CAMELOT FANTASIES

Lullaby



by 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 carnal 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 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.