Idealism in Auden’s O who can ever gaze his fill, Out on the lawn I li

Idealism in Audens O who toilette ever wish his fill, come on on the lawn I lie in bed (A spend Night 1933), and The Shield of Achilles W.H. Audens poems are noted for their intelligence, detachedness, and musicality. Often, angelism is associated with ro objet dartticism and the excessively personal, because it is an attempt at envisioning the humanness as it ought to be and not as it is. However, Auden successfully blends idealism into his heading poems, and this idealism manifests itself in his O who idler ever gaze his fill, Out on the lawn I lie in bed (A Summer Night 1933), and The Shield of Achilles. In O who can ever gaze his fill, mortals from various walks of life comment on their ideals while Death watches all over them. Composed of four stanzas, Deaths refrain succeeds the mortals thoughts and gets the last severalise in each instance. In the first stanza, the farmer and the fisherman wait on upon the water and the land fondly, belie ving that the traditional life of hard fetch coexists with their closeness to nature. This ideal life is how their forefathers have lived, and it is how the pilgrims from their loins should live in the years to come (6). However, Death remarks as it oversees the empty catch and harvest-home loss (9) that, the earth is an oyster with nothing inside it (12). Therefore, it advises, forget this ideal and throw down the mattock and dance while you can (15). This advice can be seen as giving up on the traditional way of life, so that the fisherman and the farmer no longer have to be march to their toils. Death also says, Not to be born is the best for man (13), and this phrase is repeated in the subsequent stanzas. In the ideal world, maybe mankind is not born i... ...ion, love, art, and nature. This idealism, far from being romantic, is imbued with rationality. Often, it is also countered by a strong cynicism. Using haunting imageries and melodic poetic devices, Auden successfu lly demonstrates a balanced sense of idealism in his O who can ever gaze his fill, Out on the lawn I lie in bed (A Summer Night 1933), and The Shield of Achilles.* some versions of the poem, identical the one in Selected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (Vintage) appear to have 15 stanzas. Works CitedAuden, W.H. A Summer Night 1933. In The Colleced Poetry of Auden, pp. 96-98. New York haphazard House, 1945.Auden, W.H. O who can ever gaze his fill. In The Colleced Poetry of Auden, pp. 224-226. New York Random House, 1945.Auden, W.H. The Shield of Achilles. In The Shield of Achilles, pp. 35-37. New York Random House, 1955.