sunday best

Time for the Four Weddings and a Funeral poetry corner. Very "16 and staring at your turtle in the terrarium while thinking, 'Wow. Everything...dies.'" / the feel-on of the phase just after kid sulking, and the one before deciding you're Existential in collegio.

Seriously, now that I'm in my golden holy-roller years, I think this one lives to out-lovely us all. It's a collective unconscious poem (thanks in no small part to the popularity of the aforementioned Hugh Grant vehicle). One of that breed of verse where people suddenly spout a few lines without even realizing they had it down -- (oh no, bad simile alert) like when the man who stays in the attic of the brainhouse basically up and runs into the mouthkitchen because he smells biscuits, and you're all like, "Well, hi there, stranger."

Truly shared words are such a rare thing...this expresses real fellow-feeling, the universal and the personal nesting inside, the delicate + lasting + very lost. As useful as a spoon, and as fine as light through curtains. It's a wonderful public dove.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,

Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,

Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last for ever; I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood,

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

-W. H. Auden

fell on 2004-08-15 at 10:23 a.m.

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