One rational voice is dumb: over a grave
The household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved.
Sad is Eros, builder of cities,
And weeping anarchic Aphrodite.

The lines stage a funeral lament in which “Reason” (the “rational voice”) is imagined as dead and therefore powerless—“dumb”—while the unruly “household of Impulse” grieves the loss of something it nonetheless depended on. By invoking Eros and Aphrodite, Auden frames the conflict between rational order and erotic/desiring energies in mythic terms: Eros is paradoxically a “builder of cities” (desire as a civilizing, social force), while Aphrodite is “anarchic” (love as destabilizing, lawless). The poem’s elegiac tone suggests that without reason, even the forces of love and creativity become sorrowful and disoriented, mourning the collapse of a balancing principle that made their energies fruitful rather than merely chaotic.