A terror shakes my tree,
A flock of words fly out,
Whereat a laughter shakes
The busy and devout.

Wild images, come down
Out of your freezing sky,
That I, like shorter men,
May get my joke and die.

— Selection from “Trinculo,” from W. H. Auden’s “The Sea and the Mirror”

Photo credit: By Tomwsulcer (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.