Spain

W. H. Auden (1937)

Yesterday all the past. The language of size
Spreading to China along the trade-routes; the diffusion 
              Of the counting-frame and the cromlech;
Yesterday the shadow-reckoning in the sunny climates.

Yesterday the assessment of insurance by cards,
The divination of water; yesterday the invention 
              Of cartwheels and clocks, the taming of
Horses. Yesterday the bustling world of the navigators.

Yesterday the abolition of fairies and giants,
The fortress like a motionless eagle eyeing the valley, 
       The chapel built in the forest;
Yesterday the carving of angels and alarming gargoyles.

The trial of heretics among the columns of stone; 
Yesterday the theological feuds in the taverns 
              And the miraculous cure at the fountain;
Yesterday the Sabbath of witches; but to-day the struggle.

Yesterday the installation of dynamos and turbines, 
The construction of railways in the colonial desert;
              Yesterday the classic lecture
On the origin of Mankind. But to-day the struggle.

Yesterday the belief in the absolute value of Greece, 
The fall of the curtain upon the death of a hero; 
              Yesterday the prayer to the sunset
And the adoration of madmen. But to-day the struggle.

As the poet whispers, startled among the pines, 
Or where the loose waterfall sings compact, or upright 
              On the crag by the leaning tower:
’O my vision. O send me the luck of the sailor.’

And the investigator peers through his instruments 
At the inhuman provinces, the virile bacillus
       Or enormous Jupiter finished:
’But the lives of my friends. I inquire. I inquire.’

And the poor in their fireless lodgings, dropping the sheets 
Of the evening paper: 'Our day is our loss. O show us 
              History the operator, the 
Organizer, Time the refreshing river.'

And the nations combine each cry, invoking the life 
That shapes the individual belly and orders 
              The private nocturnal terror:
'Did you not found the city state of the sponge,'

'Raise the vast military empires of the shark 
And the tiger, establish the robin's plucky canton? 
              Intervene, O descend as a dove or 
A furious papa or a mild engineer, but descend.'

And the life, if it answers at all, replies from the heart 
And the eyes and the lungs, from the shops and squares of the city: 
             'O no, I am not the mover; 
Not to-day; not to you. To you, I'm the

'Yes-man, the bar-companion, the easily-duped; 
I am whatever you do. I am your vow to be 
             Good, your humorous story. 
I am your business voice. I am your marriage.

'What's your proposal? To build the just city? I will. 
I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic 
            Death? Very well, I accept, for 
I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain.'

Many have heard it on remote peninsulas, 
On sleepy plains, in the aberrant fisherman's islands 
            Or the corrupt heart of the city,
Have heard and migrated like gulls or the seeds of a flower.

They clung like birds to the long expresses that lurch 
Through the unjust lands, through the night, through the alpine tunnel; 
            They floated over the oceans; 
They walked the passes. All presented their lives.

On that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot 
Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe; 
            On that tablet and scored by rivers,
Our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our fever

Are precise and alive. For the fears which made us respond 
To the medicine ad, and the brochure of winter cruises 
            Have become invading battalions;
And our faces, the institute-face, the chain-store, the ruin

Are projecting their greed as the firing squad and the bomb. 
Madrid is the heart. Our moments of tenderness blossom 
            As the ambulance and the sandbag; 
Our hours of friendship into a people's army.

To-morrow, perhaps the future. The research on fatigue 
And the movement of packers; the gradual exploring of all the 
            Octaves of radiation;
To-morrow the enlarging of consciousness by diet and breathing.

To-morrow the rediscovery of romantic love,
The photographing of ravens; all the fun under 
            Liberty's masterful shadow;
To-morrow the hour of the pageant-master and the musician,

The beautiful roar of the chorus under the dome;
To-morrow the exchanging of tips on the breeding of terriers, 
           The eager election of chairmen
By the sudden forest of hands. But to-day the struggle.

To-morrow for the young poets exploding like bombs,
The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;  
           To-morrow the bicycle races
Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle.

Today the deliberate increase in the chances of death,
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder; 
           To-day the expending of powers
On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.

To-day the makeshift consolations: the shared cigarette,
The cards in the candle-lit barn, and the scraping concert, 
          The masculine jokes; to-day the
Fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace before hurting.

The stars are dead. The animals will not look.
We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and 
          History to the defeated
May say alas but cannot help or pardon.



"In Memory of W. B. Yeats"
(1939)

I

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
The snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The 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;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

III

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.