The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish. - W. H. Auden

Now is the age of anxiety.

And the poor in their fireless lodgings, dropping the sheets Of the evening paper: "Our day is our loss, O show us History the operator, the Organiser, Time the refreshing river." <p> And the nations combine each cry, invoking the life That shapes the individual belly and orders The private nocturnal terror: "Did you not found the city state of the sponge,<p>"Raise the vast military empires of the shark And the tiger, establish the robin's plucky canton? Intervene. Descend as a dove or A furious papa or a mild engineer, but descend."

Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice; <p> With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress; <p> In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountains start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise.