W. H. Auden Quotes About Heart

Quotes about: Heart

• God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good.

  W. H. Auden

  Heart, Tears, May

• In the deserts of the heart
  Let the healing fountain start.

  W. H. Auden

  Healing, Heart, Relaxation

  Another Time (1940) "In Memory of W. B. Yeats"

• If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.

  W. H. Auden

  Love, Heart, Affection

  W. H. Auden, Katherine Bucknell (2003). “Juvenilia: Poems, 1922-1928”, p.41, Princeton University Press

• A small grove massacred to the last ash,
  An oak with heart-rot, give away the show:
  This great society is going to smash;
  They cannot fool us with how fast they go,
  How much they cost each other and the gods.
  A culture is no better than its woods.

  W. H. Auden

  Heart, Giving, Environmental

  Shield of Achilles (1955) "Bucolics"

• And none will hear the postman’s knock Without a quickening of the heart. For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

  W. H. Auden

  Heart, Bears, Forgotten

  1936 'Night Mail', written to accompany a documentary by the Post Office Film Unit.

• You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart.

  W. H. Auden

  Heart, Crooked, Neighbour

  W.H. Auden (2016). “Canción de cuna y otros poemas”, p.76, DEBOLS!LLO

• The nightingales are sobbing in The orchards of our mothers, And hearts that we broke long ago Have long been breaking others; Tears are round, the sea is deep: Roll them overboard and sleep.

  W. H. Auden

  Mother, Heart, Sleep

• The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews Not to be born is the best for man The second best is a formal order The dance's pattern, dance while you can. Dance, dance, for the figure is easy The tune is catching and will not stop Dance till the stars come down from the rafters Dance, dance, dance till you drop.

  W. H. Auden

  Stars, Heart, Men

  Letter from Iceland (1937, by Auden and MacNeice) "Letter to William Coldstream, Esq."

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

  W. H. Auden

  Healing, Heart, Night

  Another Time (1940) "In Memory of W. B. Yeats"

• The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart; For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have; Not universal love But to be loved alone.

  W. H. Auden

  Heart, Men, Errors

  "September 1, 1939" l. 59 (1939)

• Beauty, midnight, vision dies: Let the winds of dawn that blow Softly round your dreaming head Such a day of welcome show Eye and knocking heart may bless, Find our mortal world enough; Noons of dryness find you fed By the involuntary powers, Nights of insult let you pass Watched by every human love.

  W. H. Auden

  Dream, Heart, Eye

  W. H. Auden, “Lullaby”

• The masculine imagination lives in a state of perpetual revolt against the limitations of human life. In theological terms, one might say that all men, left to themselves, become gnostics. They may swagger like peacocks, but in their heart of hearts they all think sex an indignity and wish they could beget themselves on themselves. Hence the aggressive hostility toward women so manifest in most club-car stories.

  W. H. Auden

  Sex, Heart, Men

• Harrow the house of the dead; look shining at New styles of architecture, a change of heart.

  W. H. Auden

  Change, Heart, Shining

  'Sir, No Man's Enemy' (1955)

• For time is inches
  And the heart's changes,
  Where ghost has haunted
  Lost and wanted.

  W. H. Auden

  Time, Heart, Ghost

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