Washing out the spot
That never goes away
How many children
Did you kill today?
Staring at the basin
In all your distress
What happens in your head
Is anybody’s guess
Now you’re making speeches
Reciting practiced lies
I wonder what’s behind
The empty in your eyes
Where does it come from?
The hunger that devours
Destroying whole countries
For a little taste of Power
by Richard W. Bray
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart
—W.H Auden, As I Walked Out One Evening
Anger and resentment
Will fill your heart with sand
Allow yourself to care about
Somebody you can’t stand
There’s a part of you that tries to love
Everyone you see
Pretending that it doesn’t
Makes you angry sad and mean
It’s a crooked crooked world
Filled with crooked souls
Love can make it meaningful
But nothing makes us whole
By Richard W. Bray
In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.
—W.H. Auden, As I Walked Out One Evening
Walking down the street
Going nowhere
Nothing to look forward to
Nobody to care
Big cloud of empty
Hanging in the air
Life is just
A rotten stupid
Maggot-breeding scam
I’m tired and I’m sick
Of everything I am
Can’t stagger through
Another dragging day
None of my plans
Ended up this way
Days bleed into weeks
And life drifts away
Life is just
A rotten stupid
Maggot-breeding scam
I’m tired and I’m sick
Of everything I am
by Richard W. Bray
Sentient consciousness is a marvelous gift; I’m really glad I exist.
I would be happy to thank Someone for every glorious breath that life grants me; I just can’t quite figure out whom to thank. God? Which one?
I’m a devout deist because my Creator has endowed me with the type of brain which renders me incapable of experiencing a connection to an anthropomorphized God. I can’t imagine ever giving myself over to the God of the Christians, for example. First of all, a God who wishes to be exalted by the likes of me would be all too human for me to take seriously. Moreover, there are billions of people on Earth who believe in reincarnation while billions of other people believe in heaven. These are two mutually incompatible outcomes of existence. Maybe billions of people are right and billions of people are wrong. Who knows? Fortunately, it’s not my task in life to figure these things out.
To be clear, I am not one of those New Atheists who hates God for not existing. On the contrary, I encounter many things in Christianity that are good and beautiful. I’m all for fellowship, good works, humility, and forgiveness; furthermore, the Peace Christians are my heroes. (And I really don’t think grownups should have heroes.)
But the universe got along just fine for a long, long time before human beings came onto the scene, so it’s obvious that Existence really isn’t about us.
For some reason or another, human beings have developed the capacity to appreciate the fact that we exist. At any rate, for me, life remains a blessing, as W. H. Auden notes in “As I Walked Out One Evening,” his bleak and lovely meditation on Christianity
This brings me to the Christian concept of grace. Although there is much bickering over the theological specifics of grace within and between Christian denominations, grace is basically the notion that human beings have done nothing to deserve the love and mercy bestowed upon us by God. Instead of arguing about how loving and merciful God actually is, I will simply concede that our existence is unearned. Life is a mysterious take-it-or-leave-it proposition. And griping about how life should be different is a silly waste of our precious time on Earth.
As Robert Pinsky notes in “Family Values,” his bleak and lovely poem about resentment and cupidity,
nobody gets what they/ Deserve more than everybody else.
Does anyone deserve to have an unhappy childhood? Of course not. But this world is not about fairness.
The universe wasn’t built for us. But it’s a spectacular privilege to be granted the slight and brief glimpse that our limited consciousness affords.
I don’t “hope for higher raptures, when life’s day is done.” The physical world is sufficiently marvelous for me.
I’ll leave the final word on grace to Kris Kristofferson.
by Richard W. Bray
I’d like to read one of W. H. Auden’s best-known poems and one of the best-known poems, I suppose, modern poems of the last ten years. Probably someone will find that it was written in the last nine years, but it doesn’t matter…”As I walked Out One Evening.”
—Dylan Thomas (from the Caedmon Collection)
No poet consistently knocks me on my tailbone the way W.H. Auden does. Listening to Auden read Death’s Echo from the Voice of the Poet recordings makes me want to lie down in the fetal position and turn out all the lights.
As I Walked Out One Evening, depressing as it is, leaves me with some hope, however. At my lowest points, I try to remind myself that my life remains a blessing although I cannot bless.
Each stanza of “As I Walked out One Evening” is by itself a masterpiece, containing more literary merit than you will find on this entire blog.
The theme of the poem is certainly nothing new: Everything human beings do and feel is ephemeral. But a poet’s task is not to discover new themes. As Richard Wilbur notes, the “urge of poetry” is to bring its subject matter “into the felt world.”
The poem has many notable lines, but I’d like to focus on one that seems mundane at first reading, line seven:
“Under an arch of the railway”
There are, of course, many less lovely ways to express this particular image: Beneath the railroad line, below the arch which a train passes over, underneath the elevated train tracks, etc. But Auden’s construction magically sings itself off the page and into my brain where it will remain until such time as I am forced to surrender my smidge of nitrogen to the World Fund
Richard W. Bray
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