A Symposium on W. H. Auden’s “A Change of Air”

A Change of Air

Corns, heartburn, sinus headaches, such minor ailments 
Tell of estrangement between your name and you, 
Suggest a change of air: heed them, but let 
The modesty of their discomfort warn you 
Against the flashy errands of your dreams. 

To grow a sailor's beard, don monkish garb, 
Or trade in an agglutinative tongue 
With a stone-age culture would be mollycoddling: 
To go elsewhere is to abstain from movement; 
A side-step, a short one, will convey you thither. 

Although its chaffinches, maybe, have learned 
The dialect of another river-basin, 
A fault transformed the local building stone, 
It has a priest, a post-mistress, an usher, 
Its children know they are not to beg from strangers. 

Within its average elsewhereishness 
Your name is as a mirror answers, yourself 
How you behave in shops, the tips you give; 
It sides with neither, being outside both, 
But welcomes both with healing disregard. 

Nor when you both return here (you will, of course), 
Where luck and instinct originally brought you, 
Will it salute your reconciliation 
With farewell rites, or populate your absence 
With reverent and irreverent anecdote. 

No study of your public reappearance 
Will show, as judgement on a cure demands, 
A sudden change in love, ideas or diet; 
Your sojourn elsewhere will remain a wordless 
Hiatus in your voluble biography. 

Fanatic scholarship at most may prove 
That you resigned from a Committee, unearth 
A letter from the Grand-Duke to his cousin, 
Remarking, among more important gossip, 
That you seem less amusing than you were.