All the others translate: the painter sketches
 A visible world to love or reject;
 Rummaging into his living, the poet fetches
 The images out that hurt and connect.
 From Life to Art by painstaking adaption
 Relying on us to cover the rift;
 Only your notes are pure contraption,
 Only your song is an absolute gift.

 Pour out your presence, O delight, cascading
 The falls of the knee and the weirs of the spine,
 Our climate of silence and doubt invading;
 You, alone, alone, O imaginary song,
 Are unable to say an existence is wrong,
 And pour out your forgiveness like a wine.

Auden always surprises me. Just when I think I’ve read everything, or almost everything, out pops another poem that I’ve never seen – and end up loving. Take “The Composer” for example. I have Auden’s collected poems lovingly stashed on my book shelf and then I find this poem on my GRE subject test – the one I took last Saturday! Just goes to show that poetry does truly find you and not the other way round!

I love what he says about the painter and the poet, even though they only ‘translate’… interesting how he says ‘relying on us to cover the rift’. And then suddenly – almost like a symphony itself – the poem takes off and rises high above itself when he describes music. Music that delights, uplifts, cascades over us and ‘our climate of silence and doubt invading’. So beautiful :)

— Janice