Lay your sleeping head my love
Human on my faithless arm
The phrase enchanted slope sprang out at me. Was that a direct reference to/quotation from The Ecstasy by John Donne?
Well, no. I guess it just reminded me of the opening lines:
Where, like a pillow on a bed,
A pregnant bank swelled up
Reading through the whole poem (yet again), another few lines from the Donne put me in mind of Larkin’s Arundel Tomb:
We like sepulchral statues lay;
All day, the same our postures were,
And we said nothing all the day
Another quotewhich always goes direct to the heart:
When love, with one another so
Interanimates two souls,
That abler soul, which thence doth flow
Defects of loneliness controls
Another passage (on the relationship between body & soul) always, for some reason, recalls to me the Speech of Aristophanes
Our bodies why do we forbear?
They are ours, though they are not we, we are
The intelligence, they the sphere
We owe them thanks, because they thus
Did us, to us, at first convey,
Yielded their forces, sense, to us,
Nor are dross to us but allay
On man heaven’s influence works not so,
But that it first imprints the air,
So soul into the soul may flow,
Though it to body first repair
Two more quotes – no comment needed
That subtle knot, which makes us man
That mysteries in souls do grow,
But yet the body is his book
And, set in its full context, Auden’s enchanted slope is indeed reminiscent of The Ecstasy
Soul & 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 & hope
Read the full texts; The Ecstasy
Lullaby
