LITR 5731: Seminar in American Multicultural Literature

Poetry Presentation, fall 2007

Thursday, 15 November

Poetry: W. H. Auden, "Lullabye"

Poetry reader / discussion leader: Leah Guillory

Objectives:  4a: To identify the “new American” who crosses, combines, or confuses gender identities. 5a: To discover the power of poetry to help “others” hear the minority voice and vicariously share the minority experience.

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:                   (ephemeral: lasting a very short time--m-w. com)
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's carnal ecstasy.              

(carnal: marked by sexuality <carnal love> carnal more connotes derogatorily an action or manifestation of a person's lower nature <a slave to carnal desires>

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:           

(pedantic: of, relating to, or being a pedant:  one who makes a show of knowledge b: one who is unimaginative or who unduly emphasizes minutiae in the presentation or use of knowledge c: a formalist or precisionist in teaching m-w.com)

Every farthing cost

All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

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.

Discussion Question: How does it matter that the male speaker in the poem is speaking to another man about their “soul and body” love connection?