The Bell Ringer
A POEM
He disturbs
The sleeping bells, the stolid sounds
Locked in the iron tower
That hold indifferent resonance to
The germination of a seed,
The cutting of a flower.
He wraps the ropes like ivy In the groinings of his hand
And dances
Blending joy and sorrow
With the falling sand.
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Rocks that block the mouths of tombs
Give sermons of great gravity
On the benefits…
Twentieth-Century Adam and Eve
As aliens yearn
For the native land.
We still return
To the garden —
Taste…
Paradoxical in the Extreme
Evidently a man of coarse, even slovenly, personal habits, Auden was as meticulous as T.S. Eliot in the precision of his verse.