You were silly like us: your gift survived it all;
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself; mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its saying where executives
Would never want to tamper; it flows south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
(from, The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Edward Mendelson, Faber & Faber, 1977, 1978, 1986)
Groundwork 