

They who guard the Sacred Gates,

without whose wordless warnings

soon the verbalising I

becomes a vicious despot,

lewd, incapable of love,

disdainful, status-hungry.

Should dreams haunt you, heed them not,

for all, both sweet and horrid,

are jokes in dubious taste,

too jejune to have truck with.

Sleep, Big Baby, sleep your fill.

April 1972

99

A Thanksgiving

When pre-pubescent I felt that moorlands and woodlands were sacred: people seemed rather profane.

Thus, when I started to verse, I presently sat at the feet of Hardy and Thomas and Frost.

Falling in love altered that, now Someone, at least, was important: Yeats was a help, so was Graves.

Then, without warning, the whole Economy suddenly crumbled: there, to instruct me, was Brecht.

Finally, hair-raising things that Hitler and Stalin were doing forced me to think about God.

Why was I sure they were wrong? Wild Kierkegaard, Williams and Lewis guided me back to belief.

Now, as I mellow in years and home in a bountiful landscape, Nature allures me again.

Who are the tutors I need? Well, Horace, adroitest of makers, beeking in Tivoli, and

Goethe. devoted to stones, who guessed that—he never could prove it— Newton led Science astray.

Fondly I ponder You all: without You I couldn't have managed even my weakest of lines.

7 May 1973

Archaeology

The archaeologist's spade delves into dwellings vacancied long ago,

unearthing evidence of life-ways no one would dream of leading now,

concerning which he has not much to say that he can prove: the lucky man!

Knowledge may have its purposes, but guessing is always more fun than knowing.

We do know that Man, from fear or affection, has always graved His dead.

What disastered a city, volcanic effusion, fluvial outrage,

or a human horde, agog for slaves and glory, is visually patent,

and we're pretty sure that, as soon as palaces were built, their rulers,

though gluttoned on sex and blanded by flattery, must often have yawned.

But do grain-pits signify a year of famine? Where a coin-series

peters out, should we infer some major catastrophe? Maybe. Maybe.

From murals and statues we get a glimpse of what the Old Ones bowed down to,

but cannot conceit

in what situations they blushed

or shrugged their shoulders.

Poets have learned us their myths, but just how did They take them? That's a stumper.

When Norsemen heard thunder, did they seriously believe Thor was hammering?

No, I'd say: I'd swear

that men have always lounged in myths

as Tall Stories,

that their real earnest has been to grant excuses for ritual actions.

Only in rites

can we renounce our oddities and be truly entired.

Not that all rites should be equally fonded: some are abominable.

There's nothing the Crucified would like less

than butchery to appease Him.

CODA

From Archaeology

one moral, at least, may be drawn,

to wit, that all

our school text-books lie. What they call History is nothing to vaunt of,

being made, as it is, by the criminal in us: goodness is timeless.

August 1973

A Note on the Text

The poems in this selection first appeared in Auden's published books as follows:

Poems (1930): No. 1-11

Poems (second edition 1933): No. 12-14

The Orators (1932): No. 15-16

The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935): No. 24-25

Look, Stranger! (1936, American title On This Island): No. 17-23,

26-30 Spain (1937): No. 34 Letters from Iceland (1937): No. 31-32 Journey to a War (1939): No. 40 Another Time (1940): No. 33, 35-39, 41-49

The Double Man (1941, British title New Year Letter): No. 52 For the Time Being (1944): No. 60

The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (1945, similar British edition

Collected Shorter Poems 1930-1944): No. 50-51, 53-59 The Age of Anxiety (1947): No. 61-62 Nones (1951): No. 63-69 (and no. 75, parts I and IV only) The Shield of Achilles (1955): No. 70-75

Homage to Clio (1960): No. 76-81 (and no. 86, part VIII only)

About the House (1965): No. 82-86

City Without Walls (1969): No. 87-93

Epistle to a Godson (1972): No. 94-97

Thank You, Fog (1974): No. 98-100

Auden excluded certain of his early poems from his later collections. Of the poems in this book, the following did not appear in Auden's final collected edition: no. 7, 17, 25, 34, 40 (parts IX, X, XIV, XX, XXVI only), 47. Other poems were extensively revised or abridged, notably no. 4, 10, 16, 20, 23, 24, 28, 31, 39, 40 (the remaining parts), 44, 54, 57. Most of the remaining poems have lesser revi­sions. The final versions may be found in Collected Poems (1976) or, for most of the important changes, in the paperback Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957 (1966).

As stated in the preface, the texts in this book are those of the first published editions, with misprints corrected on the basis of manuscripts, and with some minor revisions that Auden made shortly after first publication. Such revisions occur in only two or three poems, and only one instance amounts to more than a small adjustment in the meter. This exception is poem no. 8, where the present text adopts the cuts Auden made for the second edition (1933) of Poems (1930); these cuts can be dated in manuscript to about a year after the book was first published. In the same poem the present text incorporates for the first time a small change Auden made simultaneously with the cuts, but apparently forgot when preparing the new edition for the press more than a year later (the complicated textual history of this poem, published and unpub­lished, offers good reasons for assuming a lapse of memory on Auden's part); the revision occurs in line 17 of part IV, where "To censor the play"-clearly a superior reading in context- replaces "The intricate play".

In About the House some of the parts of poem no. 86 had shorter poems appended to them as "Postscripts"; these have been omit­ted here, as Auden omitted them in his own selections, one of which he prepared shortly after the poem first appeared.

Index of Titles and First Lines

A cellar underneath the house, though not lived in 259 A cloudless night like this 188

A lake allows an average father, walking slowly 208 A living room, the catholic area you 276 A shilling life will give you all the facts 32 A starling and a willow-wren 200 About suffering they were never wrong 79 Adrian and Francisco 141 Adventure 108 Adventurers, The 108

After Reading a Child's Guide to Modern Physics 246

After shaking paws with his dog 218

All are limitory, but each has her own 295

All folk-tales mean by ending 278

All had been ordered weeks before the start 99

Alonso 141

Always far from the centre of our names 77

Among pelagian travelers 248

Among the leaves the small birds sing 231

And the age ended, and the last deliverer died 70

And the traveller hopes: "Let me be far from any 46

Antonio 136

Archaeology 302

Ares at last has quit the field 178

Ashamed to be the darling of his grief 102

As a young child the wisest could adore him 69

As all the pigs have turned back into men 136

As I walked out one evening 60

At Dirty Dick's and Sloppy Joe's 144

At the Grave of Henry James 119

Atlantis 116

August 1968 291 Average, The 105

Being set on the idea 116 Bucolics 202 But I Can't 110

But in the evening the oppression lifted 74

Caliban to the Audience 148 Capital, The 78 Casino 45

Cave of Making, The 256 Cave of Nakedness, The 273

Certainly praise: let the song mount again and again 71 City, The 101 Common Life, The 276 Compline 230

Consider this and in our time 14

Control of the passes was, he saw, the key 3

Crossroads, The 100

Dame Kind 242

Dark-green upon distant heights 284 Dear, all benevolence of fingering lips 111 Dear Son, when the warm multitudes cry 141 Dear, though the night is gone 44

Dear water, clear water, playful in all your streams 214 Deep below our violences 202 Deftly, admiral, cast your fly 187

Don Juan needs no bed, being far too impatient to undress 273 Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle 18 Door, The 99 Down There 259

Easily, my dear, you move, easily your head 33 Embrace me, belly, like a bride 138 Encomium Balnei 263

Engines bear them through the sky: they're free 72

Epitaph on a Tyrant 80

Epithalamium 278

Et in Arcadia Ego 250

Evening, grave, immense, and clear 139

Except where blast-furnaces and generating-stations 287

Fairground 280 Fall of Rome, The 183

Far from the heart of culture he was used 73

Ferdinand 137

First Temptation, The 102

First Things First 236

Fleet Visit 197

Flesh, fair. unique, and you, warm secret that my kiss 137 For Friends Only 269

For this and for all enclosures like it the archetype 256 Forty Years On 287

Fresh addenda are published every day 106 Friday's Child 237

From gallery-grave and the hunt of a wren-king 252 From the very first coming down 2

Garden, The 110

Geography of the House, The 261

Gonzalo 139

Good little sunbeams must learn to fly 141 Good-bye to the Mezzogiorno 239 Grub First, Then Ethics 266

He disappeared in the dead of winter 80 He looked in all his wisdom from the throne 70 He parried every question that they hurled 107 He stayed: and was imprisoned in possession 66 He told us we were free to choose 237 He turned his field into a meeting-place 68 He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be 85 He was their servant-some say he was blind 68 He watched the stars and noted birds in flight 67 He watched with all his organs of concern 103 Hearing of harvests rotting in the valleys 28 Here war is simple like a monument 72 Hero, The 107

His generous bearing was a new invention 67

His peasant parents killed themselves with toil 105

Homage to Clio 232

Horae Canonicae 216

How still it is; the horses 175

I can imagine quite easily ending up 211 I know a retired dentist who only paints mountains 206 I sit in one of the dives 86 If all a top physicist knows 246

If it form the one landscape that we the inconstant ones 184 If now, having dismissed your hired impersonators 148 If the hill overlooking our city has always been known 227 - In a garden shady this holy lady 96 In Memory of Sigmund Freud 91 In Memory of W. B. Yeats 80 In Praise of Limestone 184 In Sickness and in Health 111 In Time of War 64

In villages from which their childhoods came 101 Incredulous, he stared at the amused 105 Islands 210

it is odd that the English 263

It was Easter as I walked in the public gardens 7

It's natural the Boys should whoop it up for 294

Journey to Iceland 46 Jumbled in the common box 115

Kicking his mother until she let go of his soul 123

Lady, weeping at the crossroads 95 Lakes 208

Lament for a Lawgiver 176 Lauds 231

Law, say the gardeners, is the sun 89

Lay your sleeping head, my love 50

Lesson, The 125

Let me tell you a little story 55

Look, stranger, at this island now 43

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well 237

Lucky, The 107

Lullaby, A 299

Make this night loveable 201 Master and Boatswain 144 Mechanic, merchant, king 146 Memorial for the City 190

Men would never have come to need an attic 260

Miranda 147

Miss Gee 55

Moon Landing 294

More Loving One, The 237

Mountains 206

Mundus et Infans 123

Musee des Beaux Arts 79

My Dear One is mine as mirrors are lonely 147 My rioters all disappear, my dream 145

Nature is so near: the rooks in the college garden 63 New Year Greeting, A 292

No, not their names. It was the others who built 76 No window in his suburb lights that bedroom where 101 Nobody I know would like to be buried 253 Nocturne 201 Nones 223 Noon 175

Nothing is given: we must find our law 77 Now, as desire and the things desired 230 Now the leaves are falling fast 43 Now through night's caressing grip 41

o for doors to be open and an invite with gilded edges 42 o Love, the interest itself in thoughtless Heaven 25 o what is that sound which so thrills the ear 26 "0 where are you going?" said reader to rider 19 "0 who can ever gaze his fill" 48 Ode to Terminus 289 Old People's Home 295 Old saints on millstones float with cats 210 On the Circuit 248 On this day tradition allots 292 Only a smell had feelings to make known 66 Only the hands are living; to the wheel attracted 45 Orpheus 55

Others had swerved off to the left before 108

Our hill has made its submission and the green 232

Our hunting fathers told the story 33

Ours yet not ours, being set apart 269

Out of a bellicose fore-time, thundering 282

Out of a gothic North, the pallid children 239 Out of it steps the future of the poor 99 Out on the lawn I lie in bed 29 Oxford 63

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after 80 Plains 211

Poet, oracle and wit 109 Postscript 174 Preparations, The 99 Presumptuous, The 104 Prime 216

Prologue At Sixty 284

Prologue: The Birth of Architecture 252

Prospera to Ariel 129

Quarter of pleasures where the rich are always waiting 78 Quest, The 99

Really, must you 245 Refugee Blues 83 River Profile 282

Say this city has ten million souls 83 Sea and the Mirror, The 127 Seated after breakfast 261 Sebastian 145

Second Temptation, The 102 September 1, 1939 86 Sext 219

She looked over his shoulder 198

Shield of Achilles, The 198

Should the shade of Plato 266

Simultaneously, as soundlessly 216

Since you are going to begin to-day 12

Sir, no man's enemy, forgiving all 7

Simple like all dream wishes, they employ 75

So from the years the gifts were showered; each 64

Sob, heavy world 176

Song 187

Song for St. Cecilia's Day 96 Spain 51

Spinning upon their central thirst like tops 108

Spring this year in Austria started off benign 296

Stay with me, Ariel, while I pack, and with your first free act 129

Steatopygous, sow-dugged 242

Stephano 138

Streams 214

Suppose he'd listened to the erudite committee 107 Sylvan meant savage in those primal woods 204

Talking to Myself 296

Taller to-day, we remember similar evenings 3 Terce 218

Thanksgiving, A 300 Thanksgiving for a Habitat 252 The aged catch their breath 127 The archaeologist's spade 302 The din of work is subdued 299

The eyes of the crow and the eye of the camera open 190

The first time that I dreamed, we were in flight 125

The friends who met here and embraced are gone 100

The High Priests of telescopes and cyclotrons 289

The library annoyed him with its look 102

The life of man is never quite completed 75

The life of plants 271

The Ogre does what ogres can 291

The over-logical fell for the witch 106

The piers are pummelled by the waves 183

The sailors come ashore 197

The snow, less intransigeant than their marble 119

The Summer holds: upon its glittering lake 36

They are and suffer; that is all they do 73

They carry terror with them like a purse 74

They died and entered the closed life like nuns 69

They noticed that virginity was needed 104

They wondered why the fruit had been forbidden 65

Third Temptation, The 103

This is an architecture for the odd 103

This lunar beauty 16

Though aware of our rank and alert to obey orders 20 Thumping old tunes gives a voice to its whereabouts 280 Time will say nothing but I told you so 110 To ask the hard question is simple 17

Tonight at Seven-Thirty 271 Tower, The 103 Traveller, The 101 Trinculo 146

Under Sirius 195 Under Which Lyre 178 Unknown Citizen, The 85 Up There 260 Useful, The 106

Vespers 227 Vocation 105

Walk After Dark, A 188

Wandering lost upon the mountains of our choice 77 Watch any day his nonchalant pauses, see 4 Waters, The 109 Way, The 106

Weep no more but pity me 174

What does the song hope for? And the moved hands 55 What we know to be not possible 223 What's in your mind, my dove, my coney 19 When all the apparatus of report 76 When pre-pubescent I felt 300

When there are so many we shall have to mourn 91

Who, now, seeing Her so 250

Who stands, the crux left of the watershed 1

Will you turn a deaf ear 5

Willow-Wren and the Stare, The 200

Winds 202

Within these gates all opening begins 110

Woken, I lay in the arms of my own warmth and listened 236

Woods 204

Wrapped in a yielding air, beside 59

Yes, these are the dog-days, Fortunatus 195 Yes, we are going to suffer, now; the sky 71 Yesterday all the past. The language of size 51 You 245

You need not see what someone is doing 219

WYSTAN HUGH AUDEN was born in York, England, on February 21, 1907. He studied at Gresham's School, Holt, and Christ Church, Oxford, after which he lived for a year in a Berlin slum. In the early nineteen-thirties he taught school at Helensburgh, in Scotland, and then at the Downs School, near Malvern. In the later thirties he worked as a free-lance writer, and published travel books on Iceland (with Louis MacNeice) and the Sino-Japanese War (with Christopher Isherwood). Also in collaboration with Isher- wood, he wrote three plays for the Group Theatre, London: The Dog Beneath the Skin, The Ascent of F6, and On the Frontier. In 1939 he left England for the United States, where he became a citizen in 1946. In America he lived in New York until 1941, then taught at Michigan and Swarth- more. In 1945 he served in Germany with the U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey, and, when he returned, again took an apartment in New York. From 1948 to 1972 he spent his winters in America and his summers in Europe, first in Ischia, then, from 1958, in a house he owned in Kirchstetten, Austria. During this period he wrote four opera libretti with Chester Kallman: The Rake's Progress (for Igor Stravinsky), Elegy for Young Lovers and The Bassarids (both for Hans Werner Henze), and Love's Labour's Lost (for Nicolas Nabokov). In 1950 he published a book of essays, The Enchofed Flood, or, The Romantic Iconography of the Sea. Further essays are gathered in two large collections, The Dyer's Hand (1962) and Forewords and Afterwords (1973), as well as in the shorter Secondary Worlds (1968). His commonplace book A Certain World, which he called "a sort of autobiography," was published in 1970. From 1956 to 1960 he spent a few months of each year in Oxford as the elected Professor of Poetry. In 1972 he left his winter home in New York to return to Oxford. He died in Vienna on September 29. 1973.

EDWARD MENDELSON, the editor of this selection. is the literary executor of the Estate of W. H. Auden.