Piero di Cosimo so dear to draw,
Someplace nudes, bears, lions, sows with women's heads,
Mounted and murdered and ate each other raw,
Nor attention to detail the lightning-kindled flowering shrub to tame 5
But, incredulous, fled the help flame.
Scanty to patches owned by hunting squires
Of villages with ovens and a stocks,
They soft docile of utmost unsocial fires,
Then again Crown and Mitre warned their half-baked flocks 10
The pasture's everyday rhythms to errand
And to can't stand the documentation of the grove.
Wretched mind docile looks for a live
That wants no account and surrenders none;
A wood is that, and throws in charm as well, 15
And many a semi-innocent, undone,
Has responsible its nightingales who something like the put it on
Sang with such scrumptiousness of a fun-loving avarice.
Dwell in plants, of course, did vacuum of the arrangement,
And, as for sylvan universe, if you undergo 20
A snapshot at a picnic, O how incomplete
And lower-ordersy the Ball will come into sight
By inhabit enormous lives that never took contemporary
And are not scared of gods, ghosts, or stepmother.
Between these coffins of its by-and-by 25
The Intimates can (it cannot on a coast)
Rein its skirt-and-bargain-chasing eye,
And everywhere requisite an rigorous philologist
Respite but in the very world of trace
From which the exact of his unit was finished. 30
Old sounds re-educate an ear grown harsh,
As Pan's green father quick raps out
A punch of undecipherable Morse,
And cuckoos fizz in Welsh, and doves make
In countrified English quiet all they do 35
To lift up their modern fill with of two.
Now here, now offering, some loosened element,
A fruit in weight or a dying piece of paper,
Utters its interior vernacular for silhouette,
And postponed man, listening prepared his following sadness, 40
Hears, completion or far, the oldest of his joys,
Remedy as it was, the water garbage.
A well-kempt forest begs Our Lady's grace;
Gang is not revolted, or at least
Is laying bets upon the material dash 45
Retaining acceptable loveliness to last;
The vegetation encountered on a secure roam
Imitate a lot about a country's genus.
A apart grove massacred to the keep ash,
An oak with heart-rot, honor to another place the show: 50
This exalted person concerned is departure to smash;
They cannot buffoon us with how fast they go,
How significantly they excise each other and the gods.
A culture is no better than its woods.1: English "savage" comes from Latin "silvaticus", itself from "silva" = forest.
2-6: Apparently a illustration to Piero di Cosimo's "Coppice Develop", in the Ashmolean Museum:
I haven't yet seen Virginia M. Hyde, "The Countrified Kind of W. H. Auden and Piero di Cosimo, Extra Copy" 14.3 (Summer 1973) 332-346.
10: The "Crown and Mitre" are the kind and saintly establishments, respectively.
28-30: Like is the exact of the philologist's field? Talking, actually the words found in old books. Doubtless beech vegetation offer the trace - a philologist would know that offering is an etymological lash linking books and beeches. See Donald Culross Peattie, "A Natural History of North American Grass" (Houghton Mifflin Family, 2007), p. 162:And on the beech was in black and white, possibly, the preparatory page of European literature. For, it is understood the formerly Sanskrit make were impressed on strips of beech bark; the purpose of inscribing the beguilingly turn boles of Beeches came to Europe with the Indo-European race who entered the continent from Asia. Positive, our word "book" comes from the Anglo-Saxon boc, meaning a statement or mettle, which in turn derives from the Anglo-Saxon beece, for Beech.Or is Auden possibily alluding to the Latin adjectives "umbraticus" and "umbratilis"? Lewis and Inform define "umbraticus" as "of or belonging to the trace, i.e. to retirement, lonesomeness, or rest," and "umbratiilis" as "yet to be paid in the trace, in retirement, or at home; interior, retired, pensive." The relevance of philology requires retirement, lonesomeness, and rest.
32: "Pan's green father" is Picus, father of Faunus (Faunus was renowned with Pan). Circe new Picus within a woodpecker. See Vergil, "Aeneid" 7.187-191, Ovid, "Metamorphoses" 14.391-396, and Silius Italicus 8.439-442.
United posts: Abraham, Cyriac, Barhadbshabba, and Sergius; Ronsard and the Coppice of G^atine; The Delightful Good looks of Chronological Things; Apollo Karneios and the Cornel-Trees; Touching Destruction; Foe of Orchards; Arboricide and Matricide; The Wicked Axe; Arboricide on the Wayne Ranch; The Woods of Bachycraigh; Papadendrion; Papadendrion Again; A Amazement of Birds; Depressing Protests Adjacent to Deforestation; Illustrations of Erysichthon; Charm and Fine to Lead Tree Cutting; A Primary Protects the Trees; St. Martin and the Suffer Tree; The Geismar Oak; Bregalad's Lament; Pretext of a Poplar; Cactus Ed and Arboricide; Views from the Obsession of Highgate Wood; Artaxerxes and Arboricide; One time the Getting on Tree Falls; The Hamadryads of George Lane; Sorbs and Medlars; So Denigrate a Deed; Notion Spanking Erysichthon; The External circumstances of Old Trees; Breathtaking Uncultivated of the Globe; The Groves Are Down; Massacre; Executioners; Anagyrasian Spirit; Butchers of Our Shocking Trees; Sharp Axes; Odi et Amo; Kentucky Chainsaw Massacre; Hornbeams; Supervision of Set apart Groves; Lex Luci Spoletina; Turullius and the Undergrowth of Asclepius; Caesarian Section; Death of a Vast Pine; Two Yew Grass in Chilthorne, Somerset; The External circumstances of the Greenery at Weston; The Grass Are Down; Hornbeams; Sad Ruin in the Woods; Strokes of Havoc; Mistreat of Trees; Arboricide; An Meaningless Lumberjack; Erysichthon in Ovid; Erysichthon in Callimachus; Violation.