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The law cannot forgive, for the law has not been wronged, only broken only persons can be wronged. The law can pardon, but it can only pardon what it has the power to punish.

W. H. Auden

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W. H. Auden
Age: 66 †
Born: 1907
Born: February 21
Died: 1973
Died: September 28
Author
Composer
Essayist
Librettist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
Cannot
Power
Wronged
Persons
Punish
Pardon
Forgive
Forgiving
Broken
Law

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Human beings are, necessarily, actors who...can be divided...into the sane who know they are acting and the mad who do not.
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We till shadowed days are done, We must weep and sing Duty's conscious wrong, The Devil in the clock
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Drama is based on the Mistake.
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Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse.
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A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.
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Get up very early and get going at once. In fact, work first and wash afterwards.
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The habit-forming pain, Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again.
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The Ogre does what ogres can, Deeds quite impossible for Man, But one prize is beyond his reach, The Ogre cannot master Speech: About a subjugated plain, Among its desperate and slain, The Ogre stalks with hands on hips, While drivel gushes from his lips.
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O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist Stare, stare in the basin And wonder what you've missed.
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A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.
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Soft as the earth is mankind and both need to be altered.
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All wishes, whatever their apparent content, have the same and unvarying meaning: I refuse to be what I am.
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Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry.
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You need not see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation, you have only to watch his eyes: a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon making a primary incision, a clerk completing a bill of lading wear the same rapt expression, forgetting themselves in a function. How beautiful it is, that eye-on-the-obje ct look.
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Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the differences between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity.
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