Poem(s) of the Week

This appeared in Nones (1951) as Footnotes to Dr Sheldon. However the two parts (I and II) are more often found as separate poems nowadays.

Footnotes to Dr. Sheldon
W H Auden

I
Behold the manly mesomorph
Showing his bulging biceps off,
Whom social workers love to touch,
Though the loveliest girls do not care for him much.

Pretty to watch with bat or ball,
An Achilles, too, in a bar-room brawl,
But in the ditch of hopeless odds,
The hour of desertion by brass and gods,

Not a hero. It is the pink-and-white,
Fastidious, almost girlish in the night
When the proud-arsed broad-shouldered break and run,
Who covers their retreat, dies at his gun.

II
Give me a doctor partridge-plump,
Short in the leg and broad in the rump,
An endomorph with gentle hands
Who'll never make absurd demands
That I abandon all my vices
Nor pull a long face in a crisis,
But with a twinkle in his eye
Will tell me that I have to die.