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W H Auden - Thanksgiving for a Habitat
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     Nobody I know would like to be buried
     with a silver cocktail-shaker,
     a transistor radio and a strangled
     daily help, or keep his word because

     of a great-great-grandmother who got laid
     by a sacred beast. Only a press lord
     could have built San Simeon: no unearned income
     can buy us back the gait and gestures

     to manage a baroque staircase, or the art
     of believing footmen don`t hear
     human speech. (In adulterine castles
     our half-strong might hang their jackets

     while mending their lethal bicycle-chains:
     luckily, there are not enough
     crags to go round.) Still, Hetty Pegler`s Tump
     is worth a visit, so is Schönbrunn,

     to look at someone`s idea of the body
     that should have been his, as the flesh
     Mum formulated shouldn`t: that whatever
     he does or feels in the mood for,

     stock-taking, horse-play, worship, making love,
     he stays the same shape, disgraces
     a Royal I. To be over-admired is not
     good enough: although a fine figure

     is rare in either sex, others like it
     have existed before. One may
     be a Proustian snob or a sound Jacksonian
     democrat, but which of us wants

     to be touched inadvertently, even
     by his beloved? We know all about graphs
     and Darwin, enormous rooms no longer
     superhumanise, but earnest

     city-planners are mistaken: a pen
     for a rational animal
     is no fitting habitat for Adam`s
     sovereign clone. I, a transplant

     from overseas, at last am dominant
     over three acres and a blooming
     conurbation of country lives, few of whom
     I shall ever meet, and with fewer

     converse. Linnaeus recoiled from the Amphibia
     as a naked gruesome rabble,
     Arachnids give me the shudders, but fools
     who deface their emblem of guilt

     are germane to Hitler: the race of spiders
     shall be allowed their webs. I should like
     to be to my water-brethren as a spell
     of fine weather: Many are stupid,

     and some, maybe, are heartless, but who is not
     vulnerable, easy to scare,
     and jealous of his privacy? (I am glad
     the blackbird, for instance, cannot

     tell if I`m talking English, German or
     just typewriting: that what he utters
     I may enjoy as an alien rigmarole.) I ought
     to outlast the limber dragonflies

     as the muscle-bound firs are certainly
     going to outlast me: I shall not end
     down any oesophagus, though I may succumb
     to a filter-passing predator,

     shall, anyhow, stop eating, surrender my smidge
     of nitrogen to the World Fund
     with a drawn-out Oh (unless at the nod
     of some jittery commander

     I be translated in a nano-second
     to a c.c. of poisonous nothing
     in a giga-death). Should conventional
     blunderbuss war and its routiers

     invest my bailiwick, I shall of course
     assume the submissive posture:
     but men are not wolves and it probably
     won`t help. Territory, status,

     and love, sing all the birds, are what matter:
     what I dared not hope or fight for
     is, in my fifties, mine, a toft-and-croft
     where I needn`t, ever, be at home to

     those I am not at home with, not a cradle,
     a magic Eden without clocks,
     and not a windowless grave, but a place
     I may go both in and out of.
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