From “The Age of Anxiety” by W. H. Auden

For the others, like me, there is only the flash

Of negative knowledge, the night when, drunk, one

Staggers to the bathroom and stares in the glass

To meet one’s madness, when what mother said seems

Such darling rubbish and the decent advice

Of the liberal weeklies as lost an art

As peasant pottery, for plainly it is not.

To the Cross or to Clarté or to Common Sense

Our passions pray but to primitive totems

As absurd as they are savage; science or no science,

It is Bacchus or the Great Boyg or Baal-Peor,

Fortune’s Ferris-wheel or the physical sound

Of our own names which they actually adore as their

Ground and goal.