from ‘New Year Letter’ by W.H. Auden (1940)

.................................

To set in order--that's the task
Both Eros and Apollo ask;
For Art and Life agree in this
That each intends a synthesis,
That order which must be the end
That all self-loving things intend
Who struggle for their liberty,
Who use, that is, their will to be.
Though order never can be willed
But is the state of the fulfilled,
For will but wills its opposite
And not the whole in which they fit,
The symmetry disorders reach
When both are equal each to each,
Yet in intention all are one,

(...)

Art in intention is mimesis
But, realised, the resemblance ceases;
Art is not life and cannot be
A midwife to society,
For Art is a fait accompli.
What they should do or how or when
Life-order comes to living men
It cannot say, for it presents
Already living experience
Through a convention that creates
Autonomous completed states.
Though their particulars are those
That each particular artist knows,
Unique events that once took place
Within a unique time and space,
In the new field they occupy,
The unique serves to typify,
Becomes, though still particular,
An algebraic formula,
An abstract model of events
Derived from past experiments,
And each life must itself decide
To what and how it be applied

(…)

Trapped in a medium’s artifice,
To charity, delight, increase.
Now large, magnificent and calm,
Your changeless presence disarm
The sullen generations, still
The fright and fidget of the will,
And to the growing and the weak
Your final transformation speak,
Saying to dreaming ‘I am deed,’
To striving ‘Courage. I succeed,’
To mourning ‘I remain. Forgive,’
And to becoming ‘I am. Live’