Auden


I take a moment to celebrate this day and note the birth anniversary of W. H. Auden, a poet for all time. How appropriate to meditate then on Words, his poem of 1956, itself a meditation on words:

A sentence uttered makes a world appear
Where all things happen as it says they do;
We doubt the speaker, not the tongue we hear:
Words have no word for words that are not true.

This opening stanza in one sense is not true as we all know, but yet the truth of the objective reality in which we, along with everything else, exist may only be expressed in words. In fact, as the poet continues in his meditation we find ourselves immersed in "gossip" and "tales" and "fiction" and where in all this is truth as we are lost in words. These words were the tools of this great poet and his art is worth a bit of reflection on this day.