To you, and to me

To those who laugh at love and think it unreal, or impermanent, or unimportant, or fanciful, or powerless:

1 If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

8 Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. 11 When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. 12 For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

You shall love your crooked neighbour with your crooked heart

As I Walked Out One Evening
_________________________
W. H. Auden

As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
'Love has no ending.

'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,

'I'll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

'The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.

'But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

'In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

'In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.

'Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.

'O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.

'O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

'O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbor
With your crooked heart.'

It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.
_____________________


What cuts the deepest in the poem are the little ironies that Auden sprinkles from verse to verse, the easy incongruity that underlies and undermines life, natural as rhyme. The pallor of night in the evening sky, the trauma of a field chopped down for harvest, the hollowness of the lover’s declarations of eternal love as he stands framed by an arch that inevitably rises and falls from point to point, as do the trains on the railway which rush onward to a final destination. Ironies quickly lapse into absurdities in the lover’s speech, but Auden’s more subtle jokes never go away. The first love of the world—that of Adam and Eve, which ended in the first sin and the introduction of death into the world. 

Neither is the speech of the clocks free from Auden’s scorn. For the clocks do not heed their own warnings: the personification of Time as if it were something humanly comprehensible, the whirring and chiming of the clocks as if it were something to be broken down and brought under control. And in the end their deceit and self-importance are laid bare. When the evening darkens, when love and its songs have faded, when time passes without the chiding of the clocks, the only thing left unchanged is the river: brimming at the start of the poem and still running deep at the end, but insensitive to notions of first and last. It has neither spilled over nor dipped under, and I cannot be sure what Auden meant but perhaps the only thing certain is that the river does not brim with promise; none has been given and none should be expected. The waters run, and run deep, but they are silent.