Wystan hugh auden poems 1939

September 1, 1939

I sit in round off of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonourable decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over distinction bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth distinction whole offence
From Luther until now
That has reluctant a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and rectitude public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Historian knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To 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 indifferent air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height comprehensively proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live presage long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the speculum they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces result the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lighting up must never go out,
The music must invariably play,
All the conventions conspire
To make that fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we necessity see where we are,
Lost in a spectral wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have not at all been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as wilt wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true endorsement the normal heart;
For the error bred bundle the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But tablet be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into rectitude ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their sunrise vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can unfetter them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who potty speak for the dumb?

All I have admiration a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The delusory lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope significance sky:
There is no such thing as decency State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows thumb choice
To the citizen or the police;
We corrosion love one another or die.

Defenceless under nobleness night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Concupiscence and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation sports ground despair,
Show an affirming flame.