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And for closer examination here is the text:
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 the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.
In the first verse Auden lays out both the sleeping innocence of the child, and the waiting sin, the original sin, summed up the the phrase, mortal, guilty, but to me the entirely beautiful." The child we see to Auden is "ephemeral>" Time will take it's innocence and life as "Time and Fevers burn away." In the middle verses Auden explores more deeply the contradictions of human life, "Gave the vision Venus sends" he says suggesting both death and love at once. He alludes to tarot cards in a manner similar to Elliot's reference--dreaded cards Auden says, predicting the worst for us no doubt. Another contradiction -the hermits carnal ecstasy, showing that we both alone and subject to union through ecstasy. Finally he says, "Beauty,midnight pass.."and gives us our progress towards death.
