“Coming out of me living is always thinking, / Thinking changing and changing living….”

These are the first lines of an unfamous poem by a famous poet. “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” and “September 1, 1939” are just a few dozen pages away in Auden’s Selected Poems, but I sometimes hesitate here, read these lines again, move my index finger in a little circle as I pass over each of the gerunds. Thinking, changing, changing, living.

Oh, the effortless, endless motion of those wee verbish wheels turning! But I stop here not exactly for them, or for their grammatical function (we could have, say, clapping, eating, smiling, with only the most superficial charm). I stop because I am invited to imagine the most vital processes of the human self—thought and change and life—fitted together and visible, as though the poet had lifted off the face of an old-fashioned watch.

Think of it: we look down from a star or some other satellite and see a series of storm systems pinwheeling across the Earth, silent and even gentle from our perch up in space. Indeed, later in the poem the speaker calls himself a “tiny observer of enormous world.” Oh, that one could hover above our world—so detached, so advanced, so adult.

In the next lines we learn that the speaker is also ­gazing downward, watching a few waterfowl from a bridge over a river. He later meets some friends who are behaving somewhat childishly, and he forgives them, ­piously and a little pompously—for they are frightened, alienated, “alone in flesh,” as, one assumes, are we all. At the poem’s end, he exhorts himself to be different, to “love my life, not as other, / Not as bird’s life, not as child’s”—and then ends in an avowal, spoken aloud: “‘Cannot,’ I said, ‘being no child now nor a bird.’” I found this to be a ­mature thing to say, pointed it out to friends of mine, even—really just a way of trying to say it too.

“Coming out of me living” is the second in a four-part series Auden wrote in 1929, when he was only ­twenty-two. This January, when I had just turned ­twenty-five, I pored over it for several days. At the time I thought...