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I'll always remember "when one of them goes to the bad" because it reminds me of things. Still, I don't think him much of a poet, doesn't even have a tattoo like William Carlos Williams on his chest. I don't think much of poets, though, as a rule. William Carlos Williams go fuck yourself.

Awesome thanks

This great society is going smash.

'Life out there is goodly, miraculous, lovable'

My stepfather. But which one?

So Auden was the first to identify the archetype of the normie

The word; 'genius' sits comfortably and genuinely in the presence of a man like Auden.

Gem of a poem!

TS Elliot's "The Hollow Men" - 'This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but with a whimper. the world ends not with a bang but a whisper.'

"From weathered outcrop to hilltop temple": euphonic!

Wonderful to hear a favourite poem read by its creator.

Auden evokes in me the same feelings as I got from Orwell's 1984 with a dash of Marx added to the mix.

In tears.....what a prophecy.....

I love W. H. Auden!!!! Just memorized his "Funeral Blues". He is my favorite poet.

Where is this recording from?

And the traveller hopes: “Let me be far from any Physician”; and the ports have names for the sea; The citiless, the corroding, the sorrow; And North means to all: “Reject”. And the great plains are for ever where cold creatures are hunted, And everywhere; the light birds flicker and flaunt; Under a scolding flag the lover Of islands may see at last, Faintly, his limited hope; as he nears the glitter Of glaciers; the sterile immature mountains intense In the abnormal day of this world, and a river’s Fan-like polyp of sand. Then let the good citizen here find natural marvels: The horse-shoe ravine, the issue of steam from a cleft In the rock, and rocks, and waterfalls brushing the Rocks, and among the rock birds. And the student of prose and conduct, places to visit; The site of a church where a bishop was put in a bag, The bath of a great historian, the rock where An outlaw dreaded the dark. Remember the doomed man thrown by his horse and crying: “Beautiful is the hillside, I will not go”; The old woman “He that I loved the Best, to him I was worst,” For Europe is absent. This is an island and therefore Unreal. And the steadfast affections of its dead may be bought By those whose dreams accuse them of being Spitefully alive, and the pale From too much passion of kissing feel pure in its deserts. Can they? For the world is, and the present, and the lie. And the narrow bridge over a torrent, And the small farm under a crag Are natural settings for the jealousies of a province; And the weak vow of fidelity is formed by the cairn; And within the indigenous figure on horseback On the bridle-path down by the lake The blood moves also by crooked and furtive inches, Asks all our questions: “Where is the homage? When Shall justice be done? Who is against me? Why am I always alone?” Present then the world to the world with its mendicant shadow; Let the suits be flash, the Minister of Commerce insane; Let jazz be bestowed on the huts, and the beauty's Set cosmopolitan smile. For our time has no favourite suburb; no local features Are those of the young for whom all wish to care; The promise is only a promise, the fabulous Country impartially far. Tears fall in all the rivers. Again some driver Pulls on his gloves and in a blinding snowstorm starts Upon his deadly journey; and again some writer Runs howling to his art.

the published version reads: 'What could be more like Mother or a fitter background For her son, the flirtatious male who lounges Against a rock in the sunlight, never doubting That for all his faults he is loved' so the poet adding a mischievous extra phrase in this reading...

dramatic irony engraved..

brillant poem

My favorite poem. For me this poem traces his own history from public to personal life, from a leftist political icon to a poet of human realities. It's enormously wise and funny, self-deprecating and brave, I think. It's brilliant the way the antecedent of 'we' grows more and more narrow across the poem, until at the end (I imagine) he is just talking to Christopher Isherwood. I went to school at IU, where all the buildings are limestone, and used to imagine he wrote the poem with Bloomington in mind. Someday I hope to get to Ischia, and see the actual place that inspired the work.

here on Ischia, he captures the languid, sure way of the Ischitani

A Walk After Dark - W.H. Auden A cloudless night like this Can set the spirit soaring: After a tiring day The clockwork spectacle is Impressive in a slightly boring Eighteenth-century way. It soothed adolescence a lot To meet so shameless a stare; The things I did could not Be so shocking as they said If that would still be there After the shocked were dead Now, unready to die Bur already at the stage When one starts to resent the young, I am glad those points in the sky May also be counted among The creatures of middle-age. It's cosier thinking of night As more an Old People's Home Than a shed for a faultless machine, That the red pre-Cambrian light Is gone like Imperial Rome Or myself at seventeen. Yet however much we may like The stoic manner in which The classical authors wrote, Only the young and rich Have the nerve or the figure to strike The lacrimae rerum note. For the present stalks abroad Like the past and its wronged again Whimper and are ignored, And the truth cannot be hid; Somebody chose their pain, What needn't have happened did. Occuring this very night By no established rule, Some event may already have hurled Its first little No at the right Of the laws we accept to school Our post-diluvian world: But the stars burn on overhead, Unconscious of final ends, As I walk home to bed, Asking what judgment waits My person, all my friends, And these United States.

A telling variant? An early 1940s recording? What's the story? Auden's COLLECTED POEMS (1991) has this version: MAY May with its light behaving Stirs vessel, eye and limb, The singular and sad Are willing to recover, And to each swan-delighting river The careless picnics come In living white and red. Our dead, remote and hooded, In hollows rest, but we From their vague woods have broken, Forests where children meet And the white angel-vampires flit, Stand now with shaded eye, The dangerous apple taken. The real world lies before us, Brave motions of the young, Abundant wish for death, The pleasing, pleasured, haunted: A dying Master sinks tormented In his admirers' ring, The unjust walk the earth. And love that makes impatient Tortoise and roe, that lays The blonde beside the dark, Urges upon our blood, Before the evil and the good How insufficient is Touch, endearment, look. --- W. H. Auden, 1934

Hi, thanks for the upload of this poem!

...he wanders off the main theme a bit, don't he.

...again... ...does this work have ANY relevance to anything whatever? So lost in irrelevance and intellect. 

...does this work have ANY relevance to anything whatever? So lost in irrelevance and intellect.

It's odd how often great poets are pretty poor at reading their own work. It was true of TS Eliot and Philip Larkin. And Auden too, judging by this. A brilliant poem, but a pretty wretched reading. Still interesting to hear it, though.

Beautiful.

He's brilliant.

beautiful!

thank you for posting