Mind of Winter

A poem from the beginning of World War II that is not irrelevant today:

Excerpt from September 1, 1939

by W.H. Auden

…

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

…

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

…

The full poem, which is still under copyright, may be read at Poets.org.

Twelve Songs [Song V, March 1936]

by W. H. Auden

Fish in the unruffled lakes
Their swarming colours wear,
Swans in the winter air
A white perfection have,
And the great lion walks
Through his innocent grove;
Lion, fish, and swan
Act, and are gone
Upon Time’s toppling wave.

We, till shadowed days are done,
We must weep and sing
Duty’s conscious wrong,
The Devil in the clock,
The goodness carefully worn
For atonement or for luck;
We must lose our loves,
On each beast and bird that moves
Turn an envious look.

Sighs for folly done and said
Twist our narrow days,
But I must bless, I must praise
That you, my swan, who have
All gifts that to the swan
Impulsive nature gave,
The majesty and pride,
Last night should add
Your voluntary love.

Twelve Songs [Song VIII, April 1936]

by W. H. Auden

At last the secret is out, as it always must come in the end,
The delicious story is ripe to tell to the intimate friend;
Over the tea-cups and in the square the tongue has its desire;
Still waters run deep, my dear, there’s never smoke without fire.

Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links,
Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks,
Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh
There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.

For the clear voice suddenly singing, high up in the convent wall,
The scent of the elder bushes, the sporting prints in the hall,
The croquet matches in summer, the handshake, the cough, the kiss,
There is always a wicked secret, a private reason for this.

Auden has an essay on Frost that I like. Here’s how it ends:

Hardy, Yeats, and Frost have all written epitaphs for themselves.

Hardy
I never cared for life, life cared for me.
And hence I owe it some fidelity…

Yeats
Cast a cold eye
On life and death.
Horseman, pass by.

Frost
I would have written of me on my stone
I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

Of the three, Frost, surely, comes off best. Hardy seems to be stating the Pessimist’s Case rather than his own feelings. I never cared… Never? Now, Mr. Hardy, really! Yeats’ horseman is a stage prop; the passer-by is much more likely to be a motorist. But Frost convinces me that he is telling neither more nor less than the truth about himself. And, when it comes to wisdom, is not having a lover’s quarrel with life more worthy of Prospero than not caring or looking coldly?

I realize looking over this that it’s not clear that any of those are necessarily on any of the poets’ headstones. Still, I thought I’d mention it. If only because I like the essay.

I have mentioned a couple of Auden poems from Homage to Clio, the book from which came The More Loving One. Here is one of them that I like a lot. My only trouble with it is the “thank our lucky star” line. Was this less of a cliche when the poem was written or was he just in a rush?

An Island Cemetery

by W.H. Auden

This graveyard with its umbrella pines
Is inferior in status to the vines
And, though new guests keep crowding in,
Must stay the size it’s always been.

Where men are many, acres few,
The dead must be cultivated too,
Like seeds in any farmer’s field
Are planted for the bones they yield.

It takes about eighteen months for one
To ripen into a skeleton,
To be washed, folded, packed in a small
Niche hollowed out of the cemetery wall.

Curiousity made me stop
While sextons were digging up a crop:
Bards have taken it too amiss
That Alexanders come to this.

Wherever our personalities go
(And, to tell the truth, we do not know),
The solid structures they leave behind
Are no discredit to our kind.

Mourners may miss, and they do, a face,
But at least they cannot detect a trace
Of those fishlike hungers, mammalian heats,
That kin our flesh to the coarser meats.

And who would be ashamed to own
To a patience that we share with stone,
This underlying thing in us
Which never at any time made a fuss?

Considering what our motives are,
We ought to thank our lucky star
That Love must ride to reach his ends
A mount which has no need of friends.

Perhaps Auden’s last line points us to something about the type of cynicism that these poems exhibit. The view that the stars don’t, in fact, give a damn is born from an attempt to remove all personifiable qualities that would typically be attributed to stars (caring, watching-over, keenness in Frost’s words). What we’re left with when we strip the stars of all the mystical qualities (the ones that Bronte satirically gives them) is nothing but the pale and lifeless eyes of a statue. Perhaps Auden is inviting the question in his last line: Should we be doing this? And, if we do succumb to the cynical modern view of the stars, what are we left with when we stare at the nothingness?

PS: Do we have a second poem lined up for next week?

If one can abide stars that are simply points of light, inert things that don’t watch us and are no kind of companion—and certainly this is what we all believe nowadays—one can learn to adjust to an empty sky. An empty sky is awfully beautiful, too, and, moreover, reminds us that we are the more loving ones—the only ones who love. That is something of a distinction. Bronte would never adjust… but she is lost in her fantasy: could the dark of her pillow really be a surrogate for the washed out stars? Auden is more cynical. There is no difference between day and night if stars are not the sort to give a damn.

But maybe there is a difference… the daily washout of the stars by the blood-red sun doesn’t faze Auden while the total dark sublime would take (him) a little getting used to. I think Mike is right to wonder persistently about that last line. I feel strongly that we are meant to read ‘a little time’ as ‘a hell of a lot of time.’ So which is it—“no worries, man, the stars are just pretty lights anyway” or “this might take a good long while.” Maybe Auden is as susceptible to fantasy as Bronte. I know I am.

RE: #1) I’m not sure I fell similarly about the dark sky. I tend to agree more with the idea that one could learn to love an empty sky as much as the stars, not out of a residual effect of the stars but due to a newfound appreciation of total dark. One consideration: as Frost hinted, the stars die every morning and we are often left with an empty sky. Granted, it is blue and not black, but it is interesting that in stanza 2 he mentions the daytime and immediately follows it with the hypothetical situation of stars dying. These two are in many ways the same event. It seems to suggest that because he doesn’t miss the stars during the day there is no reason he should miss them at night.

But…… thinking about it further, why does Auden feel the need to replace his admiration? I think I’m liking Alan’s general theory applied to this situation. I’ll leave that to Alan. Regardless, if we take his affection to be a template for general human affection, it might point to a necessity of loving at night (during the bad times, maybe?).

A couple of quick comments regarding The More Loving One before I go to bed:

1. Brian, I think, was right to insist that ‘sublime’ is not a noun in this poem. I was perhaps overly enthusiastic about my misreading. Had he felt “the total dark sublime” I would have maintained my case, but the word in the poem is ‘its.’ That little pronoun seems to demand that the object be an attribute or quality of the empty sky, and ‘sublime’ just doesn’t work that way. I still want to believe that the sublime dark is not a substitute for the stars, and that the affection is not preserved through some transference, but rather the appreciation of the absence of the object is itself is in some way just a sublimation, so to speak, of the original sentiment. I’m certain, though, that ‘sublime’ can be used as a noun in other circumstances.
2. In reading this poem, I was reminded of a passage from one of my favorite novels (my appreciation is somewhat idiosyncratic, and I’m not sure I’d recommend the book to anyone else):

   It’s very odd, my dear Lewis, how being loved brings out the worst in comparatively amiable people. One sees these worthy creatures lying at one’s feet and protesting their supreme devotion. And it’s a great strain to treat them with even moderate civility. I doubt whether anyone is nice enough to receive absolutely defenceless love.

   —C.P. Snow, The Light and the Dark

   I took it to mean that the speaker agrees: “If equal affection cannot be,” she’d rather not be on the receiving end. Of course, she also says, “If a love affair has come to the point when one needs to get things straight, then…it’s time to think a little about the next.” Perhaps it’s best not to pay too close attention to what she says…

3. I keep wanting to skip the word ‘me’ in the last line. Without it, the line is iambic and comfortable; with it, I am forced to pay attention to what the line actually says.

Point:

The More Loving One

by W.H. Auden

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.