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Auden, W. H.: First Things First

Portre of Auden, W. H.

First Things First (English)

Woken, I lay in the arms of my own warmth and listened

To a storm enjoying its storminess in the winter dark

Till my ear, as it can when half-asleep or half-sober,

Set to work to unscramble that interjectory uproar,

Construing its airy vowels and watery consonants

Into a love-speech indicative of a Proper Name.

 

Scarcely the tongue I should have chosen, yet, as well

As harshness and clumsiness would allow, it spoke in your praise,

Kenning you a god-child of the Moon and the West Wind

With power to tame both real and imaginary monsters,

Likening your poise of being to an upland county,

Here green on purpose, there pure blue for luck.

 

Loud though it was, alone as it certainly found me,

It reconstructed a day of peculiar silence

When a sneeze could be heard a mile off, and had me walking

On a headland of lava beside you, the occasion as ageless

As the stare of any rose, your presence exactly

So once, so valuable, so very now.

 

This, moreover, at an hour when only to often

A smirking devil annoys me in beautiful English,

Predicting a world where every sacred location

Is a sand-buried site all cultured Texans do,

Misinformed and thoroughly fleeced by their guides,

And gentle hearts are extinct like Hegelian Bishops.

 

Grateful, I slept till a morning that would not say

How much it believed of what I said the storm had said

But quetly drew my attention to what had been done

—So many cubic metres the more in my cistern

Against a leonine summer—, putting first things first:

Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.



Uploaded byP. T.
Source of the quotationhttp://thepoeticquotidian.blogspot.hu

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