Radiance

Alexander McCall Smith’s What W. H. Auden Can Do For You describes the profound influence of a much loved poet. As with those we come to love wholeheartedly, Smith wishes he’d discovered Auden earlier, and determinedly introduces his four-year old daughter to favorite verses (“As I walked out one evening, / Walking down Bristol Street, / The crowds upon the pavement / Were fields of golden wheat”). Auden’s mix of worldliness and naïveté broadens and softens, and coaxes towards acceptance of human sorts: “The moon looks on them all, / The healers and the brilliant talkers, / The eccentrics and the silent walkers, /The dumpy and the tall.”