Auden's Funeral

I One among friends who stood above your grave I cast a clod of earth from those heaped there Down on the great brass-handled coffin lid. It rattled on the oak like a door knocker And at that sound I saw your face beneath Wedged in an oblong shadow under ground. Flesh creased, eyes shut, jaw jutting And on the mouth a grin: triumph of one Who has escaped from life-long colleagues roaring For him to join their throng. He's still half with us Conniving slyly, yet he knows he's gone Into that cellar where they'll never find him, Happy to be alone, his last work done, Word freed from world, into a different wood. II But we, with feet on grass, feeling the wind Whip blood up in our cheeks, walk back along The hillside road we earlier climbed today Following the hearse and tinkling village band. The white October sun circles Kirchstetten With colours of chrysanthemums in gardens, And bronze and golden under wiry boughs, A few last apples gleam like jewels. Back in the village inn, we sit on benches For the last toast to you, the honoured ghost Whose absence now becomes incarnate in us. Tasting the meats, we imitate your voice Speaking in flat benign objective tones The night before you died. In the packed hall You are your words. Your listeners see Written on your face the poems they hear Like letters carved in a tree's bark The sight and sound of solitudes endured. And looking down on them, you see Your image echoed in their eyes Enchanted by your language to be theirs. And then, your last word said, halloing hands Hold up above their heads your farewell bow. Then many stomp the platform, entreating Each for his horde, your still warm signing hand. But you have hidden away in your hotel And locked the door and lain down on the bed And fallen from their praise, dead on the floor. III (Ghost of a ghost, of you when young, you waken In me my ghost when young, us both at Oxford. You, the tow-haired undergraduate With jaunty liftings of the head. Angular forward stride, cross-questioning glance, A Buster Keaton-faced pale gravitas. Saying aloud your poems whose letters bit Ink-deep into my fingers when I set Them up upon my five-pound printing press: 'An evening like a coloured photograph A music stultified across the water The heel upon the finishing blade of grass.')