Lullaby

  1. Lay your sleeping head, my love,
  2. 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.

  3. Soul and body have no bounds:
  4. 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.

  5. Certainty, fidelity
  6. 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.

  7. Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
  8. 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.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             by W. H. Auden