W.H. Auden Poem Mentioned in 'The Tommyknockers'

[ZomZom]

Stephen King mentions a W.H. Auden poem in ‘The Tommyknockers’ but I haven’t been able to identify the specific poem. Here is the reference:

He found himself remembering W.H. Auden’s poem about running away: sooner or later you always ended up in one room, under a naked light bulb, playing solitaire at three in the morning.

Anyone know which poem this is?

[Gray_Ghost]

I wonder if it is a strange reference to the flight of Mary and Joseph into Egypt in Auden’s, For The Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio? The poem is complicated, and I don’t claim to understand it, but this passage [trimmed to accommodate the Dope’s fair use policy] seems to be what good old Gard was referring to:

VOICES OF THE DESERT:
In a land of lilies I lost my wits,
Nude as a number all night I ran
With a ghost for a guest along green canals;
By the waters of waking I wept for the weeds.
Come to our jolly desert
Where even the dolls go whoring;
Where cigarette-ends
Become intimate friends.
And it’s always three in the morning.

In the context of the rest of the poem (It’s available for now at archive.org, if you squint.), the passage is kinda’ what he’s talking about.

[Gray_Ghost]

Oh, and not actually having a copy of the text, I don’t know if the following quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald is there, but this blog post conjoins the Auden text and Fitzgerald quote for some reason. Fitzgerald quote, from an article in a 1936issue of Esquire, entitled The Crack-Up:

Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering – this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutary daytime advice for everyone. But at three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work – and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.

EDIT: Thanks for the question; I had forgotten how much fun it was to read Auden.

[Dendarii_Dame]

I remember being in a high school academic competition where one question our team missed (and the other team got) was “According to F. Scott Fitzgerald, in a real dark night of the soul, what time is it?”

[ZomZom]

Thanks, Gray Ghost, nice sleuthing. I’m really surprised to find so little in my searches on the question. Much appreciated!