A Bad Night Lyrics
(A LEXICAL EXERCISE)
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.
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.
About
Genius Annotation
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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