Auden is an interesting case. He believed that you should write drunk and revise sober. That was his rhythm. And it worked for him for a while. Then he mistakenly mixed in an alien chemical: speed. The poetry that he wrote on speed is no good. The poetry he wrote in the thirties, before he found speed, is good. Speed hurried him into the realm of the abstract noun. He was stuck fast on speed. Sartre took speed, too-and wrote Being and Nothingness, which is a gigantic smoke generator of abstraction.

So speed is a bad idea. And suffering is a good idea. You have to suffer in order to be a human being who can help people understand suffering.

I have a mouse in the kitchen.

AUDEN SAYS: "About suffering, they were never wrong, the eld mesters." He has a pronounced Oxford accent. The poem actually rhymes, but subtly. One line ends "forgot," and then there's "untidy spot." It's such a famous poem I almost hesitate to bring it up. But I do hope you will read it.

The famous part of the poem is about Breughel's Icarus. About the fact that there's a whole painting of a seaport, with all these people's lives intersecting, bales being loaded and unloaded onto ships, and there off to one side, shploof, is Icarus, plunging into the water with his wings all melted. Not that wax could have ever worked. It was not a good idea and anyone could have told the two flyers that they'd need something stronger than wax. But the myth is poked into this completely real and commonplace in some ways but beautifully sunlit painting of a harbor. That's the famous part of the poem.

But if you listen to Auden read it, you can't skip ahead to the Icarus part, and you realize that a lot of the poem isn't about that painting. It's about the torturer's horse, and about how the "dogs go on with their doggy life." Nobody ever put that way of talking in a poem before. That's the Christopher Isherwood note. "The dogs go on with their doggy life / And the torturer's horse scratches its innocent behind on a tree." When Auden reads it, that's what you remember. You can hear his own amazement that he had been capable of that simple, completely new bit of poetic speech. Christopher Isherwood was a huge influence on Auden. That's what people don't understand. Isherwood is partly responsible for Auden's greatness. When they went their separate ways, Auden's poetry grew colder and more abstract. Isherwood was the wax on Auden's wings.

I BOUGHT A CHIN-UP BAR and a badminton set. They were both surprisingly cheap. The badminton set comes in a clear zippered case-birdies, rackets, and net, all neatly packed. You can buy purple birdies now, as well as white birdies. What is it like to play in the cool of the twilight with a purple birdie? I don't know. Does anyone make birdies out of actual tailfeathers anymore?

I think I bought the badminton set because I had an idea that I would practice, refine my skill set. Perhaps work on picking up the birdie from the grass without getting a nose-bleed. But how can you really practice badminton on your own? You can't. You can bounce a tennis ball against the barn door, and I used to do that in the summer when I was fourteen and didn't have anyone to play tennis with. But you just can't bounce a birdie against the barn and get anything useful from it. I thought of calling up my friend Tim and asking him if he would like to play badminton, but that just seemed silly, and anyway I'd be using him to improve my game so that if Nan and Chuck invited me to play badminton again I'd be better at it, which didn't seem very nice. He'd be like a human batting cage. Also Tim's stomach has gotten large, and he's self-conscious about that.

What's the meter of badminton? There's a hard one, friends. Poink, poink, poink. "Break, break, break, / On thy cold gray stones O Sea." A monosyllabic meter. And tennis? Tennis is a slow duple meter. Pa-pock, pa-pock, pa-pock. "Two roads-diverged-in a yell-ow wood." Hm, "yellow" doesn't work. Fault-thirty love. Love means nothing in tennis, as you know. Frost said that free verse was like playing tennis without a net. Lawn Tennyson. Marianne Moore was a lifelong tennis player but not a good metrist. She had a pet crow, and she circled her rhyme words with different colored pencils. Mina Loy once said, Imagine a tennis player who wrote poems. "Would not his meter depend on his way of life?"

Ping-Pong-now there's a fine rollicking meter. You can recite Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome to a game of Ping-Pong. Try it:

Through teeth, and skull, and helmet

So fierce a thrust he sped,

The good sword stood a hand-breadth out

Behind the Tuscan's head.

Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay. This used to be the poem that all little boys read in English private schools. It was violent, and it was nasty, and it galumphed right along. Headmasters would give this poem out as a present to their prize students. And 0.00001 percent of these little boys who read this poem ended up becoming great English Ping-Pong players. More to the point, 0.0000000001 percent of them ended up becoming great English poets. That was the glorious, indispensable inefficiency of the British educational system.

Macaulay's theory, which he explained in his introduction, was that the Latin poetry that survived, that made it through the dark and sketchy times, wasn't representative of the songs people had sung in Rome. The literary poetry of Horace and et cetera had survived because it wasn't memorable. It had to be written down. It didn't stick in your head. The "lays"-the popular love songs and drinking songs and war songs-were all lost, every single one. So Macaulay, who was by the way a venomous essayist, wrote these bloody imaginary battle ballads to supply the lack.

Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome. "Through teeth, and skull, and helmet-" Crunch. "So fierce a thrust he sped-" It's completely disgusting and repellant.

Three end-rests in that four-line stanza. Right? Four beats in each line. Lines one, two, and four have rests, line three doesn't, and that longer line gives it that parrun tun tan, tarran tan tan, tarRUM pum pom pom pom ending.

English is a stressed language, and you want to boom it out sometimes. Then sometimes you want to whisper it, like this: "Give me my scallop-shell of quiet." Poetry is written sometimes, I think, in a whisper. Not a stage whisper but a real human whisper. A confiding sorrowful whisper, brimful of emotion. And when it's declaimed it's ruined. Which is sad, really. Very very sad.

You hear that bird? Chirtle chirtle chirtle chirtle. With birds it's different. Birds are very different than we are. They don't know what an upbeat is. They go, Chirtle, chirtle, chirtle, chirtle. And then the next time they might just go, Chirtle-chirtle, chirtle. It's like some kind of wigged-out aimless Gregorian chant. And then sometimes: Chirtle chirtle. And then: Chirtle chirtle chirt? Questioning. You don't know where you are with that. The meter is primitive. It's a primitive meter. But we obviously respond to it. When I hear that chirping, I know that the world is starting up. And that I'd better get something done that day, or I will have failed once again. As I have failed today.

Chirtle chirtle. Chirtle. Chirtle.

Nice chirpin' there, Mister Birdie! Good one. I like what you did there. That's good! Funky bitch! Love your work!