I think this is the third Auden poem I’ve put up for the Thursday short poem. I promise to stop soon, but I’ve had the fifth stanza in my head all day. In this very adult poem, that little section was one my mother recited to me often during my childhood years — when, of course, we had a pet dachsund who was my best friend. All I knew, as a child, was that Auden thought dachsunds were sinless, which was fine by me. It was only when I was in college that I found the whole poem — and found it exactly at the moment that the last stanza was to start making sense to me. (I was reading Augustine and Auden the same semester. Actually, I think they ought always to be read together, each as a corrective to the other.)
And kids today think they invented this stuff…
The Love Feast
In an upper room at midnight
See us gathered on behalf
Of love according to the gospel
Of the radio-phonograph.
Lou is telling Anne what Molly
Said to Mark behind her back;
Jack likes Jill who worships George
Who has the hots for Jack.
Catechumens make their entrance;
Steep enthusiastic eyes
Flicker after tits and baskets
Someone vomits; someone cries.
Willy cannot bear his father,
Lilian is afraid of kids;
The Love that rules the sun and stars
Permits what He forbids.
Adrian’s pleasure-loving dachshund
In a sinner’s lap lies curled;
Drunken absent-minded fingers
Pat a sinless world.
Who is Jenny lying to
In her call, Collect, to Rome?
The Love that made her out of nothing
Tells me to go home.
But that Miss Number in the corner
Playing hard to get…
I am sorry I’m not sorry…
Make me chaste, Lord, but not yet.
“Make me chaste, Lord, but not yet.” To those who want to be chaste… I think we’ve all prayed that prayer in one way or another.