'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you 10 Till China and Africa meet And the river jumps over the mountain An d the salmon sing in the street.
'I'll love you till the ocean Is folded and hung up to dry 15 An d the seven stars2 go squawking Like geese about the sky.
'The years shall run like rabbits For in my arms I hold Th e Flower of the Ages 20 An d the first love of the world.'
But all the clocks in the city Began to whirr and chime: 'O let not Tim e deceive you, You cannot conquer Time.
25 'In the burrows of the Nightmare Wher e Justice naked is, Tim e watches from the shadow And coughs when you would kiss.
1. Title from Auden's later collections. 2. The constellation of the Pleiades, supposed by the ancients to be seven sisters.
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2428 / W. H. AUDEN
'In headaches and in worry 30 Vaguely life leaks away, And Time will have his fancy To-morrow or to- day.
'Into man y a green valley Drifts the appalling3 snow; 35 Tim e breaks the threaded dances An d the diver's brilliant bow.
'O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist; Stare, stare in the basin 40 An d wonder what you've missed.
'The glacier knocks in the cupboard, Th e desert sighs in the bed, An d the crack in the tea-cup opens A lane to the land of the dead.
45 'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes And the Giant is enchanting to Jack, And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer And Jill goes down on her back.4
'O look, look in the mirror, 50 O look in your distress; Life remains a blessing Although you cannot bless.
'O stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start; 55 You shall love your crooked neighbour Wit h your crooked heart.'
It was late, late in the evening, Th e lovers they were gone; The clocks had ceased their chiming 60 An d the deep river ran on.
Nov. 1937 1938, 1940
Musee des Beaux Arts1
About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place
3. Literally, making white. pure) becomes a boisterous reveler; Jill, of 'Jack 4. The giant of 'Jack and the Bean Stalk' is trying and Jill/' is seduced. to seduce Jack; the 'lily-white Boy' (presumably 1. Museum of Fine Arts (French).
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IN MEMORY OF W. B. YEATS / 2429
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
5 How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot
io That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Wher e the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel's Icarus,2 for instance: how everything turns away
15 Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
20 Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Ha d somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Dec. 1938 1940
In Memory of W. B. Yeats1
(d. January 1939) I
He disappeared in the dead of winter: The brooks were frozen, the air-ports almost deserted, An d snow disfigured the public statues; The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
5 O all the instruments agree The day of his death was a dark cold day.
Far from his illness Th e wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, Th e peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
io By mourning tongues Th e death of the poet was kept from his poems.
But for him it was his last afternoon as himself, An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
2. The Fall of Icarus, by the Flemish painter Pieter Numbering at Bethlehem, skaters in Winter Land- Brueghel (ca. 1525?1 569), in the Musees Royaux scape with Skaters and a Bird Trap, a horse scratchdes Beaux Arts in Brussels. In one corner of Brue-ing its behind in The Massacre of the Innocents. ghel's painting, Icarus's legs are
