Time will say nothing but I told you so,
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.
If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time will say nothing but I told you so.
There are no fortunes to be told, although,
Because I love you more than I can say,
If I could tell you I would let you know.
The winds must come from somewhere when they blow,
There must be reasons why the leaves decay;
Time will say nothing but I told you so.
Perhaps the roses really want to grow,
The vision seriously intends to stay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.
Suppose all the lions get up and go,
And all the brooks and soldiers run away;
Will Time say nothing but I told you so?
If I could tell you I would let you know.
1940
2 comments:
To a classical bod, "brooks and soldiers run away" lies under profound suspicion of being a textual corruption because (a) it is an ugly zeugma, and (b) it is false, because brooks only run, they do not run away.
To confirm or refute this hypothesis I need an article with a title like "Zeugma in Auden," which would show me whether or not he was apt to use ugly zeugmas. But no such thing exists (and the internet reveals only one, much weaker, zeugma,
The mountains cannot judge us when we lie:
We dwell upon the earth; the earth obeys
The intelligent and evil till they die.
From _In Time of War_ XIV).
But what I especially need is to know where the poem was first published--but the internet disagrees--and, most importantly, to inspect the MS, either in an archive or (ideally) on the web. But I cannot even find out in what archive the MS is, if it survives. There is presumably some apparatus in the necessary volume of the _Complete Works of Auden, Poems, II_, published in 2022 by Princeton, but no Ebook seems to exist on the web, even for a fee.
What a strange, primitive, field, Eng. Lit. is. Except in the case of a few of the most important authors--Shakespeare, Milton--they appear to have abandoned the essential philology for Lit. Crit. (or whatever it is they do now) long before the job was done!
JEL
@JEL
Seriously out of my depth here, but I took "brooks . . . run away" to mean they were drained out, with no water left--as at the End Of All Things. Likewise with the soldiers: I took the point to be that they were vanished, gone, like the lions (not that they fled their posts and were hiding somewhere, disgraced but still very much extant). I took that to be the surface image, anyway.
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