Quotes by W.H. Auden

We must love one another or die

He was my North, my South, my East and West,My working week and my Sunday rest,My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

If equal affection cannot be,Let the more loving one be me.

I am sure it is everyone’s experience, as it has been mine, that any discovery we make about ourselves or the meaning of life is never, like a scientific discovery, a coming upon something entirely new and unsuspected; it is rather, the coming to conscious recognition of something, which we really knew all the time but, because we were unwilling to formulate it correctly, we did not hitherto know we knew.

Truth, like love and sleep, resents approaches that are too intense.

The religious definition of truth is not that it is universal but that it is absolute.

Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot readThe hunters waking thoughts.

If you want romance, fuck a journalist.

Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.

Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.

You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

We would rather be ruined than changedWe would rather die in our dreadThan climb the cross of the momentAnd let our illusions die.

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939I sit in one of the divesOn Fifty-second StreetUncertain and afraidAs the clever hopes expireOf a low dishonest decade:Waves of anger and fearCirculate over the brightAnd darkened lands of the earth,Obsessing our private lives;The unmentionable odour of deathOffends the September night.Accurate scholarship canUnearth the whole offenceFrom Luther until nowThat has driven a culture mad,Find what occurred at Linz,What huge imago madeA psychopathic god:I and the public knowWhat all schoolchildren learn,Those to whom evil is doneDo evil in return.Exiled Thucydides knewAll that a speech can sayAbout Democracy,And what dictators do,The elderly rubbish they talkTo an apathetic grave;Analysed all in his book,The enlightenment driven away,The habit-forming pain,Mismanagement and grief:We must suffer them all again.Into this neutral airWhere blind skyscrapers useTheir full height to proclaimThe strength of Collective Man,Each language pours its vainCompetitive excuse:But who can live for longIn an euphoric dream;Out of the mirror they stare,Imperialisms faceAnd the international wrong.Faces along the barCling to their average day:The lights must never go out,The music must always play,All the conventions conspireTo make this fort assumeThe furniture of home;Lest we should see where we are,Lost in a haunted wood,Children afraid of the nightWho have never been happy or good.The windiest militant trashImportant Persons shoutIs not so crude as our wish:What mad Nijinsky wroteAbout DiaghilevIs true of the normal heart;For the error bred in the boneOf each woman and each manCraves what it cannot have,Not universal loveBut to be loved alone.From the conservative darkInto the ethical lifeThe dense commuters come,Repeating their morning vow;I will be true to the wife,Ill concentrate more on my work,And helpless governors wakeTo resume their compulsory game:Who can release them now,Who can reach the dead,Who can speak for the dumb?All I have is a voiceTo undo the folded lie,The romantic lie in the brainOf the sensual man-in-the-streetAnd the lie of AuthorityWhose buildings grope the sky:There is no such thing as the StateAnd no one exists alone;Hunger allows no choiceTo the citizen or the police;We must love one another or die.Defenseless under the nightOur world in stupor lies;Yet, dotted everywhere,Ironic points of lightFlash out wherever the JustExchange their messages:May I, composed like themOf Eros and of dust,Beleaguered by the sameNegation and despair,Show an affirming flame.

Follow, poet, follow rightTo the bottom of the night,With your unconstraining voiceStill persuade us to rejoice;With the farming of a verseMake a vineyard of the curse,Sing of human unsuccessIn a rapture of distress;In the deserts of the heartLet the healing fountain start,In the prison of his daysTeach the free man how to praise.

I will love you forever swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. I will love you at 4:15 pm next Tuesday - Is that still as easy?

O stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start;You shall love your crooked neighbour With your crooked heart.

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom.

Poetry makes nothing happen.