W H Auden - First Things First lyrics

First Things First Woken, I lay in the arms of my own warmth and listened To a storm enjoying its storminess in the winter dark Till my ear, as it can when half-asleep or half-sober, Set to work to unscramble that interjectory uproar, Construing its airy vowels and watery consonants Into a love-speech indicative of a Proper Name. Scarcely the tongue I should have chosen, yet, as well As harshness and clumsiness would allow, it spoke in your praise, Kenning you a god-child of the Moon and the West Wind With power to tame both real and imaginary monsters, Likening your poise of being to an upland county, Here green on purpose, there pure blue for luck. Loud though it was, alone as it certainly found me, It reconstructed a day of peculiar silence When a sneeze could be heard a mile off, and had me walking On a headland of lava beside you, the occasion as ageless As the stare of any rose, your presence exactly So once, so valuable, so very now. This, moreover, at an hour when only too often A smirking devil annoys me in beautiful English, Predicting a world where every sacred location Is a sand-buried site all cultured Texans do, Misinformed and thoroughly fleeced by their guides, And gentle hearts are extinct like Hegelian Bishops. Grateful, I slept till a morning that would not say How much it believed of what I said the storm had said But quietly drew my attention to what had been done —So many cubic metres the more in my cistern Against a leonine summer—, putting first things first: Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.