The Waters
Poet, oracle and wit
Like unsuccessful anglers by
The ponds of apperception sit,
Baiting with the wrong request
The vectors of their interest;
At nightfall tell the anglers lie.
With time in tempest everywhere
To rafts of frail assumption cling
The saintly and the insincere;
Enraged phenomena bear down
In overwhelming wave to drown
Both sufferer and suffering.
The waters long to hear our question put
Which would release their longed-for answer, but.
W.H. Auden
from Selected Poems
Vintage Books 1972