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 ecstasy. 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.
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View text with all available footnotesFirst published in New Writing, Spring 1937; revised 1958. Sometimes titled "Lay your sleeping head, my love", "Poem", or "Lullaby"
Text Authorship:
- by W. H. (Wystan Hugh) Auden (1907 - 1973), title 1: "Poem", title 2: "Lay your sleeping head, my love ", title 3: "Lullaby " [author's text checked 1 time against a primary source]
Musical settings (art songs, Lieder, mélodies, (etc.), choral pieces, and other vocal works set to this text), listed by composer (not necessarily exhaustive):
- by Richard Drakeford (b. 1936), "Lullaby" [ baritone and piano ], from Four Songs [sung text not yet checked]
- by Juliana Hall (b. 1958), "Lullaby", 1992, first performed 1995 [ baritone and piano ], from Death's Echo -- 5 songs for Baritone and Piano, no. 5 [sung text checked 1 time]
- by Hans Werner Henze (1926 - 2012), "Lay your sleeping head, my love", 1983 [ tenor and piano ], from Three Auden Songs, no. 3 [sung text checked 1 time]
- by Mervyn, Lord Horder, the Second Baron of Ashford (1910 - 1998), "Lullaby (Lay your sleeping head, my love)" [ voice and piano ] [sung text not yet checked]
- by John Reginald Lang-Hyde (1899 - 1990), as Lewis Hyde, "Lay your sleeping head, my love", 1951 [ voice and piano ] [sung text not yet checked]
- by Scott Wheeler (b. 1952), "Lullaby", 1984 [ voice and piano ], from Singing to Sleep, no. 3, Scott Wheeler Music [sung text checked 1 time]
- by Stephen Wilkinson (b. 1919), "Lullaby" [ voice and piano ], from Eternal Summer, no. 5 [sung text not yet checked]
Researcher for this text: Emily Ezust [Administrator]
This text was added to the website between May 1995 and September 2003.
Line count: 40
Word count: 201