An elderly W. H. Auden once joked that his face looked like “a wedding cake that had been left out in the rain.”
Well, I’m hopefully not there quite yet, But, still … look at those crow’s feet!
The Nerd at 54.
Tag Archives: W. H. Auden
“Once in a while, the moon turns blue.”
“She looked over his shoulder/ For vines and olive trees …”
She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.
— opening lines from W. H. Auden’s “the Shield of Achilles”
“Our dream of safety has to disappear.”
A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep
Sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear:
Although I love you, you will have to leap;
Our dream of safety has to disappear.
— from W. H. Auden’s “Leap Before You Look”
Photo credit: ” Cliff in the Moonlight,” Rufin Sudkovsky, 1880
Title page of W. H. Auden’s “The Age of Anxiety,” 1947
Random House.
“That valley is fatal where furnaces burn.”
“O where are you going?” said reader to rider,
“That valley is fatal where furnaces burn,
Yonder’s the midden whose odours will madden,
That gap is the grave where the tall return.”
“O do you imagine,” said fearer to farer,
“That dusk will delay on your path to the pass,
Your diligent looking discover the lacking,
Your footsteps feel from granite to grass?”
— excerpt from W. H. Auden’s “O Where Are You Going?”
“Wild images, come down/ Out of your freezing sky.”
A terror shakes my tree,
A flock of words fly out,
Whereas 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.
— Trinculo, in W. H. Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror
“Women and books would teach his middle age/The fencing wit of an informal style.”
“Vocation,” by W. H. Auden (Part XII of “The Quest”)
Incredulous, he stared at the amused
Official writing down his name among
Those whose request to suffer was refused.
The pen ceased scratching: though he came too late
To join the martyrs, there was still a place
Among the tempters for a caustic tongue
To test the resolution of the young
With tales of the small failings of the great,
And shame the eager with ironic praise.
Though mirrors might be hateful for a while,
Women and books would teach his middle age
The fencing wit of an informal style,
To keep the silences at bay and cage
His pacing manias in a worldly smile.
“And the deep river ran on.”
O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.
O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.’
It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.
— excerpt from W. H. Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening”
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 