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: 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 ecstacy. Certainty,

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         fidelity On the stroke of midnight pass Like vibrations of a bell

And fashionable madmen raise Their pedantic boring cry: Every farthing of the 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.

                                                                                                                                                         Lullaby by W.H. Auden