"canzone" poems - Hello Poetry

When shall we learn, what should be clear as day, We cannot choose what we are free to love? Although the mouse we banished yesterday Is an enraged rhinoceros today, Our value is more threatened than we know: Shabby objections to our present day Go snooping round its outskirts; night and day Faces, orations, battles, bait our will As questionable forms and noises will; Whole phyla of resentments every day Give status to the wild men of the world Who rule the absent-minded and this world. We are created from and with the world To suffer with and from it day by day: Whether we meet in a majestic world Of solid measurements or a dream world Of swans and gold, we are required to love All homeless objects that require a world. Our claim to own our bodies and our world Is our catastrophe. What can we know But panic and caprice until we know Our dreadful appetite demands a world Whose order, origin, and purpose will Be fluent satisfaction of our will? Drift, Autumn, drift; fall, colours, where you will: Bald melancholia minces through the world. Regret, cold oceans, the lymphatic will Caught in reflection on the right to will: While violent dogs excite their dying day To bacchic fury; snarl, though, as they will, Their teeth are not a triumph for the will But utter hesitation. What we love Ourselves for is our power not to love, To shrink to nothing or explode at will, To ruin and remember that we know What ruins and hyaenas cannot know. If in this dark now I less often know That spiral staircase where the haunted will Hunts for its stolen luggage, who should know Better than you, beloved, how I know What gives security to any world. Or in whose mirror I begin to know The chaos of the heart as merchants know Their coins and cities, genius its own day? For through our lively traffic all the day, In my own person I am forced to know How much must be forgotten out of love, How much must be forgiven, even love. Dear flesh, dear mind, dear spirit, O dear love, In the depths of myself blind monsters know Your presence and are angry, dreading Love That asks its image for more than love; The hot rampageous horses of my will, Catching the scent of Heaven, whinny: Love Gives no excuse to evil done for love, Neither in you, nor me, nor armies, nor the world Of words and wheels, nor any other world. Dear fellow-creature, praise our God of Love That we are so admonished, that no day Of conscious trial be a wasted day. Or else we make a scarecrow of the day, Loose ends and jumble of our common world, And stuff and nonsense of our own free will; Or else our changing flesh may never know There must be sorrow if there can be love.

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W. H. Auden

Canzone

When shall we learn, what should be clear as day, We cannot choose what we are free to love? Although the mouse we banished yesterday Is an enraged rhinoceros today, Our value is more threatened than we know: Shabby objections to our present day Go snooping round its outskirts; night and day Faces, orations, battles, bait our will As questionable forms and noises will; Whole phyla of resentments every day Give status to the wild men of the world Who rule the absent-minded and this world. We are created from and with the world To suffer with and from it day by day: Whether we meet in a majestic world Of solid measurements or a dream world Of swans and gold, we are required to love All homeless objects that require a world. Our claim to own our bodies and our world Is our catastrophe. What can we know But panic and caprice until we know Our dreadful appetite demands a world Whose order, origin, and purpose will Be fluent satisfaction of our will? Drift, Autumn, drift; fall, colours, where you will: Bald melancholia minces through the world. Regret, cold oceans, the lymphatic will Caught in reflection on the right to will: While violent dogs excite their dying day To bacchic fury; snarl, though, as they will, Their teeth are not a triumph for the will But utter hesitation. What we love Ourselves for is our power not to love, To shrink to nothing or explode at will, To ruin and remember that we know What ruins and hyaenas cannot know. If in this dark now I less often know That spiral staircase where the haunted will Hunts for its stolen luggage, who should know Better than you, beloved, how I know What gives security to any world. Or in whose mirror I begin to know The chaos of the heart as merchants know Their coins and cities, genius its own day? For through our lively traffic all the day, In my own person I am forced to know How much must be forgotten out of love, How much must be forgiven, even love. Dear flesh, dear mind, dear spirit, O dear love, In the depths of myself blind monsters know Your presence and are angry, dreading Love That asks its image for more than love; The hot rampageous horses of my will, Catching the scent of Heaven, whinny: Love Gives no excuse to evil done for love, Neither in you, nor me, nor armies, nor the world Of words and wheels, nor any other world. Dear fellow-creature, praise our God of Love That we are so admonished, that no day Of conscious trial be a wasted day. Or else we make a scarecrow of the day, Loose ends and jumble of our common world, And stuff and nonsense of our own free will; Or else our changing flesh may never know There must be sorrow if there can be love.