Lay your sleeping head, my love

Lay your sleeping head, my love

- W.H. Auden

  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 sensual ecstasy.

  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 sweetness show

  Eye and knocking heart may bless,

  Find the mortal world enough;

  Noons of dryness see you fed

  By the involuntary powers,

  Nights of insult let you pass

  Watched by every human love.