Auden
Already the routine ritual paragraphs appear,
Prefabricated obituaries that distort
Important names and transpose dates and continents
Until the modest busy life is modified
Into a civic fiction, as false as the photograph
Becomes to the face, as the poet's body, untended
For a day or two, will become to the unkept spirit.
Sit still: we are ready because he readied us,
Delivering for forty years the old homily,
That the human business of poetry is human business—
Not ego-flattering or self-pity or any other squalid
Cheap operation of Personality, but rather
The sort of act most prosaic and most difficult:
To take note, pay attention, and remember.
Grammar (the science of fun and the moon) regards
In gross accustomed springs and autumns
The didactic cadences, fresh and radiant, of
Antic-antique syntax radically irregular but right
For charismatic archaisms, musical tools, articles
Of machinery and faith, imaginary
Universes organized as madly formal gardens
Whose harvest feeds
Our extravagantly
Unkempt hungers.
Already the routine ritual paragraphs appear,
Prefabricated obituaries that distort
Important names and transpose dates and continents
Until the modest busy life is modified
Into a civic fiction, as false as the photograph
Becomes to the face, as the poet's body, untended
For a day or two, will become to the unkept spirit.
Sit still: we are ready because he readied us,
Delivering for forty years the old homily,
That the human business of poetry is human business—
Not ego-flattering or self-pity or any other squalid
Cheap operation of Personality, but rather
The sort of act most prosaic and most difficult:
To take note, pay attention, and remember.
Grammar (the science of fun and the moon) regards
In gross accustomed springs and autumns
The didactic cadences, fresh and radiant, of
Antic-antique syntax radically irregular but right
For charismatic archaisms, musical tools, articles
Of machinery and faith, imaginary
Universes organized as madly formal gardens
Whose harvest feeds
Our extravagantly
Unkempt hungers.
Prefabricated obituaries that distort
Important names and transpose dates and continents
Until the modest busy life is modified
Into a civic fiction, as false as the photograph
Becomes to the face, as the poet's body, untended
For a day or two, will become to the unkept spirit.
Sit still: we are ready because he readied us,
Delivering for forty years the old homily,
That the human business of poetry is human business—
Not ego-flattering or self-pity or any other squalid
Cheap operation of Personality, but rather
The sort of act most prosaic and most difficult:
To take note, pay attention, and remember.
Grammar (the science of fun and the moon) regards
In gross accustomed springs and autumns
The didactic cadences, fresh and radiant, of
Antic-antique syntax radically irregular but right
For charismatic archaisms, musical tools, articles
Of machinery and faith, imaginary
Universes organized as madly formal gardens
Whose harvest feeds
Our extravagantly
Unkempt hungers.
Already the routine ritual paragraphs appear,
Prefabricated obituaries that distort
Important names and transpose dates and continents
Until the modest busy life is modified
Into a civic fiction, as false as the photograph
Becomes to the face, as the poet's body, untended
For a day or two, will become to the unkept spirit.
Sit still: we are ready because he readied us,
Delivering for forty years the old homily,
That the human business of poetry is human business—
Not ego-flattering or self-pity or any other squalid
Cheap operation of Personality, but rather
The sort of act most prosaic and most difficult:
To take note, pay attention, and remember.
Grammar (the science of fun and the moon) regards
In gross accustomed springs and autumns
The didactic cadences, fresh and radiant, of
Antic-antique syntax radically irregular but right
For charismatic archaisms, musical tools, articles
Of machinery and faith, imaginary
Universes organized as madly formal gardens
Whose harvest feeds
Our extravagantly
Unkempt hungers.
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