From the utterly sublime Advent portion of Wystan’s Christmas Oratorio:
Alone, alone, about a dreadful wood
Of conscious evil runs a lost mankind,
Dreading to find its Father lest it find
The Goodness it has dreaded is not good:
Alone, alone, about our dreadful wood.
Where is that Law for which we broke our own,
Where now that Justice for which Flesh resigned
Her hereditary right to passion, Mind
His will to absolute power? Gone. Gone.
Where is that Law for which we broke our own?
The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss.
Was it to meet such grinning evidence
We left our richly odoured ignorance?
Was the triumphant answer to be this?
The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss.
We who must die demand a miracle.
How could the Eternal do a temporal act,
The Infinite become a finite fact?
Nothing can save us that is possible:
We who must die demand a miracle.
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4 responses to “We Who Must Die Demand A Miracle: From W.H. Auden’s “For The Time Being””
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wow, dz. amazing stuff! I especially like the part about justice being gone.
Auden is amazing. Richard Adams uses quotes from Auden to begin a number of different chapters of his great novel WATERSHIP DOWN. A particularly disturding chapter begins with this passage (from a poem called “The Witnesses”):
When the green field comes off like a lid
Revealing what was much better hid:
Unpleasant.
And look, behind you without a sound
The woods have come up and are standing round
In deadly crescent.
The bolt is sliding in its groove,
Outside the window is the black removers’ van.
And now with sudden swift emergence
Come the woman in dark glasses and humpbacked surgeons
And the scissors man.
what a gem you’ve found dz…thanks
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