[…] the occasion as ageless
As the stare of any rose, your presence exactly
So once, so valuable, so very now.’
I used to know the whole of W. H. Auden’s poem ‘First Things First’ by heart. Now, only these lines remain. Stirred by a storm outside his window, the speaker of the poem recounts walking with his beloved. A simple moment of shared adventure – for Auden always a journey, a quest!
All these years later I am struck again by this poem. The last line, the line that everyone else remembers (‘Thousands have lived without love, not one without water’) for me, only serves to elevate the earlier reverie. The practicality of the final image set against the impossibly Romantic!
As his biographer notes, as a poem, it’s ‘impossibly great.’
