Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love 
--W. H. Auden (1940)
      Lay your sleeping head, my love, 
      Human on my faithless arm; 
      Time and fevers burn away 
      Individual beauty from 
      Thoughtful children, and the grave 
      Proves the child ephemeral: 
      But in my arms till break of day 
      Let the living creature lie, 
      Mortal, guilty, but to me 
      The entirely beautiful.

      Soul and body have no bounds: 
      To lovers as they lie upon 
      Her tolerant enchanted slope 
      In their ordinary swoon, 
      Grave the vision Venus sends 
      Of supernatural sympathy, 
      Universal love and hope; 
      While an abstract insight wakes 
      Among the glaciers and the rocks 
      The hermit’s sensual ecstacy.

      Certainty, fidelity 
      On the stroke of midnight pass 
      Like vibrations of a bell, 
      And fashionable madmen raise 
      Their pedantic boring cry: 
      Every farthing of the cost, 
      All the dreaded cards foretell, 
      Shall be paid, but from this night 
      Not a whisper, not a thought, 
      Not a kiss nor look be lost.

      Beauty, midnight, vision dies: 
      Let the winds of dawn that blow 
      Softly round your dreaming head 
      Such a day of sweetness show 
      Eye and knocking heart may bless, 
      Find the mortal world enough; 
      Noons of dryness see you fed 
      By the involuntary powers, 
      Nights of insult let you pass 
      Watched by every human love.