In “The Night I Finished Auden,” Stephen Kampa pays tribute to a favorite poet [W. H. Auden, pictured left] in the most elegant way—by not just alluding to several of Auden’s poems but also writing in imitation of his distinctive manner. The rhymed trimeters, iambic but often starting with a stressed syllable, are signature Auden, as are the buried serious jokes. In Kampa’s final stanza, “I felt like one who’s wandered” calls up Keats’ lines about Homer (“Then felt I like some watcher of the skies”). And in imagining “a form that could contain/ An elegy for oceans, /An epitaph for rain” Kampa not only updates Auden’s world as our climate-changed one, but fulfills Auden’s stated wish in his “Letter to Lord Byron:” “I want a form that’s large enough to swim in.” — Mary Jo Salter
The Night I Finished Auden
The night I finished Auden
Was much like any night:
A palatable meal had
Appeased my appetite,
A sweating green-glass bottle
Provided company
For Auden, in absentia,
And absentminded me.
I like the later poems,
Mannered and talkative
With doctrinaire digressions,
For posing how to live
Gracefully with the knowledge
That even the most wry,
Intelligent, and gentle
Among us, too, must die.
Wystan, you mastered meters
For which I know no names
And thanked the god who gave us
Our grammar and our games,
Then selflessly accomplished—
A born iconoclast—
Your corpse, but left your corpus,
Of which I’ve read the last.
I feel like one who’s wandered
Through hitherto unseen
Landscapes, equipped with nothing
But compass and canteen
And tasked by ghosts with finding
A form that could contain
An elegy for oceans,
An epitaph for rain.
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Author: The Best American Poetry
