An Auden Bouquet for Valentine’s Day

 

Auden remains one of our most compelling  love poets, so I’ve assembled a dozen of his lines from the poems listed below. (I’ve also altered the original punctuation.) Happy Valentine’s Day!

I heard a lover sing:
Because I love you more than I can say
Through the night’s delights and the day’s impressions,
You certainly remain to-day
The entirely beautiful,
Dear, though the night is gone.
(My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song.)
Like love we can’t compel or fly.
But I must bless, I must praise
The sweetness here.
Let the more loving one be me.
Strike for the heart and have me there.

Poem sources: 1. “As I Walked Out One Evening”; 2. “But I Can’t”; 3. “Easily, my dear, you move, easily your head” (A Bride in the 30s); 4. “From the very first coming down” (The Letter); 5. “Lay your sleeping head, my love” (Lullaby); 6. “Dear, though the night is gone”; 7. “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone” (Funeral Blues); 8. “Law Like Love”; 9. “Fish in the unruffled lakes”; 10. “This Lunar Beauty”; 11. “The More Loving One”; 12. “What’s in your mind, my dove, my coney”  -MB