Derek

“Is it possible that, not content with inveigling Caliban into Ariel's kingdom, you have also let loose Ariel in Caliban's? We note with alarm that when the other members of the final tableau were dismissed. He was not returned to His arboreal confinement as He should have been. Where is He now? For if the intrusion of the real has disconcerted and incommoded the poetic. that is a mere bagatelle compared to the damage which the poetic would inflict if it ever succeeded in intruding upon the real. We want no Ariel here, breaking down our picket fences in the name of fraternity, seducing our wives in the name of romance. and robbing us of our sacred pecuniary deposits in the name of justice. Where is Ariel? What have you done with Him? For we won't, we daren't leave until you give us a satisfactory
answer.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Poems

“From gallery-grave and the hunt of a wren-king
to Low Mass and trailer camp
is hardly a tick by the carbon clock, but I
don't count that way nor do you:
already it is millions of heartbeats ago
back to the Bicycle Age,
before which is no After for me to measure,
j ust a still prehistoric Once
where anything could happen. To you, to me,
Stonehenge and Chartres Cathedral,
the Acropolis, Blenheim, the Albert Memorial
are works by the same Old Man
under different names : we know what He did,
what, even, He thought He thought,
but we don't see why.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Poems

“From Archaeology
one moral, at least, may be drawn,
to wit, that all

our school text-books lie.
What they call History
is nothing to vaunt of,'

being made, as it is,
by the criminal in us:
goodness is timeless.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Poems

“joining the crowd
is the only thing all men can do.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Poems