In his dream zealous To attain his home, But ensorcelling powers Have contorted space, Odded the way: Instead of a facile Five-minute trot, Far must he hirple, Clumsied by cold, Buffeted often By blouts of hail Or pirries of rain, On stolchy paths Over glunch clouds, Where infrequent shepherds, Sloomy of face, Snudge of spirit, Snoachy of speech, With scaddle dogs Tend a few scrawny Cag-mag sheep.
Fetched into conscience By a hoasting fit, He lies darkling, Senex morosus, Too ebb of verve Even to monster Social trifles, Or violent over The world's wrongs, While time drumbles, A maunder of moments, Wan, haphazard, And unaccented: To re-faith himself, He rummages lines, Plangent or pungent, By bards of sentence, But all to his sample Ring fribble or fop, Not one of them worth A hangman's wages.
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A poem in skeltonic metre written by Auden in June 1969. It recounts a bad dream of having to travel home over a bleak landscape, made unfamiliar by some unpleasant magic, and of being hampered in his travel by bad weather. Upon waking from this dream, the subject of the poem is sapped of energy, listless, and tries to “re-faith” himself by reading famous poets, but even this activity proves dissatisfying.
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