and seven planets blazing in her hair

It's my birthday! I HAVE SURVIVED THE YEAR OF ROCKSTAR DEATH. Today's celebratory plans involve lighting cupcakes on fire with a blowtorch, so I may not survive the year of rockstar death by very much, but at least I will have a good time. (Possibly we should invite the firemen from next door to my party.) I've already been out to brunch, and put on a lot of glittery eye makeup; later this afternoon, we are having a bunch of people over for a birthday shindig, because I have great friends, and I think my birthday is a pretty good excuse to have a party. I flatly refuse to have anything other than an excellent day. What else are birthdays for?

Well. Birthdays are also for Auden. It's actually sort of shocking that I haven't posted this one, before.

By all means sing of love but, if you do,
Please make a rare old proper hullabaloo:
When ladies ask How much do you love me?
The Christian answer is cosi-cosi;
But poets are not celibate divines:
Had Dante said so, who would read his lines?
Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever,
And do not listen to those critics ever
Whose crude provincial gullets crave in books
Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks,
As though the Muse preferred her half-wit sons;
Good poets have a weakness for bad puns.

Suppose your Beatrice be, as usual, late,
And you would tell us how it feels to wait,
You're free to think, what may be even true,
You're so in love that one hour seems like two,
But write—As I sat waiting for her call,
Each second longer darker seemed than all
(Something like this but more elaborate still)
Those raining centuries it took to fill
That quarry whence Endymion's Love was torn;
From such ingenious fibs are poems born.
Then, should she leave you for some other guy,
Or ruin you with debts, or go and die,
No metaphor, remember, can express
A real historical unhappiness;
Your tears have value if they make us gay;
Oh Happy Grief! is all sad verse can say.

The living girl's your business (some odd sorts
Have been an inspiration to men's thoughts):
Yours may be old enough to be your mother,
Or have one leg that's shorter than the other,
Or play Lacrosse or do the Modern Dance,
To you that's destiny, to us it's chance;
We cannot love your love till she takes on,
Through you, the wonders of a paragon.
Sing her triumphant passage to our land,
The sun her footstool, the moon in her right hand,
And seven planets blazing in her hair,
Queen of the Night and Empress of the Air;
Tell how her fleet by nine king swans is led,
Wild geese write magic letters overhead
And hippocampi follow in her wake
With Amphisboene, gentle for her sake;
Sing her descent on the exulting shore
To bless the vines and put an end to war.

If half-way through such praises of your dear,
Riot and shooting fill the streets with fear,
And overnight as in some terror dream
Poets are suspect with the New Regime,
Stick at your desk and hold your panic in,
What you are writing may still save your skin:
Re-sex the pronouns, add a few details,
And, lo, a panegyric ode which hails
(How is the Censor, bless his heart, to know?)
The new pot-bellied Generalissimo.
Some epithets, of course, like lily-breasted
Need modifying to say, lion-chested,
A title Goddess of wry-necks and wrens
To Great Reticulator of the fens,
But in an hour your poem qualifies
For a State pension or His annual prize,
And you will die in bed (which He will not:
That public nuisance will be hanged or shot).
Though honest Iagos, true to form, will write
Shame! in your margins, Toady! Hypocrite!,
True hearts, clear heads will hear the note of glory
And put inverted commas round the story,
Thinking—Old Sly-boots! We shall never know
Her name or nature. Well, it's better so.

For given Man, by birth, by education,
Imago Dei who forgot his station,
The self-made creature who himself unmakes,
The only creature ever made who fakes,
With no more nature in his loving smile
Than in his theories of a natural style,
What but tall tales, the luck of verbal playing,
Can trick his lying nature into saying
That love, or truth in any serious sense,
Like orthodoxy, is a reticence?

—W. H. Auden (1907-1973), "'The Truest Poetry Is The Most Feigning'," September 1953. This is one of my favorite versions of Auden: acerbic and brilliant, and a little wry, and a lot meta, sarcastic and sharp and kind of bitter (also totally right about the myth of plain style, come the fuck on), and kind of right about the things poetry can't do; and yet also forever believing in poetry, despite everything, and against all odds (true hearts, clear heads). I really, really love Auden.