Selected Poems

This significantly expanded edition of W. H. Audens Selected Poems adds twenty poems to the hundred in the original edition, broadening its focus to better reflect the enormous wealth of form, rhetoric, tone, and content in Audens work. Newly included are such favorites as “Funeral Blues” and other works that represent Audens lighter, comic side, giving a fuller picture of the range of his genius. Also new are brief notes explaining references that may have become obscure to younger generations of readers and a revised introduction that draws on recent additions to knowledge about Auden.

As in the original edition, the new Selected Poems makes available the preferred original versions of some thirty poems that Auden revised later in life, making it the best source for enjoying the many facets of Audens art in one volume.

This edition presents the original versions of many poems, which Auden revised to conform to his evolving political and literary attitudes later in his career. In this volume, Edward Mendelson has restored the early versions of some thirty poems generally considered to be superior to the later versions, allowing the reader to see the entire range of Auden's work. Selected and edited by Edward Mendelson

W. H. Auden (1907-73) was born in York, England, and educated at Oxford. During the 1930s he was the leader of a left-wing literary group that included Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender. With Isherwood he wrote three verse plays. He lived in Germany during the early days of Nazism, and was a stretcher-bearer for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. Auden's first volume of poetry appeared in 1930. Later volumes include Spain (1937), New Year Letter (1941), For the Time Being, a Christmas Oratorio (1945), The Age of Anxiety (1947; Pulitzer Prize), Nones (1951), The Shield of Achilles (1955), Homage to Clio (1960), About the House (1965), Epistle of a Godson (1972), and Thank You, Fog (1974). His other works include the libretto, with his companion Chester Kallman, for Stravinsky's opera The Rake's Progress (1953); A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (1970); and The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays (1968). In 1939 Auden moved to the United States and became a citizen in 1946, and beginning that year taught at a number of American colleges and universities. From 1956 to 1961 he was professor of poetry at Oxford. Subsequently he lived in a number of countries, including Italy and Austria, and in 1971 he returned to England. He was awarded the National Medal for Literature in 1967.

Note to the Expanded Edition xiii

Introduction xv

1. Who stands, the crux left of the watershed

2. From the very first coming down

3. Control of the passes was, he saw, the key

4. Taller to-day, we remember similar evenings

5. Watch any day his nonchalant pauses, see

6. Will you turn a deaf ear

7. Sir, no mans enemy, forgiving all

8. It was Easter as I walked in the public gardens

9. Since you are going to begin to-day

10. Consider this and in our time

11. This lunar beauty

12. To ask the hard question is simple

13. Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle

14. Whats in your mind, my dove, my coney

15. “O where are you going?” said reader to rider

16. Though aware of our rank and alert to obey orders

17. O Love, the interest itself in thoughtless Heaven

18. O what is that sound which so thrills the ear

19. Hearing of harvests rotting in the valleys

20. Out on the lawn I lie in bed

21. A shilling life will give you all the facts

22. Our hunting fathers told the story

23. Easily, my dear, you move, easily your head

24. The Summer holds: upon its glittering lake

25. Now through nights caressing grip

26. O for doors to be open and an invite with gilded edges

27. Look, stranger, at this island now

28. Now the leaves are falling fast

29. Underneath the abject willow

30. Dear, though the night is gone

31. Fish in the unruffled lakes

32. Casino

33. Funeral Blues

34. Journey to Iceland

35. “O who can ever gaze his fill”

36. Lay your sleeping head, my love

37. Spain

38. Johnny

39. Orpheus

40. Miss Gee

41. Wrapped in a yielding air, beside

42. Dover

43. As I walked out one evening

44. Oxford

45. O Tell Me the Truth About Love

46. In Time of War

47. The Capital

48. Museé des Beaux Arts

49. Epitaph on a Tyrant

50. In Memory of W. B. Yeats

51. Refugee Blues

52. The Unknown Citizen

53. Calypso

54. September 1, 1939

55. Law, say the gardeners, is the sun

56. In Memory of Sigmund Freud

57. Eyes look into the well

58. Lady, weeping at the crossroads

59. Song for St. Cecilias Day

60. The Quest

61. But I Cant

62. In Sickness and in Health

63. Leap Before You Look

64. Jumbled in the common box

65. Atlantis

66. At the Grave of Henry James

67. Mundus et Infans

68. The Lesson

69. The Sea and the Mirror

70. Noon

71. Lament for a Lawgiver

72. Under Which Lyre

73. The Fall of Rome

74. In Praise of Limestone

75. A Household

76. Song

77. A Walk After Dark

78. Memorial for the City

79. Under Sirius

80. Their Lonely Betters

81. Nocturne I

82. Fleet Visit

83. The Shield of Achilles

84. The Willow-Wren and the Stare

85. Epitaph for the Unknown Soldier

86. Nocturne II

87. Bucolics

88. Horae Canonicae

89. Homage to Clio

90. The Old Mans Road

91. The Song

92. First Things First

93. The More Loving One

94. Fridays Child

95. Good-bye to the Mezzogiorno

96. Dame Kind

97. You

98. A Change of Air

99. After Reading a Childs Guide to Modern Physics

100. On the Circuit

101. Et in Arcadia Ego

102. Thanksgiving for a Habitat

103. Epithalamium

104. Amor Loci

105. Profile

106. Fairground

107. River Profile

108. Prologue at Sixty

109. Forty Years On

110. Ode to Terminus

111. August 1968

112. A New Year Greeting

113. Moon Landing

114. Old Peoples Home

115. Talking to Myself

116. A Shock

117. A Lullaby

118. Aubade

119. A Thanksgiving

120. Archaeology 3

A Note on the Text

Explanatory Notes

Index of Titles and First Lines