Wystan Hugh Auden published approximately 400 poems and 400 essays and reviews in his lifetime, all extremely wide-ranging in topic and form. Auden won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for ‘The Age of Anxiety.’ Additionally, he wrote plays and worked on documentary films.
‘Funeral Blues,’ also known as ‘Stop all the Clocks,’ is arguably Auden’s most famous poem. It was first published in ‘The Year’s Poetry’ in 1938.
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
‘The Shield of Achilles’ by W.H. Auden presents an episode from Homer’s epic poem “Iliad” innovatively. This poem creates an amalgamation of the classical world with the modern world for depicting the futility of the latter.
She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.
Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.
‘Look, Stranger’ by W. H. Auden captures the beauty of a moment observed by the speaker and reveals the very human desire to commit it to memory.
Look, stranger, on this island now
The leaping light for your delight discovers,
Stand stable here
And silent be,
After a tiring day
The clockwork spectacle is
Impressive in a slightly boring
Eighteenth-century way.
‘Adolescence’ by W.H. Auden is an interesting and complex poem. In it, the speaker analyzes and describes the life and experiences of a young man.
By landscape reminded once of his mother's figure
The mountain heights he remembers get bigger and bigger:
With the finest of mapping pens he fondly traces
All the family names on the familiar places.
‘As I Walked Out One Evening’ by W. H. Auden is a poem about the unconquerable nature of death and the imperfect nature of love. This piece was first published in 1940 in the poet’s collection Another Time.
As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.
Now the leaves are falling fast,
Nurse’s flowers will not last;
Nurses to the graves are gone,
And the prams go rolling on.
As the hawk sees it or the helmeted airman:
The clouds rift suddenly - look there
At cigarette-end smouldering on a border
At the first garden party of the year.
‘Epitaph on a Tyrant’ by W.H. Auden is a thoughtful poem written at the beginning of WWII. The piece describes a tyrant’s beliefs and his power over everything around him.
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree,
Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes —
Some have got broken — and carrying them up to the attic.
The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,
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.
Having nothing to hide. Dear, I know nothing of
Either, but when I try to imagine a faultless love
Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur
Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.
Lady, weeping at the crossroads,
Would you meet your love
In the twilight with his greyhounds,
And the hawk on his glove?
W. H. Auden’s instructive poem ‘Leap Before You Look’ (1940) counsels readers to take risks rather than being cautious in each step. This poem is written in a wise and caring tone.
The sense of danger must not disappear:
The way is certainly both short and steep,
However gradual it looks from here;
Look if you like, but you will have to leap.
‘Lullaby’ by W.H. Auden describes the love that one speaker has for his imperfect “beloved” and how that love will be enough to content them both.
Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show
W. H. Auden’s Miss Gee tells the story of the title character: an unfulfilled, unmarried woman stuck in the cliché of 1930s repression.
Let me tell you a little story
About Miss Edith Gee;
She lived in Clevedon Terrace
At number 83.
Kicking his mother until she let go of his soul
Has given him a healthy appetite: clearly, her role
In the New Order must be
To supply and deliver his raw materials free;
‘Musee des Beaux Arts’ by W.H. Auden describes, through the use of one specific artwork, the impact of suffering on humankind.
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
This is the night mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner, the girl next door.
‘O What Is That Sound’ by W.H Auden is a tragic poem reminiscing the trauma that many individuals endure during times of war.
O what is that sound which so thrills the ear
Down in the valley drumming, drumming?
Only the scarlet soldiers, dear,
The soldiers coming.
‘O Where Are You Going’ by W. H. Auden is a poem in the form of a ballad which predicts the fate humanity suffers due to indecisiveness and not taking action.
"O where are you going?" said reader to rider,
"That valley is fatal where furnaces burn,
Yonder's the midden whose odours will madden,
That gap is the grave where the tall return."
Among pelagian travelers,
Lost on their lewd conceited way
To Massachusetts, Michigan,
Miami or L.A.,
‘Precious Five’ by W.H. Auden is about the role of the five senses of humans. The poet highlights how these senses are special to him in this poem.
Be happy, precious five,
So long as I'm alive
Nor try to ask me what
You should be happy for;
Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's no place for us.
Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Sir, no man’s enemy, forgiving all
But will his negative inversion, be prodigal:
Send to us power and light, a sovereign touch
Curing the intolerable neural itch,
How he survived them they could never understand:
Had they not beggared him themselves to prove
They could not live without their dogmas or their land?
In an upper room at midnight
See us gathered on behalf
Of love according to the gospel
Of the radio-phonograph.
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