Selected Poems Quotes

“The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Poems

“Time will say nothing but I told you so,
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Poems

“The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach:
The Ogre cannot master speech.

About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Poems

“We have no destiny assigned us:
Nothing is certain but the body; we plan
To better ourselves; the hospitals alone remind us
Of the equality of man.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Poems

“But round your image
there is no fog, and the Earth
can still astonish.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Poems

“Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full strength of Collective Man.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Poems

“Time will say nothing but I told you so.
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

There are no fortunes to be told, although
Because I love you more than I can say,
If I could tell you I would let you know.

The winds must come from somewhere when they blow,
There must be reasons why the leaves decay; Time will say nothing but I told you so.

Perhaps the roses really want to grow,
The vision seriously intends to stay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

Suppose the lions all get up and go,
And all the brooks and soldiers run away;
Will Time say nothing but I told you so?
If I could tell you I would let you know.”
― W. H. Auden, Selected poetry of W.H. Auden

“Now our partnership is dissolved, I feel so peculiar:
As if I had been on a drunk since I was born
And suddenly now, and for the first time, am cold sober,
With all my unanswered wishes and unwashed days
Stacked up all around my life ; as if through
the ages I had dreamed
About some tremendous journey I was taking,
Sketching imaginary landscapes, chasms and cities,
Cold walls, hot spaces, wild mouths, defeated backs,
Jotting down fictional notes on secrets overheard
In theatres and privies, banks and mountain inns,
And now, in my oId age, I wake, and this journey really exists,
And I have actually to take it, inch by inch,
Alone and on foot, without a cent in my pocket,
Through a universe where time is not foreshortened,
No animals talk, and there is neither floating nor flying.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Poems

“From Archaeology
one moral, at least, may be drawn,
to wit, that all

our school text-books lie.
What they call History
is nothing to vaunt of,'

being made, as it is,
by the criminal in us:
goodness is timeless.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Poems

“Expect no help from others, for who
Talk sense to princes or refer to
The scorpion in official speeches
As they unveil some granite Progress
Leading a child and holding a bunch
Of lilies?”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Poems

“Is it possible that, not content with inveigling Caliban into Ariel's kingdom, you have also let loose Ariel in Caliban's? We note with alarm that when the other members of the final tableau were dismissed. He was not returned to His arboreal confinement as He should have been. Where is He now? For if the intrusion of the real has disconcerted and incommoded the poetic. that is a mere bagatelle compared to the damage which the poetic would inflict if it ever succeeded in intruding upon the real. We want no Ariel here, breaking down our picket fences in the name of fraternity, seducing our wives in the name of romance. and robbing us of our sacred pecuniary deposits in the name of justice. Where is Ariel? What have you done with Him? For we won't, we daren't leave until you give us a satisfactory
answer.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Poems

“Here, where the possessive note is utterly silent and all events are tautological repetitions and no decision will ever alter the secular stagnation, at long last you are, as you have asked to be, the only subject. Who, When, Why, the poor tired little historic questions fall wilting into a hush of utter failure. Your tears splash down upon clinkers which will never be persuaded to recognise a neighbour and there is really and truly no one to appear with tea and help. You have indeed come all the way to the end of your bachelor's journey where Liberty stands with her hands behind her back, not caring, not minding anything. Confronted by a straight and snubbing stare to which mythology is bosh, surrounded by an infinite passivity and purely arithmetrical disorder which is only open to perception, and with nowhere to go on to, your existence is indeed free at last to choose its own meaning, that is, to plunge headlong into despair and fall through silence fathomless and dry, all fact your single drop, all value your pure alas.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Poems

“joining the crowd
is the only thing all men can do.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Poems

“From gallery-grave and the hunt of a wren-king
to Low Mass and trailer camp
is hardly a tick by the carbon clock, but I
don't count that way nor do you:
already it is millions of heartbeats ago
back to the Bicycle Age,
before which is no After for me to measure,
j ust a still prehistoric Once
where anything could happen. To you, to me,
Stonehenge and Chartres Cathedral,
the Acropolis, Blenheim, the Albert Memorial
are works by the same Old Man
under different names : we know what He did,
what, even, He thought He thought,
but we don't see why.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Poems

“for the subject of the verb
to-hunger is never a name :
dear Adam and Eve had different bottoms,
but the neotene who marches
upright and can subtract reveals a belly
like the serpent's with the same
vulnerable look. Jew, Gentile or pigmy,
he must get his calories
before he can consider her profile or
his own, attack you or play chess,
and take what there is however hard to get down :
then surely those in whose creed
God is edible may call a fine
omelette a Christian deed.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Poems

“Broadening or burrowing to the moon's phases,
turbid with pulverized wastemantle, on through
flatter, duller, hotter, cotton-gin country
it scours, approaching
the tidal mark where it puts off majesty,
disintegrates, and through swamps of a delta,
punting-pole, fowling-piece, oyster-tongs country,
wearies to its final
act of surrender, effacement, atonement
in a huge amorphous aggregate no cuddled
attractive child ever dreams of, non-country,
image of death as
a spherical dew-drop of life. Unlovely
monsters, our tales believe, can be translated
too, even as water, the selfless mother
of all especials.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Poems

“where to all species except the talkative
have been allotted the niche and diet that
become them. This, whatever micro-
biology may think, is the world we
really live in and that saves our sanity,
who know all too well how the most erudite
mind behaves in the dark without a
surround it is called on to interpret,
how, discarding rhythm, punctuation, metaphor,
it sinks into a driveling monologue,
too literal to see a joke or
distinguish a penis from a pencil.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Poems

“Still his loud iniquity is still what only the
Greatest of saints become-someone who dqes not lie :
He because he cannot
Stop the vivid present to think, they by having got
Past reflection into
A passionate obedience in time. We have our BoyMeets-Girl era of mirrors and muddle to work through,
Without rest, without j oy.
Therefore we love him because his judgements are so
Frankly subjective that his abuse carries no
Personal sting.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Poems

“Now, more than ever, we distinctly hear
The dreadful shuffle of a murderous year
And all our senses roaring as the Black
Dog leaps upon the individual back.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Poems

“And how reliable can any truth be that is got
By observing oneself and then just inserting a Not?”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Poems

“the hospitals alone remind us
Of the equality of man.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Poems

“They carry terror with them like a purse,
And flinch from the horizon like a gun;
And all the rivers and the railways run
Away from Neighbourhood as from a curse.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Poems

“Behind each sociable home-loving eye
The private massacres are taking place ;
All Women, Jews, the Rich, the Human Race.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Poems

“Beyond him his young cousins in the city
Pursued their rapid and unnatural course,
Believed in nothing but were easy-going,
And treated strangers like a favourite horse.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Poems

“And over the talkative city like any other
Weep the non-attached angels”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Poems

“A friend is the old tale of Narcissus
Not to be born is the best for man
An active partner in something disgraceful
Change your partner, dance while you can.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Poems

“It is time for the destruction of error.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Poems

“Will you wheel death anywhere
In his invalid chair,
With no affectionate instant
But his his attendant?

For to be held for friend
By an underdeveloped mind
To be joke for children is
Death's happiness:

Whose anecdotes betray
His favourite colour as blue
Colour of distant bells
And boys' overalls.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Poems