02c. 1920 ADHe was my North, my South, my East and West,My working week and my Sunday rest,My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.W.H. Auden / quote ↗
04c. 1920 ADI am sure it is everyone’s experience, as it has been mine, that any discovery we make about ourselves or the meaning of life is never, like a scientific discovery, a coming upon something entirely new and unsuspected; it is rather, the coming to conscious recognition of something, which we really knew all the time but, because we were unwilling to formulate it correctly, we did not hitherto know we knew.W.H. Auden / quote ↗
06c. 1920 ADThe religious definition of truth is not that it is universal but that it is absolute.W.H. Auden / quote ↗
07c. 1920 ADHappy the hare at morning, for she cannot readThe hunter's waking thoughts.W.H. Auden / quote ↗
09c. 1920 ADLanguage is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.W.H. Auden / quote ↗
12c. 1920 ADA poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.W.H. Auden / quote ↗
13c. 1920 ADWe would rather be ruined than changedWe would rather die in our dreadThan climb the cross of the momentAnd let our illusions die.W.H. Auden / quote ↗
14c. 1920 ADFollow, poet, follow rightTo the bottom of the night,With your unconstraining voiceStill persuade us to rejoice;With the farming of a verseMake a vineyard of the curse,Sing of human unsuccessIn a rapture of distress;In the deserts of the heartLet the healing fountain start,In the prison of his daysTeach the free man how to praise.W.H. Auden / quote ↗
15c. 1920 ADI will love you forever" swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. "I will love you at 4:15 pm next Tuesday" - Is that still as easy?W.H. Auden / quote ↗
16c. 1920 ADO stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start;You shall love your crooked neighbour With your crooked heart.W.H. Auden / quote ↗
20c. 1920 ADAll the rest is silenceOn the other side of the wall;And the silence ripeness,And the ripeness all.W.H. Auden / quote ↗
21c. 1920 ADClear, unscalable, aheadRise the Mountains of Instead,From whose cold, cascading streamsNone may drink except in dreams.W.H. Auden / quote ↗
22c. 1920 ADSay 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.W.H. Auden / quote ↗
23c. 1920 ADThe 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 it's desperate and slain,The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,While drivel gushes from his lips.W.H. Auden / quote ↗
24c. 1920 ADEvery poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs.W.H. Auden / quote ↗
