"A Walk After Dark" W H Auden (poetry reading)

Written just after the war, this poem is similar in form to 1st September, 1939, written just before the war.

Perhaps it is appropriate in the present political climate.

"Lachrimae rerum" is an expression from Virgil, the Aeneid. Aeneas sheds tears for the loss of humanity in the Trojan War, saying, "sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt" In English, "These are tears for what happened and the suffering that touches my soul." It's a comment on the pointlessness of warfare and waste of young lives.

The final picture is Van's Gogh's impression of what a starry sky looks like which, to most people, it doesn't.

A cloudless night like this
Can set the spirit soaring:
After a tiring day
The clockwork spectacle is
Impressive in a slightly boring
Eighteenth-century way.

It soothed adolescence a lot
To meet so shameless a stare;
The things I did could not
Be so shocking as they said
If that would still be there
After the shocked were dead

Now, unready to die
But already at the stage
Where one starts to resent the young,
I am glad those points in the sky
May also be counted among
The creatures of middle-age.

It's cosier thinking of night
As more an Old People's Home
Than a shed for a faultless machine,
That the red pre-Cambrian light
Is gone like Imperial Rome
Or myself at seventeen.

Yet however much we may like
The stoic manner in which
The classical authors wrote,
Only the young and rich
Have the nerve or the figure to strike
The lacrimae rerum note.

For the present stalks abroad
Like the past and its wronged again
Whimper and are ignored,
And the truth cannot be hid;
Somebody chose their pain,
What needn't have happened did.

Occurring this very night
By no established rule,
Some event may already have hurled
Its first little No at the right
Of the laws we accept to school
Our post-diluvian world:

But the stars burn on overhead,
Unconscious of final ends,
As I walk home to bed,
Asking what judgment waits
My person, all my friends,
And these United States.

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[SheddHeadz]

Gandolf!?! is that you?

[SpokenVerse]

@SheddHeadz Gandalf is played by Sir Ian McKellen. I'm not him. Please listen to a few more.

[SheddHeadz]

@SpokenVerse ahh, thought for sure it was.. nice channel though, i subscribed

[thissong4you]

"What needn't have happened did," and does again. "Lachrimae rerum," indeed. Van Gogh's clockwork spectacle is Impressive, and not in a boring way. Thanks for another brilliant post.

[testing4echo]

Beautifully done.

[swantonist]

your choices in poetry always seem to be exactly my taste, even though i know nothing about poetry and have hardly ever read it and find it nearl impossible to write.