How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me. - W. H. Auden

If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems. <p> But for him it was his last afternoon as himself, An afternoon of nurses and rumours; The provinces of his body revolted, The squares of his mind were empty, Silence invaded the suburbs. The current of his feeling failed: he became his admirers. <p> Now he is scattered over a hundred cities And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections; To find his happiness in another kind of wood And be punished under a foreign code of conscience. The words of a dead man Are modified in the guts of the living.

Oh dear white children, casual as birds,
Playing among the ruined languages,
So small beside their large confusing words.

Without art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without science, we should always worship false gods.