W H Auden - Amor Loci lyrics

I could draw its map by heart, showing its contours, strata and vegetation, name every height, small burn and lonely sheiling, but nameless to me, faceless as heather or grouse, are those who live there, its dead too vague for judgement, tangible only what they wrought, their giant works of delve and drainage in days preterite: long since their hammering stopped as the lodes all petered out in the Jew Limestone. Here and there a tough chimney still towers over dejected masonry, moss, decomposed machines, with no one about, no chance of bu*tering bread, a land postured in my time for marginal farms. Any musical future is most unlikely. Industry wants Cheap Power, romantic muscle a perilous wilderness, Mr Pleasure pays for surf-riding, claret, s**: it offers them none. To me, though, much: a vision, not (as perhaps at twelve I thought it) of Eden, still less of a New Jerusalem but, for one, convinced he will die, more comely, more credible than either day-dream. How but with some real focus of desolation could I, by an*logy, imagine a Love that, however often smeared, shrugged at, abandoned by a frivolous worldling, does not abandon?