Ainda outro poema de W.H.Auden

(que faria 100 anos no próximo dia 21)

Lullaby

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, guility, 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 abstract insight wakes/
Among the glaciers and the rocks/
The hermit's sensual ecstasy/

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 your mortal world enough;/
Noons of dryness see you fed/
By the involuntary powers,/
Nights of insult let you pass/
Watched by every human love.