a poem from gyn

Lay your sleeping head, my love

lay your sleeping head, my love,
human on my faithless arm;
time and fevers burn away
individual beauty from
thoughtful children, and the grave
proves the child ephemeral:
but in my arms till break of day
let the living creature lie,
mortal, guilty, but to me
the entirely beautiful.

soul and body have no bounds:
to lovers as they lie upon
her tolerant enchanted slope
in their ordinary swoon,
grave the vision Venus sends
of supernatural sympathy,
universal love and hope;
while an abstract insight wakes
among the glaciers and the rocks
the hermit's sensual ecstacy.

certainty, fidelity
on the stroke of midnight pass
like vibrations of a bell,
and fashionable madmen raise
their pedantic boring cry:
every farthing of the cost,
all the dreaded cards foretell,
shall be paid, but from this night,
not a whisper, not a thought,
not a kiss nor look be lost.

beauty, midnight, vision dies:
let the winds of dawn that blow
softly round your dreaming head
such a day of sweetness show
eye and knocking heart may bless,
find the mortal world enough;
noons of dryness see you fed
by the involuntary powers,
nights of insult let you pass
watched by every human love.

- W. H. Auden

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