A cloudless night like this <br />Can set the spirit soaring: <br />After a tiring day <br />The clockwork spectacle is <br />Impressive in a slightly boring <br />Eighteenth-century way. <br /> <br />It soothed adolescence a lot <br />To meet so shamelesss a stare; <br />The things I did could not <br />Be so shocking as they said <br />If that would still be there <br />After the shocked were dead <br /> <br />Now, unready to die <br />Bur already at the stage <br />When one starts to resent the young, <br />I am glad those points in the sky <br />May also be counted among <br />The creatures of middle-age. <br /> <br />It's cosier thinking of night <br />As more an Old People's Home <br />Than a shed for a faultless machine, <br />That the red pre-Cambrian light <br />Is gone like Imperial Rome <br />Or myself at seventeen. <br /> <br />Yet however much we may like <br />The stoic manner in which <br />The classical authors wrote, <br />Only the young and rich <br />Have the nerve or the figure to strike <br />The lacrimae rerum note. <br /> <br />For the present stalks abroad <br />Like the past and its wronged again <br />Whimper and are ignored, <br />And the truth cannot be hid; <br />Somebody chose their pain, <br />What needn't have happened did. <br /> <br />Occuring this very night <br />By no established rule, <br />Some event may already have hurled <br />Its first little No at the right <br />Of the laws we accept to school <br />Our post-diluvian world: <br /> <br />But the stars burn on overhead, <br />Unconscious of final ends, <br />As I walk home to bed, <br />Asking what judgment waits <br />My person, all my friends, <br />And these United States.<br /><br />WH Auden<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-walk-after-dark-3/
