W H Auden - A Summer Night (to Geoffrey Hoyland) lyrics

Out on the lawn I lie in bed, Vega conspicuous overhead In the windless nights of June, As congregated leaves complete Their day's activity; my feet Point to the rising moon. Lucky, this point in time and space Is chosen as my working-place, Where the s**y airs of summer, The bathing hours and the bare arms, The leisured drives through a land of farms Are good to a newcomer. Equal with colleagues in a ring I sit on each calm evening Enchanted as the flowers The opening light draws out of hiding With all its gradual dove-like pleading, Its logic and its powers: That later we, though parted then, May still recall these evenings when Fear gave his watch no look; The lion griefs loped from the shade And on our knees their muzzles laid, And d**h put down his book. Now north and south and east and west Those I love lie down to rest; The moon looks on them all, The healers and the brilliant talkers, The eccentrics and the silent walkers, The dumpy and the tall. She climbs the European sky, Churches and power stations lie Alike among earth's fixtures: Into the galleries she peers And blankly as a butcher stares Upon the marvellous pictures. To gravity attentive, she Can notice nothing here, though we Whom hunger does not move, From gardens where we feel secure Look up and with a sigh endure The tyrannies of love: And, gentle, do not care to know, Where Poland draws her eastern bow, What violence is done, Nor ask what doubtful act allows Our freedom in this English house, Our picnics in the sun. Soon, soon, through dykes of our content The crumpling flood will force a rent And, taller than a tree, Hold sudden d**h before our eyes Whose river dreams long hid the size And vigours of the sea. But when the waters make retreat And through the black mud first the wheat In shy green stalks appears, When stranded monsters gasping lie, And sounds of riveting terrify Their whorled unsubtle ears, May these delights we dread to lose, This privacy, need no excuse But to that strength belong, As through a child's rash happy cries The drowned parental voices rise In unlamenting song. After discharges of alarm All unpredicted let them calm The pulse of nervous nations, Forgive the murderer in his gla**, Tough in their patience to surpa** The tigress her swift motions.