W. H. Auden — A Summer Night to Geoffrey Hoyland

Out on the lawn I lie in bed, Vega conspicuous overhead     In the windless nights of June, As congregated leaves complete Their day's activity; my feet     Point to the rising moon. Lucky, this point in time and space Is chosen as my working-place,     Where the sexy airs of summer, The bathing hours and the bare arms, The leisured drives through a land of farms     Are good to a newcomer. Equal with colleagues in a ring I sit on each calm evening     Enchanted as the flowers The opening light draws out of hiding With all its gradual dove-like pleading,     Its logic and its powers: That later we, though parted then, May still recall these evenings when     Fear gave his watch no look; The lion griefs loped from the shade And on our knees their muzzles laid,     And Death put down his book. Now north and south and east and west Those I love lie down to rest;     The moon looks on them all, The healers and the brilliant talkers, The eccentrics and the silent walkers,     The dumpy and the tall. She climbs the European sky, Churches and power stations lie     Alike among earth's fixtures: Into the galleries she peers And blankly as a butcher stares     Upon the marvellous pictures. To gravity attentive, she Can notice nothing here, though we     Whom hunger does not move, From gardens where we feel secure Look up and with a sigh endure     The tyrannies of love: And, gentle, do not care to know, Where Poland draws her eastern bow,     What violence is done, Nor ask what doubtful act allows Our freedom in this English house,     Our picnics in the sun. Soon, soon, through dykes of our content The crumpling flood will force a rent     And, taller than a tree, Hold sudden death before our eyes Whose river dreams long hid the size     And vigours of the sea. But when the waters make retreat And through the black mud first the wheat     In shy green stalks appears, When stranded monsters gasping lie, And sounds of riveting terrify     Their whorled unsubtle ears, May these delights we dread to lose, This privacy, need no excuse     But to that strength belong, As through a child's rash happy cries The drowned parental voices rise     In unlamenting song. After discharges of alarm All unpredicted let them calm     The pulse of nervous nations, Forgive the murderer in his glass, Tough in their patience to surpass     The tigress her swift motions.