W.H. Auden, With Wise Advice for the New Year

“Convict our pride of its offense

In all things, even penitence,

Instruct us in the civil art

Of making from the muddled heart

A desert and a city where

The thoughts that have to labor there

May find locality and peace,

And pent-up feelings their release.”— English poet-critic W.H. Auden (1907-1973), “New Year Letter” (1940)

“New Year Letter” is far longer than my favorite W.H. Auden poem, “In Memory of W.B.Yeats.” But if it didn’t have that elegy's concentrated power, it issued an equally ringing summons to the best human impulses toward tolerance and hope only a few months into a second world war that had arisen from the most hideous brutality the world had ever known, as I think you'll see in the above lines.