Poem of the Week: WH Auden
In honor of Auden’s centenary, York cabbies will be reciting his verse to their passengers. I expect most of the passengers will at least know who Auden is; if New York cabbies did the same, maybe not!
Take this quiz to see how much you know about Auden.
“After Reading a Child’s Guide to Modern Physics”
(link to 1965 audio recording by Auden)
WH Auden
If all a top physicist knows
About the Truth be true,
Then, for all the so-and-so’s,
Futility and grime,
Our common world contains,
We have a better time
Than the Greater Nebulae do,
Or the atoms in our brains.Marriage is rarely bliss
But, surely it would be worse
As particles to pelt
At thousands of miles per sec
About a universe
Wherein a lover’s kiss
Would either not be felt
Or break the loved one’s neck.Though the face at which I stare
While shaving it be cruel
For, year after year, it repels
An ageing suitor, it has,
Thank God, sufficient mass
To be altogether there,
Not an indeterminate gruel
Which is partly somewhere else.Our eyes prefer to suppose
That a habitable place
Has a geocentric view,
That architects enclose
A quiet Euclidian space:
Exploded myths - but who
Could feel at home astraddle
An ever expanding saddle?This passion of our kind
For the process of finding out
Is a fact one can hardly doubt,
But I would rejoice in it more
If I knew more clearly what
We wanted the knowledge for,
Felt certain still that the mind
Is free to know or not.It has chosen once, it seems,
And whether our concern
For magnitude’s extremes
Really become a creature
Who comes in a median size,
Or politicizing Nature
Be altogether wise,
Is something we shall learn.
Also recommended: “Musee des Beaux Arts” and “In Memory of WB Yeats”
BBC interviews with Auden
“The Permanent Auden” (New Criterion)
poet Peter Nicholson’s Auden tribute, “Asking Auden”
Slate’s email book club on Auden
Add comment February 24th, 2007
