For Friends Only - Poem by WH Auden

Ours yet not ours, being set apart As a shrine to friendship, Empty and silent most of the year, This room awaits from you What you alone, as visitor, can bring, A weekend of personal life. In a house backed by orderly woods, Facing a tractored sugar-beet country, Your working hosts engaged to their stint, You are unlike to encounter Dragons or romance: were drama a craving, You would not have come. Books we do have for almost any Literate mood, and notepaper, envelopes, For a writing one (to "borrow" stamps Is the mark of ill-breeding): Between lunch and tea, perhaps a drive; After dinner, music or gossip. Should you have troubles (pets will die Lovers are always behaving badly) And confession helps, we will hear it, Examine and give our counsel: If to mention them hurts too much, We shall not be nosey. Easy at first, the language of friendship Is, as we soon discover, Very difficult to speak well, a tongue With no cognates, no resemblance To the galimatias of nursery and bedroom, Court rhyme or shepherd's prose, And, unless spoken often, soon goes rusty. Distance and duties divide us, But absence will not seem an evil If it make our re-meeting A real occasion. Come when you can: Your room will be ready. In Tum-Tum's reign a tin of biscuits On the bedside table provided For nocturnal munching. Now weapons have changed, And the fashion of appetites: There, for sunbathers who count their calories, A bottle of mineral water. Felicissima notte! May you fall at once Into a cordial dream, assured That whoever slept in this bed before Was also someone we like, That within the circle of our affection Also you have no double.