Language, by which hearts are riven,
won’t let errors be forgiven,
even when the words we speak
have been spoken tongue in cheek.
Make sure that no heart’s deterred
by your words when they’ve been heard,
highlighting the positive
always as dispositive.
Inspired by William Safire, who writes about some lines of W. H. Auden which he had forgotten and could not find in Auden’s “Collected Poems”:
I have long had in my head some lines of poetry by W. H. Auden written “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” but couldn’t find them in Auden’s “Collected Poems.” Thanks to Prof. Nicholas Jenkins at Stanford, co-chairman of the Auden Society, I have found out why: The British poet wrote the poem in 1939, soon after coming to live in the U.S., in response to Yeats’s death. In the 1960s, he revised his poem, cutting out the poignant lines I remembered. Here they are, for those writers and readers inclined to hold relevant verse in memory:
Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives.
2/25/07
gershon hepner
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/language-6/
