Pleasure Island

What there is as a surround to our figures
Is very old, very big,
Very formidable indeed; the ocean
Stares right past us as though
No one here was worth drowning, and the eye, true
Blue all summer, of the sky
Would not miss a huddle of huts related
By planks, a dock, a state
Of undress and improvised abandon
Upon shadowless sand.
To send a cry of protest or a call for
Protection up into all
Those dazzling miles, to add, however sincerely,
One's occasional tear
To that volume, would be rather silly,
Nor is there one small hill
For the hopeful to climb, one tree for the hopeless
To sit under and mope;
The coast is a blur and without meaning
The churches and routines
Which stopped there and never cared or dared to
Cross over to interfere
With this outpost where nothing is wicked
But to be sorry or sick,
But one thing unneighbourly, work. Sometimes
A visitor may come
With notebooks intending to make its quiet
Emptiness his ally
In accomplishing immortal chapters,
But the hasty tap-tap-tap
Of his first day becomes by the second
A sharp spasmodic peck
And by the third is extinct; we find him
Next improving his mind
On the beach with a book, but the dozing
Afternoon is opposed
To rhyme and reason and chamber music,
The plain sun has no use
For the printing press, the wheel, the electric
Light, and the waves reject
Sympathy: soon he gives in, stops stopping
To think, lets his book drop
And lies, like us, on his stomach watching
As bosom, backside, crotch
Or other sacred trophy is borne in triumph
Past his adoring by
Souls he does not try to like; then, getting
Up, gives all to the wet
Clasps of the sea or surrenders his scruples
To some great gross braying group
That will be drunk till Fall. The tide rises
And falls, our household ice
Drips to death in the dark and our friendships
Prepare for a weekend
They will probably not survive: for our
Lenient amusing shore
Knows in fact about all the dyings, is in
Fact our place, namely this
Place of a skull, a place where the rose of
Self-punishment will grow,
The sunset happens, the bar is copious
With fervent life that hopes
To make sense, but down the beach some decaying
Spirit shambles away,
Kicking idly at driftwood and dead shellfish
And excusing itself
To itself with evangelical gestures
For having failed the test:
The moon is up there, but without warning,
A little before dawn,
Miss Lovely, life and soul of the party,
Wakes with a dreadful start,
Sure that whatever--O God!--she is in for
Is about to begin,
Or hearing, beyond the hushabye noises
Of sea and Me, just a voice
Ask as one might the time or a trifle
Extra her money and her life.

-W. H. Auden

The sea wind blew open Auden's Selected Poetry when we went out on the beach this afternoon and this was the first poem that greeted me. Besides Auden, other things that go well with an afternoon on the beach: Fennesz's Endless Summer.

In other coincidences, I am unoriginal.