LGBTQ Poetry Month II: W. H. Auden
Twelve Songs (excerpt)
W. H. Auden
O last night I dreamed of you, Johnny, my lover,
You'd the sun on one arm and the moon on the other,
The sea it was blue and the grass it was green,
Every star rattled a round tambourine;
Ten thousand miles deep in a pit there I lay:
But you frowned like thunder and you went away.
Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) was an Anglo-American writer, born in Birmingham and later a naturalised US citizen. He believed all his life in the sanctity of faithful love and marriage, which sucked a bit for him because most of the men he fell in love with were not big on commitment (e.g. Chester Kallman), although he often remained friends with ex-lovers and probably had a lengthy friends-with-benefits arrangement with Christopher Isherwood. He wedded the German writer and actress Erika Mann in 1935 in a marriage of convenience so she could escape the Nazis on a British passport. His oeuvre includes over 400 poems in a huge variety of form and style, including Anglo-Saxon meter.