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W H Auden - from The Cave of Making
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                                            Who would, for preference,
              be a bard in an oral culture,
    obliged at drunken feasts to improvise a eulogy
              of some beefy illiterate burner,
    giver of rings, or depend for bread on the moods of a
              Baroque Prince, expected,
    like his dwarf, to amuse? After all, it`s rather a privilege
              amid the affluent traffic
    to serve this unpopular art which cannot be turned into
              background noise for study
    or hung as a status trophy by rising executives,
              cannot be "done" like Venice
    or abridged like Tolstoy, but stubbornly still insists upon
              being read or ignored: our handful
    of clients at least can rune.
                                            [* * *]
                                            Our forerunners might envy us
              our remnant still able to listen:
    as Nietzsche said they would, the plebs have got steadily
              denser, the optimates
    quicker still on the uptake.
                                            [* * *]
                                            We`re not musicians: to stink of Poetry
              is unbecoming, and never
    to be dull shows a lack of taste. Even a limerick
              ought to be something a man of
    honor, awaiting death from cancer or a firing squad,
              could read without contempt: (at
    that frontier I wouldn`t dare speak to anyone
              in either a prophet`s bellow
    or a diplomat`s whisper).
                                            Seeing you know our mystery
              from the inside and therefore
    how much, in our lonely dens, we need the companionship
              of our good dead, to give us
    comfort on dowly days when the self is a nonentity
              dumped on a mound of nothing,
    to break the spell of our self-enchantment when lip-smacking
              imps of mawk and hooey
    write with us what they will, you won`t think me imposing if
              I ask you to stay at my elbow
    until cocktail time: dear Shade, for your elegy
              I should have been able to manage
    something more like you than this egocentric monologue,
              but accept it for friendship`s sake.
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