The Millennial Pedestrian

The stars don’t care what we do, let alone how long we live. Auden’s poem seems especially apt at this time of year, this time in life, and this time in our history, as it must have to Auden when he wrote it in 1947. (The phrase "lacrimae rerum," by the way, is from the Aeneid and refers to tears shed over man’s fate on earth, specifically by Aeneas when he sees a Carthaginian mural depicting fallen comrades in the Trojan War.) 

 

A Walk After Dark
    By W. H. Auden

A cloudless night like this
Can set the spirit soaring:
After a tiring day
The clockwork spectacle is
Impressive in a slightly boring
Eighteenth-century way.

It soothed adolescence a lot
To meet so shameless a stare;
The things I did could not
Be as shocking as they said
If that would still be there
After the shocked were dead.

Now, unready to die
But already at the stage
When one starts to dislike the young,
I am glad these points in the sky
May also be counted among
The creatures of middle-age.

It’s cosier thinking of night
As more of an Old People’s Home
Than a shed for a faultless machine,
That the red pre-Cambrian light
Is gone like Imperial Rome
Or myself at age seventeen.

Yet however much we may like
The stoic manner in which
The classical authors wrote,
Only the young and the rich
Have the nerve or the figure to strike
The lacrimae rerum note.

For the present stalks abroad
Like the past and its wronged again
Whimper and are ignored,
And the truth cannot be hid;
Somebody chose their pain,
What needn’t have happened did.

Occurring this very night
By no established rule,
Some event may already have hurled
Its first little No at the right
Of the laws we accept to school
Our post-diluvian world:

But the stars burn on overhead
Unconscious of final ends,
As I walk home to bed,
Asking what judgement waits
My person, all my friends,
And these United States.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 30th, 2007.
It's part of the Prose category.
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