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.

                                                            Lullaby by W.H. Auden

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.