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W H Auden - The Common Life
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     A living-room, the catholic area you
     (Thou, rather) and I may enter
     without knocking, leave without a bow, confronts
     each visitor with a style,

     a secular faith: he compares its dogmas
     with his, and decides whether
     he would like to see more of us. (Spotless rooms
     where nothing`s left lying about

     chill me, so do cups used for ash-trays or smeared
     with lip-stick: the homes I warm to,
     though seldom wealthy, always convey a feeling
     of bills being promptly settled

     with cheques that don`t bounce.) There`s no We at an instant,
     only Thou and I, two regions
     of protestant being which nowhere overlap:
     a room is too small, therefore,

     if its occupants cannot forget at will
     that they are not alone, too big
     if it gives them any excuse in a quarrel
     for raising their voices. What,

     quizzing ours, would Sherlock Holmes infer? Plainly,
     ours is a sitting culture
     in a generation which prefers comfort
     (or is forced to prefer it)

     to command, would rather incline its buttocks
     on a well-upholstered chair
     than the burly back of a slave: a quick glance
     at book-titles would tell him

     that we belong to the clerisy and spend much
     on our food. But could he read
     what our prayers and jokes are about, what creatures
     frighten us most, or what names

     head our roll-call of persons we would least like
     to go to bed with? What draws
     singular lives together in the first place,
     loneliness, lust, ambition,

     or mere convenience, is obvious, why they drop
     or murder one another
     clear enough: how they create, though, a common world
     between them, like Bombelli`s

     impossible yet useful numbers, no one
     has yet explained. Still, they do
     manage to forgive impossible behavior,
     to endure by some miracle

     conversational tics and larval habits
     without wincing (were you to die,
     I should miss yours). It`s a wonder that neither
     has been butchered by accident,

     or, as lots have, silently vanished into
     History`s criminal noise
     unmourned for, but that, after twenty-four years,
     we should sit here in Austria

     as cater-cousins, under the glassy look
     of a Naples Bambino,
     the portrayed regards of Strauss and Stravinsky,
     doing British cross-word puzzles,

     is very odd indeed. I`m glad the builder gave
     our common-room small windows
     through which no observed outsider can observe us:
     every home should be a fortress,

     equipped with all the very latest engines
     for keeping Nature at bay,
     versed in all ancient magic, the arts of quelling
     the Dark Lord and his hungry

     animivorous chimaeras. (Any brute
     can buy a machine in a shop,
     but the sacred spells are secret to the kind,
     and if power is what we wish

     they won`t work.) The ogre will come in any case:
     so Joyce has warned us. Howbeit,
     fasting or feasting, we both know this: without
     the Spirit we die, but life

     without the Letter is in the worst of taste,
     and always, though truth and love
     can never really differ, when they seem to,
     the subaltern should be truth.
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