For the Time Being

Alone, alone, about a dreadful wood
Of conscious evil runs a lost mankind,
Dreading to find its Father lest it find
The Goodness it has dreaded is not good:
Alone, alone, about our dreadful wood.

Where is that Law for which we broke our own,
Where now that Justice for which Flesh resigned
Her hereditary right to passion, Mind
His will to absolute power? Gone. Gone.
Where is that Law for which we broke our own?

The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss.
Was it to meet such grinning evidence
We left our richly odoured ignorance?
Was the triumphant answer to be this?
The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss,

We who must die demand a miracle.
How could the Eternal do a temporal act,
The Infinite become a finite fact?
Nothing can save us that is possible:
We who must die demand a miracle.

__________

Pulled from W.H. Auden’s 1942 poem “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio”. You’ll find it in his Collected Poems.

I hope all of you have had wonderful Christmases and holidays.

Three others I read this time of year:

• Eliot’s haunting poem “The Journey of the Magi”
• The closing bit of John Updike’s near-perfect memoir
• “Redeem the time being from insignificance”