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 waves to drown
Both sufferer and suffering.
The waters long to hear our question put
Which would release their longed-for answer, but.
by W.H. Auden
from Selected Poems,
Vintage Books, 1972