I sit in one of the dives
     On Fifty-second Street
     Uncertain and afraid
     As the clever hopes expire
     Of a low dishonest decade:
     Waves of anger and fear
     Circulate over the bright
     And darkened lands of the earth,
     Obsessing our private lives;
     The unmentionable odour of death
     Offends the September night.
   
     Accurate scholarship can
     Unearth the whole offence
     From Luther until now
     That has driven a culture mad,
     Find what occurred at Linz,
     What huge imago made
     A psychopathic god:
     I and the public know
     What all schoolchildren learn,
     Those to whom evil is done
     Do evil in return.
   
     Exiled Thucydides knew
     All that a speech can say
     About Democracy,
     And what dictators do,
     The elderly rubbish they talk
     To an apathetic grave;
     Analysed all in his book,
     The enlightenment driven away,
     The habit-forming pain,
     Mismanagement and grief:
     We must suffer them all again.
   
     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:
     But who can live for long
     In an euphoric dream;
     Out of the mirror they stare,
     Imperialism's face
     And the international wrong.
   
     Faces along the bar
     Cling to their average day:
     The lights must never go out,
     The music must always play,
     All the conventions conspire
     To make this fort assume
     The furniture of home;
     Lest we should see where we are,
     Lost in a haunted wood,
     Children afraid of the night
     Who have never been happy or good.
   
     The windiest militant trash
     Important Persons shout
     Is not so crude as our wish:
     What mad Nijinsky wrote
     About Diaghilev
     Is true of the normal heart;
     For the error bred in the bone
     Of each woman and each man
     Craves what it cannot have,
     Not universal love
     But to be loved alone.
   
     From the conservative dark
     Into the ethical life
     The dense commuters come,
     Repeating their morning vow;
     "I will be true to the wife,
     I'll concentrate more on my work,"
     And helpless governors wake
     To resume their compulsory game:
     Who can release them now,
     Who can reach the deaf,
     Who can speak for the dumb?
   
     All I have is a voice
     To undo the folded lie,
     The romantic lie in the brain
     Of the sensual man-in-the-street
     And the lie of Authority
     Whose buildings grope the sky:
     There is no such thing as the State
     And no one exists alone;
     Hunger allows no choice
     To the citizen or the police;
     We must love one another or die.
   
     Defenceless under the night
     Our world in stupor lies;
     Yet, dotted everywhere,
     Ironic points of light
     Flash out wherever the Just
     Exchange their messages:
     May I, composed like them
     Of Eros and of dust,
     Beleaguered by the same
     Negation and despair,
     Show an affirming flame.