Prime

--W.H.Auden

Simultaneously, as soundlessly,

Spontaneously, suddenly

As, at the vaunt of the dawn, the kind

Gates of the body fly open

To its world beyond, the gates of the mind,

The horn gate and the ivory gate

Swing to, swing shut, instantaneously

Quell the nocturnal rummage

Of its rebellious fronde, ill-favoured,

Ill-natured and second-rate,

Disenfranchised, widowed and orphaned

By an historical mistake:

Recalled from the shades to be a seeing being,

From absence to be on display,

Without a name or history I wake

Between my body and the day.

Holy this moment, wholly in the right,

As, in complete obedience

To the light’s laconic outcry, next

As a sheet, near as a wall,

Out there as a mountain’s poise of stone,

The world is present, about,

And I know that I am, here, not alone

But with a world, and rejoice

Unvexed, for the will has still to claim

This adjacent arm as my own,

The memory to name me, resume

Its routine of praise and blame,

And smiling to me is this instant while

Still the day is intact, and I

The Adam sinless in our beginning,

Adam still previous to any act.

I draw breath; that is of course to wish,

No matter what, to be wise.

To be different, to die and the cost,

No matter how, is Paradise

Lost of course and myself owing a death:

The eager ridge, the steady sea,

The flat roofs of the fishing village

Still asleep in its bunny,

Though as fresh and sunny still, are not friends

But things to hand, this ready flesh

No honest equal, but my accomplice now,

My assassin to be, and my name

Stands for my historical share of care

For a lying self-made city,

Afraid of our living task, the dying

Which the coming day will ask.