Brad DeLong memorializes the anniversary with Auden's "September 1, 1939," which I suppose is inevitable but which I have never particularly admired, in contrast with this reader. I do not think that this --
Accurate scholarship can-- either wears well 70 years later, or carries any moral sense whatsoever. The Germans invaded Poland because of the evil done to them? Huh?
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.
And I do not quite understand what this verse is even saying:
Into this neutral airWhat follows the colon -- is it the vain competitive excuse, or is it Auden's commentary on the vain competitive excuses? It seems clear that we ourselves bear guilt for "Imperialism's face" -- okay, got it, but what did that have to do with September 1, 1939 -- and "the international wrong," which is like some right-winger's parody of Liberal Guilt.
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.
These lines do not show Auden's having progressed much beyond his notorious line about "the necessary murder" for which Orwell scalded him.
That said, let's give the poem credit for some of its better lines:
Faces along the bar... Carried my Auden-trashin' to the DeLong thread, where the interested may see what response it engendereth.
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
... Silbey has a good post up on September 1.
The short choppy lines are extraordinarily ugly.
ReplyDeleteYeats could pull them off in "Easter 1916," but Auden was not Yeats.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete"Easter 1916," last stanza:
ReplyDeleteToo long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse--
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.