As a poet, WH Auden considered opera “the last refuge of the High Style”. In their text for Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress (premiered in Venice in 1951), he and his collaborator Chester Kallman certainly made the most of the high-style opportunities that opera offered.
Their libretto, drawing on Hogarth’s 18th-century paintings, is peppered with sly rhyming couplets, thees and thous, inverted word-order and sundry other archaisms.
