Auden, W. H.: A Lullaby
A Lullaby (Angol)The din of work is subdued, another day has westered and mantling darkness arrived. Peace! Peace! Devoid your portrait of its vexations and rest. Your daily round is done with, you’ve gotten the garbage out, answered some tiresome letters and paid a bill by return, all frettolosamente. Now you have licence to lie, naked, curled like a shrimplet, jacent in bed, and enjoy its cosy micro-climate: Sing, Big Baby, sing lullay.
The old Greeks got it all wrong: Narcissus is an oldie, tamed by time, released at last from lust for other bodies, rational and reconciled. For many years you envied the hirsute, the he-man type. No longer: now you fondle your almost feminine flesh with mettled satisfaction, imagining that you are sinless and all-sufficient, snug in the den of yourself, Madonna and Bambino: Sing, Big Baby, sing lullay.
Let your last thinks all be thanks: praise your parents who gave you a Super-Ego of strength that saves you so much bother, digit friends and dear them all, then pay fair attribution to your age, to having been born when you were. In boyhood you were permitted to meet beautiful old contraptions, soon to be banished from earth, saddle-tank loks, beam-engines and over-shot waterwheels. Yes, love, you have been lucky: Sing, Big Baby, sing lullay.
Now for oblivion: let the belly-mind take over down below the diaphragm, the domain of the Mothers, They who guard the Sacred Gates, without whose wordless warnings soon the verbalising I becomes a vicious despot, lewd, incapable of love, disdainful, status-hungry. Should dreams haunt you, heed them not, for all, both sweet and horrid, are jokes in dubious taste, too jejune to have truck with. Sleep, Big Baby, sleep your fill.
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