University of Ljubljana

Faculty of Arts
Department of English

The Social and Political Engagement of W. H. Auden’s Verse

Supervisor: Dr Danica Čerče, full prof.

Course: American Poetry of the 19th and 20th Centuries

Date of submission: 23 February, 2023

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Table of Content

1. Introduction..........................................................................................................................4
2. Biography..............................................................................................................................5
3. Writing Career.....................................................................................................................5
3.1. First period...................................................................................................................5
3.2. The Second Period.......................................................................................................7
3.3. The Third period..........................................................................................................9
3.4. The Fourth Period......................................................................................................11
4. Conclusion...........................................................................................................................12
References...............................................................................................................................97

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Abstract

This seminar paper briefly examines W.H. Auden’s outlook on and engagement with the
political and social environment of Europe and America throughout the four period of his
writing career and how his social and political views reflected in few selected works of his
poetry. It briefly describes W.H. Auden’s life. It continues by going through Auden’s literary
career chronologically and dividing it into four periods. First it goes through Auden’s views
from 1927 to 1932 and how they can be seen in the two selected poems. Then it takes a look
at the poet’s outlook and political engagement from 1933 to 1938 and focusing on the poem
“Spain 1937” and the various interpretations of it. It goes on to explain the time period from
1939 to 1947 and Auden’s move from political verse. This section also discusses the poem
“New Year Letter” and its social themes. Lastly, the paper explains the final period of
Auden’s life and briefly explores the poem “The Shield of Achilles.” All the discussed poems
in the paper are in the appendix.

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 1. Introduction

The main purpose of this paper is to closely examine W.H. Auden’s outlook on and
engagement with the political and social environment of Europe, more specifically Spain, and
later on America – places he was deeply affected by and/or lived in – throughout the four
period of his writing career and how it reflects in specific works of his poetry. This will be
done by drawing from various academic sources, which discuss and interpret Auden’s poetry
and social and political views. Unsurprisingly, we shall also be heavily relying upon Auden’s
own verse works throughout the paper; more specifically we will be analysing “Brothers,
who when the sirens roar,” “Coming out of me living is always thinking,” “Spain 1937,”
“New Year Letter” and “Shield pf Achilles.”

Auden held differing political stances throughout his life: from the idealistic and activist-
driven outlook of his earlier years, to his disillusionment and consequent political
ambivalence after his time in Spain, and later in life to his more withdrawn and theological
approach and contemplation after his move to America and flight from European verse.

Section 2 presents a basic overview of Auden’s life. Section 3 focuses on Auden’s political
and social views and how they reflected in his selected works of his poetry. This section is
divided into four subsections, each focusing on a period of his writing career and analysing
one or two poems from that time from a social and political perspective.

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 2. Biography

Wystan Hugh Auden, more widely known as W.H. Auden, was an English and American
poet that was born in 1907 in York, England. His family were extremely pious Anglo-
Catholics, though he himself only became enamoured with religion gradually later on in life.

In 1930 he moved to Berlin, which is also where he met his long-term lover, Christopher
Isherwood. He travelled a lot, visiting and staying in various countries, from China, where he
along with Isherwood covered the Sino-Japanese conflict, to Iceland, a country he chose in
hopes of escaping the political turmoil of the continent. In 1935, he entered into a lavender
marriage with Erika Mann when her German citizenship was threatened. The couple never
lived together but remained good friends until her death in 1969. Auden worked as both an
essayists, lecturer and reviewer.

In 1939, he and Isherwood's moved to America where they separated quickly after arrival.
Auden began teaching in Swarthmore but in 1946, after gaining his American citizenship, he
moved to New York and began writing for US journals such as The New Yorker and Vogue.
During his time in America, Auden also became more focused on religion, his Protestant
theology becoming increasingly predominant in his writings. In 1956, he became a professor
at Oxford University, though he continued to live in New York.

Later in life he moved away from poetry and primarily wrote book reviews and literary
essays. In the last few years of his life, Auden lived interchangeably in the US, Austria and
Italy. He died of heart failure in 1973 in Vienna.

3. Writing Career

Auden himself separated his writing career into four distinct periods, a sectioning we will
also go adhere to in this paper as it provides us with a practical and more easily
understandable segmentation of content.

3.1. First period

The first period he marks as starting in 1927, when he was still an undergraduate at Oxford
and his deep attraction to and interest in modernism began to emerge (though it must be noted

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that Auden was already writing poetry five years earlier at age fifteen), and ending in 1932
with his long poem The Orators.

The poems from this period are notable for having “nothing to do with classes or nation,”
meaning that Auden was at the time not yet heavily concerned or simply did not have enough
proper incentive to write about concrete political and social matters; his poetry instead deals
with “the battle of a dead past against an inaccessible future.” (Mendelson, Auden 17).
Replogle in “Auden’s Marxism” asserts that before 1933 Auden build his beliefs on society
mostly upon psychological foundations, drawing primarily from the writings of Freud,
Homer Lane and D.H. Lawrence. (585)

Auden’s first dabblings in Marxism were, according to Replogle, non-serious and often
bordering on farce, at times going well into the ridicule territory. (“Auden’s Marxism” 586)
As an example we have an untitled poem from August of 1932, in which Auden expresses a
new-found “explicit sympathy with the proletariat,” seen in the beginning line “Brothers, who
when the sirens roar.” (Replogle, “Social Philosophy” 359) The “Brothers” at the beginning
were, when the poem was originally published, “Comrades,” linking Auden even more
directly to Communism. (Knox 20) Yet Auden is here not expressing sincere kinship with the
“Brothers,” but is throughout the poem self-consciously embarrassed to even play the role of
‘brother’ to the proletarians, compensating for his embarrassment by pretentiously half-
mocking Marxist sympathies and doctrines. (Replogle, “Auden’s Marxism” 586) The
“sympathy with the proletariat” is staged, the poem merely being “an exercise in writing from
a political position” not a heartfelt incursion into Marxism. (Replogle, “Social Philosophy”
359)

Despite Auden himself proclaiming the poems from this period were primarily concerned
with the subject of “their own division and estrangement,” many of his readers were apt to
impose Freudian and Marxist allegories onto them, while others inserted “their own political
and psychological enthusiasms” into them. (Mendelson, Auden 21, 24)

On the other hand, Spears writes that Auden’s poetry during this time was constantly
hovering at the crossroads between the objective need to diagnose the problems of society
and the morally and psychologically deficient individuals that inhabit it, and the subjective
need to withdraw into the fantastical, mythical and unconscious.

In another poem, this one from May of 1929, Auden responds to a friend talking about the
fights between the police and Communists that were happening at the time with “Till I was

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angry, said I was pleased.” While most people read this as “a statement of Auden’s anger at
the police and his pleasure at the prospect of revolution”, Mendelson suggests that Auden
merely “said he was pleased” while actually being rather unconcerned with it, at the time
being more preoccupied with the “strictly private development of the life of the mind” not the
developing political and social world. (Auden 74)

3.2. The Second Period

Auden’s second period can be marked as beginning in 1933 and ending in 1938. This was, as
Spears puts it, the period “in which Auden was the hero of the left.” Mendelson states that if
before Auden had written politically only “in the broadest sense of the word,” he now, in
early 1933, “almost accepted the argument that Communism was the one choice remaining
for [the] wrecked society,” though Auden himself admits that this shift was done more on
psychological than political grounds. (Auden 28)

During this time Auden visited many countries, including Iceland, China, Germany, the US
etc. The country that left the most impact on him though was Spain, which he visited in 1937
– amidst the Spanish Civil War –intending to serve on the Republic side by driving an
ambulance. His ambition, however, was never achieved as he was instead put to work writing
propaganda and broadcasting. Auden himself later on admitted that his brief time in Spain
“marked the beginning both of his disillusion with the left and of his return to Christianity.”
(Spears) Grass writes that while “Auden returned from Spain still anti-Fascist” he was now
disenchanted with the realities of the totalitarian Left that turned out to be “far more
complicated and equivocal than he had ever dreamed.” (90-1) His newly arisen political
ambivalence manifested in his writings, most notably in his 1937 pamphlet Spain that he later
on revised and published in his collection of poems Another Time in 1940 as “Spain 1937.”

“Spain 1937” is by many considered unequivocally the “best poem in the English language
concerning the Spanish Civil War.” (Bone 6) The poem speaks of the past, present and future
of Spain. The past is described as a time of achievements, exploration and intellectual and
artistic greatness – “Yesterday the bustling world of the navigators,” “yesterday the invention
/ Of cartwheels and clocks,” “Yesterday the classic lecture / On the origin of Mankind” –
while “to-day [is] the struggle,” a line that repeated several times throughout the poem. Spain
of the present is in crisis; it is, as Replogle puts it, a period in which “nations yearn for
certainty and call out for some life force to ‘intervene.” (“Auden’s Marxism” 590) In the 20th

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stanza, the poem finally turns to the future, a time of relative pleasantness, which is, however,
immediately dwarfed by the struggle of today, where “the chances of death” and “the
necessary murder” are both part of grim reality.

In “Spain 1937” Auden first presents the past as a time of glory and success to better
convince us of “the necessity of immediate action” in the unstable and troubled present, so
that there may be a chance in the future for people to experience a brighter and better world.
(Bone 5) Spain during the time of its Civil War is in the poem depicted as an opportunity for
Auden’s generation to properly stand and act against the ever-increasing threat of Fascist
totalitarianism and to change the course of history, so people in the future may have greater
control of their own lives. (Bone 5)

Auden throughout the poem employs the use of the telegraphic style of writing – a style in
which only the minimum number of words necessary to convey the central meaning of the
text are used – to give the poem a less explicit tone and to elevate the writing. (Farrell 228)
With this clipped way of writing, the poem also becomes a sort of list; Auden presents us
with a record of everyday happenings and attitudes – “the theological feuds in the tavern,”
“the belief in the absolute value of Greek,” “the installation of dynamos and turbines” –
putting focus on them instead of the great battles and treaties of times gone by. (Farrell 229)
The past is by this simultaneously brought closer and intrinsically separated from the present
(Farrell 229). “To-day” is simply a time of all-prevailing struggle that is held in contrast to
the historical possibility and overall absence of conflict that “Yesterday” possessed. (Farrell
230)

Some consider “Spain 1937” to be a witness poem of war, others a defence of Communist
ideology, some label it as a political entreaty to Western democracies to aid Spain in their
time of need. (Farrell 227) Farrell, however, proclaims that the poem is none of those things,
but is instead a “call to arms” – a petition for people to stand up to fascists with, if necessary,
violent means and even at the risk of their own safety, all in the name of greater societal
good. Bone calls this the first poem in which Auden offers “unequivocal endorsement of
political action.” (3) “Spain 1937” takes The Spanish Civil war as an opportunity for people
to choose between being complacent, doing nothing and with it basically “commit[ting]
moral suicide” or to unite and stand against Fascism (Bone 3).

Alternatively, Replogle criticises the poem for remaining rather detached from “matters of
contemporary partisanship,” explaining that in “Spain 1937” Auden focuses more on the

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“philosophical basis of Marxism” and on “the nature of men” than on the political issues of
the day. (“Auden’s Marxism” 591) Bone as well points out that while the poem is indeed
“intellectually convincing,” it lacks the “emotional fire” that would successfully convince a
person to journey to Spain and take up arms for the Republic. (6)

In complete opposition to all others, however, Mendelson considers “Spain 1937” not at all a
political or public poem but rather a utopian one; a poem filled with nostalgia for the world of
the imaginary past and longing for the fanciful future. (Auden 188)

3.3. The Third period

In 1939, the third period of Auden’s career began, with him moving to the United States
Isherwood, and subsequently also consciously moving away from activist verse. (Grass 84)
This was a period of great religious and intellectual transformation for the poet. By 1939
Auden had altered his stance on politics in poetry and concluded, as he proclaims in his poem
“In Memory of W.B Yeats,” which was published the same year, that “poetry makes nothing
happen.” (Firchow 466)

This American Auden differed vastly from his younger English version. While the younger
Auden sought social causes for which he could use “poetry as a weapon,” the older Auden
mainly “tended to look inward and comment obliquely on the social world around him.”
(Firchow 467, 462) At the same time, Auden’s philosophy and interest shifted away from
Freud and Marx, as he began to engage more readily with the thoughts of Soren Kierkegaard
and Reinhold Niebuh, both of whom were primarily concerned with Christian philosophy and
ethics (Frichow 462).

Replogle states that Auden’s eventual return to Christianity in 1940 was philosophically
supported and influenced by his earlier studies of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. (“Auden’s
Marxism” 595) Their ideas on human nature triggered him to give up on his singular focus on
studying the psychology of human behaviour and instead made him focus on the philosophy
of human existence; a thinking that was later on transformed by his new religious
considerations and became a defining feature of the poetry of his later years (Replogle,
“Auden’s Marxism” 595).

Auden’s so-called political and religious “rebirth” also resulted in him going back and
revising many of his earlier political poems to rid them of their “overt political content”
(Grass 84) It was during this time, specifically in 1940 with the publication of Another Time,

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that Spain became “Spain 1937.” Grass sees this revision as an overt example to what extent
Auden’s “idealistic zeal” had degraded. (86) Auden had ever since visiting Spain refused to
discuss what had happened there, and his disillusionment with the Left and his
disappointment with the Republic had inevitably caused him to revise and soften the poem
directly dealing with these subjects.

In early January of 1940, Auden began to write the long poem “New Year Letter;” a poem he
wrote “partly to understand, partly to induce the transformation of his beliefs.” (Mendelson,
Auden 427) The poem primarily deals with religion, ethics and aesthetics; its rhymed
octosyllabic couplets giving it an air of rationality while its formal and conservative syntax
and meter hide behind them a “a restless idiosyncratic exploration of vast historical changes
and uncertainties.” (Mendelson, Auden 428-9) But “New Year Letter” also briefly addresses
social concerns of “demagoguery, populism, migration and a refugee problem” – “And in
jalopies there migrates / A rootless tribe from windblown states,” “Nor trust the demagogue
who raves,” etc. (Seal)

In “New Year Letter,” Auden also looks back to the beginning of modernity, back to the
Renaissance, and deliberates on the progression from one era into another, how “Another
unity was made / By equal amateurs in trade” when the previous era’s “unity ha[d] come to
grief / Upon professional belief.” (Mendelson, Auden 432) But Auden doesn’t stop at merely
describing the scientific advancement of the Renaissance and ridiculing those who thought
“that progress is not interesting”, but also says: “It is the Mover that is moved,” and in the
same stanza continues: “Man captured by his liberty, / The measurable taking charge / Of him
who measures …” Here he is trying to convey that all the trappings of so-called “progress”
have struck back; “That the machine has now destroyed / The local customs we enjoyed, /
Replaced the bonds of blood and nation / By personal confederation.” Humanity is now in a
crisis, where, as Mendelson suggests, “we must begin to build another era [limited only by
our] indolence, not ignorance.” (Auden 432)

The poem tells us that “building the Just City” will not come without sacrifice; that there are
no quick and easy utopian short-cuts to social justice even if Auden himself wishes it to be
so. (Mendelson, Auden 433) Mendelson also claims that the poem here “endorses the Marxist
analysis of Fascism,” as when the “machine” destroyed all the arbitrary groups of class,
nationality, political party, residence it left people only to make a personal choice with whom

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they will associate with and form groups. (Auden 446) It is “a throwback to collectivism no
longer possible in the machine age.” (Mendelson, Auden 446)

3.4. The Fourth Period

The last period of Auden’s writing career began when Auden started annually leaving New
York City to travel Europe for most of the year. It first occurred in 1948, and from then on
Auden spend his summers in Italy until 1957. (Spears) In 1948 he was awarded the Pulitzer
Prize for his last long poem The Age of Anxiety – published in 1947 – and five years later he
also received the Bollingen Prize. (Spears)

Mendelson described Auden of this time as” the avuncular, domestic, conservative, Horatian,
High Anglican poet of civilization […] [who] would seem to show few traces of the anarchic
stringencies of his younger self” (Auden 28) And although Auden did indeed reinvent and
transformed himself and his ideas over time, the social themes in Auden’s works remain,
albeit they are now more sober and contemplative. His later writings focus on “the mutual
implication of violence and civil order, the penalty in human life that every peaceful well-lit
city must pay to survive.” (Mendelson, Auden 29-30)

In 1965, when Auden was compiling and revising his poems for the Collected Shorter Poems
1927–1957, he discarded both “Spain 1937” and “September, 1939.” Mendelson in “Revision
and Power” claims that this was not done out of no longer agreeing with the two poem’s
political messages – the former being Marxist and the latter being idealistic – but because he,
in retrospect, considered the poems’ persuasive powers to no longer be on a par to rival “the
great struggle of the age,” and that his readers will consequently not be properly convinced
that they are, along with Auden, on the right side of the struggle. (Mendelson, Auden 105)
Glass, however, writes that especially “Spain 1937” or the lack thereof in Collected Shorter
Poems (1965) tantalises readers because it allows for its political blanks to be filled and
subsequently may help to explain Auden’s own abandonment of Europe for America in both
the literal and literary sense. (Glass 85)

A poem from this period, “The Shied of Achilles,” takes the events of book 18 of the Iliad, in
which Thetis, the mother of Achilles, commissions Hephaestus to forge her son a shield for
his battle in the Trojan war, and employs them to create a powerful political message. Thetis
expects to find scenes of “[w]hite flower-garlanded heifers,” “[m]arble well-governed cities,
“[m]en and women in a dance” engraved onto the shield, yet instead finds bleak depictions of

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“[b]arbed wire,” “a weed-choked field,” “a sky like lead,” “[a] ragged urchin, aimless and
alone.” Hephaestus has instead of heading her request decided to engrave the armour with
“scenes of human suffering and torture.” (Auden, Severn 1762) Summers describes the
prevailing theme of this poem “an indictment of dehumanizing trends in contemporary
society.” (214)

In the 3rd stanza we can discern a clear argument levelled at society: that listening to a “voice
without a face” – without question and reason will lead to “grief” that all will be responsible
for. (Auden, Severn 1762) William Ruleman in “The Library of Congress Variant” states that
the poem clearly ‘implicates all of us […] [and] teaches us […] our common complicity, if
not in evil, then at least in human frailty’” (Auden, Severn 1762) The poem, despite its
seeming simplicity, according to Summers, not only perfectly captures the religious and
political beliefs Auden held during the 1940s and early 50s but also presents them in a
masterful, vivid and non-didactic manner. (214)

4. Conclusion

The purpose of this paper was to examine W.H. Auden social and political evolvement
through his poetry. This purpose was achieved by giving a brief overview of Auden’s life and
works, then discussing Auden’s political role or lack thereof through his career, and
analysing selective works of Auden’s poetry that exhibit and/or reference his social and
political views and philosophies.

The paper shows that Auden held a variety of opinions regrading social and political matters
throughout his life that were influenced by his environment, time, readings and intellectual
deliberations; his beliefs range from his early political idealism and dabbling with Marxism
to his later withdrawal from overt discussions of politics and focus on Christian theology.

The paper further proves that many of Auden’s poetry exhibits his various social and political
beliefs, implicitly or explicitly. The paper also reveals that a number of academics disagree
on the sincerity of Auden’s political poetry and many more share contradicting views on the
specifics of Auden’s complex and often ambiguous social and political philosophies.

These topics were exhibited in the five poems that were debated and analysed from a social
and political perspective. The reader was able to engage with Auden’s poetry more fully
because of the details about his life and philosophy provided in the paper, and because of the

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more focused and particular examinations into the poems. The reader has hopefully gotten a
deeper understanding and appreciation of Auden’s political and social views and how they
can be seen in his poetry.

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Appendix

(untitled poem, August 1932)

Brothers, who when the sirens roar

From office, shop and factory pour

’Neath evening sky;

By cops directed to the fug

Of talkie-houses for a drug,

Or down canals to find a hug

Until you die:

We know, remember, what it is

That keeps you celebrating this

Sad ceremonial;

We know the terrifying brink

From which in dreams you nightly shrink.

‘I shall be sacked without’, you think,

‘A testimonial.’

We cannot put on airs with you

The fears that hurt you hurt us too

Only we say

That like all nightmares these are fake

If you would help us we could make

Our eyes to open, and awake

Shall find night day.

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On you our interests are set

Your sorrow we shall not forget

While we consider

Those who in every county town

For centuries have done you brown,

But you shall see them tumble down

Both horse and rider.

O splendid person, you who stand

In spotless flannels or with hand

Expert on trigger;

Whose lovely hair and shapely limb

Year after year are kept in trim

Till buffers envy as you swim

Your Grecian figure:

You are not jealous yet, we know,

But we must warn you, even so

So pray be seated:

It isn’t cricket, but it’s true

The lady who admires us, you

Have thought you’re getting off with too,

For you’re conceited.

Your beauty’s a completed thing.

The future kissed you, called you king,

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Did she? Deceiver!

She’s not in love with you at all

No feat of yours can make her fall,

She will not answer to your call

Like your retriever.

Dare-devil mystic who bear the scars

Of many spiritual wars

And smoothly tell

The starving that their one salvation

Is personal regeneration

By fasting, prayer and contemplation;

Is it? Well,

Others have tried it, all delight

Sustained in that ecstatic flight

Could not console

When through exhausting hours they’d flown

From the alone to the Alone,

Nothing remained but the dry-as-bone

Night of the soul.

Coward; for all your goodness game

Your dream of Heaven is the same

As any bounder’s;

You hope to corner as reward

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All that the rich can here afford:

Love and music and bed and board

While the world flounders.

And you, the wise man, full of humour

To whom our misery’s a rumour

And slightly funny;

Proud of your nicely balanced view

You say as if it were something new

The fuss we make is mostly due

To lack of money.

Ah, what a little squirt is there

When of your aren’t-I-charming air

You stand denuded.

Behind your subtle sense of humour

You hide the boss’s simple stuma,

Among the foes which we enumer

You are included.

Because you saw but were not indignant

The invasion of the great malignant

Cambridge ulcer

That army intellectual

Of every kind of liberal

Smarmy with friendship but of all

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There are none falser.

A host of columbines and pathics

Who show the poor by mathematics

In their defence

That wealth and poverty are merely

Mental pictures, so that clearly

Every tramp’s a landlord really

In mind-events.

Let fever sweat them till they tremble

Cramp rack their limbs till they resemble

Cartoons by Goya:

Their daughters sterile be in rut,

May cancer rot their herring gut,

The circular madness on them shut,

Or paranoia.

Their splendid people, their wiseacres,

Professors, agents, magic-makers,

Their poets and apostles,

Their bankers and their brokers too,

And ironmasters shall turn blue

Shall fade away like morning dew

With club-room fossils.

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(untitled poem, May 1929)

Coming out of me living is always thinking,

Thinking changing and changing living,

Am feeling as it was seeing--

In city leaning on harbour parapet

To watch a colony of duck below

Sit, preen, and doze on buttresses

Or upright paddle on flickering stream,

Casually fishing at a passing straw.

Those find sun's luxury enough,

Shadow know not of homesick foreigner

Nor restlessness of intercepted growth.

All this time was anxiety at night,

Shooting and barricade in street.

Walking home late I listened to a friend

Talking excitedly of final war

Of proletariat against police--

That one shot girl of nineteen through the knees,

They threw that one down concrete stair--

Till I was angry, said I was pleased.

Time passes in Hessen, in Gutensberg,

With hill-top and evening holds me up,

Tiny observer of enormous world.

Smoke rises from factory in field,

Memory of fire: On all sides heard

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Vanishing music of isolated larks:

From village square voices in hymn,

Men's voices, an old use.

And I above standing, saying in thinking:

"Is first baby, warm in mother,

Before born and is still mother,

Time passes and now is other,

Is knowledge in him now of other,

Cries in cold air, himself no friend.

In grown man also, may see in face

In his day-thinking and in his night-thinking

Is wareness and is fear of other,

Alone in flesh, himself no friend.

"He say 'We must forgive and forget,'

Forgetting saying but is unforgiving

And unforgiving is in his living;

Body reminds in him to loving,

Reminds but takes no further part,

Perfunctorily affectionate in hired room

But takes no part and is unloving

But loving death. May see in dead,

In face of dead that loving wish,

As one returns from Africa to wife

And his ancestral property in Wales."

Yet sometimes man look and say good

At strict beauty of locomotive,

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Completeness of gesture or unclouded eye;

In me so absolute unity of evening

And field and distance was in me for peace,

Was over me in feeling without forgetting

Those ducks' indifference, that friend's hysteria,

Without wishing and with forgiving,

To love my life, not as other,

Not as bird's life, not as child's,

"Cannot," I said, "being no child now nor a bird."

Spain 1937

Yesterday all the past. The language of size

Spreading to China along the trade-routes; the diffusion

Of the counting-frame and the cromlech;

Yesterday the shadow-reckoning in the sunny climates.

Yesterday the assessment of insurance by cards,

The divination of water; yesterday the invention

Of cartwheels and clocks, the taming of

Horses. Yesterday the bustling world of the navigators.

Yesterday the abolition of fairies and giants,

the fortress like a motionless eagle eyeing the valley,

the chapel built in the forest;

Yesterday the carving of angels and alarming gargoyles;

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The trial of heretics among the columns of stone;

Yesterday the theological feuds in the taverns

And the miraculous cure at the fountain;

Yesterday the Sabbath of witches; but to-day the struggle

Yesterday the installation of dynamos and turbines,

The construction of railways in the colonial desert;

Yesterday the classic lecture

On the origin of Mankind. But to-day the struggle.

Yesterday the belief in the absolute value of Greek,

The fall of the curtain upon the death of a hero;

Yesterday the prayer to the sunset

And the adoration of madmen. but to-day the struggle.

As the poet whispers, startled among the pines,

Or where the loose waterfall sings compact, or upright

On the crag by the leaning tower:

"O my vision. O send me the luck of the sailor."

And the investigator peers through his instruments

At the inhuman provinces, the virile bacillus

Or enormous Jupiter finished:

"But the lives of my friends. I inquire. I inquire."

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And the poor in their fireless lodgings, dropping the sheets

Of the evening paper: "Our day is our loss. O show us

History the operator, the

Organiser. Time the refreshing river."

And the nations combine each cry, invoking the life

That shapes the individual belly and orders

The private nocturnal terror:

"Did you not found the city state of the sponge,

"Raise the vast military empires of the shark

And the tiger, establish the robin's plucky canton?

Intervene. O descend as a dove or

A furious papa or a mild engineer, but descend."

And the life, if it answers at all, replied from the heart

And the eyes and the lungs, from the shops and squares of the city

"O no, I am not the mover;

Not to-day; not to you. To you, I'm the

"Yes-man, the bar-companion, the easily-duped;

I am whatever you do. I am your vow to be

Good, your humorous story.

I am your business voice. I am your marriage.

"What's your proposal? To build the just city? I will.

23
I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic

Death? Very well, I accept, for

I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain."

Many have heard it on remote peninsulas,

On sleepy plains, in the aberrant fishermen's islands

Or the corrupt heart of the city.

Have heard and migrated like gulls or the seeds of a flower.

They clung like burrs to the long expresses that lurch

Through the unjust lands, through the night, through the alpine tunnel;

They floated over the oceans;

They walked the passes. All presented their lives.

On that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot

Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe;

On that tableland scored by rivers,

Our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our fever

Are precise and alive. For the fears which made us respond

To the medicine ad, and the brochure of winter cruises

Have become invading battalions;

And our faces, the institute-face, the chain-store, the ruin

Are projecting their greed as the firing squad and the bomb.

Madrid is the heart. Our moments of tenderness blossom

24
As the ambulance and the sandbag;

Our hours of friendship into a people's army.

To-morrow, perhaps the future. The research on fatigue

And the movements of packers; the gradual exploring of all the

Octaves of radiation;

To-morrow the enlarging of consciousness by diet and breathing.

To-morrow the rediscovery of romantic love,

the photographing of ravens; all the fun under

Liberty's masterful shadow;

To-morrow the hour of the pageant-master and the musician,

The beautiful roar of the chorus under the dome;

To-morrow the exchanging of tips on the breeding of terriers,

The eager election of chairmen

By the sudden forest of hands. But to-day the struggle.

To-morrow for the young the poets exploding like bombs,

The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;

To-morrow the bicycle races

Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle.

To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,

The consious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;

To-day the expending of powers

25
On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.

To-day the makeshift consolations: the shared cigarette,

The cards in the candlelit barn, and the scraping concert,

The masculine jokes; to-day the

Fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace before hurting.

The stars are dead. The animals will not look.

We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and

History to the defeated

May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.

New Year Letter

Part I

Under the familiar weight

Of winter, conscience and the State,

In loose formations of good cheer.

Love, language, loneliness and fear.

Towards the habits of next year.

Along the streets the people flow.

Singing or sighing as they go:

Exalte, piano, or in doubt.

All our reflections turn about

A common meditative norm.

Retrenchment, Sacrifice, Reform.

26
Twelve months ago in Brussels, I

Heard the same wishful-thinking sigh

As round me, trembling on their beds,

Or taut with apprehensive dreads,

The sleepless guests of Europe lay

Wishing the centuries away.

And the low mutter of their vows

Went echoing through her haunted house,

As on the verge of happening

There crouched the presence of The Thing.

All formulas were tried to still

The scratching on the window-sill.

All bolts of custom made secure

Against the pressure on the door.

But up the staircase of events

Carrying his special instruments.

To every bedside all the same

The dreadful figure swiftly came.

Yet Time can moderate his tone

When talking to a man alone,

And the same sun whose neutral eye

All florid August from the sky

Had watched the earth behave and seen

Strange traffic on her brown and green,

27
Obedient to some hidden force

A ship abruptly change her course,

A train make an unwonted stop,

A little crowd smash up a shop.

Suspended hatreds crystallise

In visible hostilities.

Vague concentrations shrink to take

The sharp crude patterns generals make.

The very morning that the war

Took action on the Polish floor,

Lit up America and on

A cottage in Long Island shone

Where Buxtehude as we played

One of his 'passacaglias made

Our minds a civitas of sound

Where nothing but assent was found.

For art had set in order sense

And feeling and intelligence,

And from its ideal order grew

Our local understanding too.

To set in order — that’s the task

Both Eros and Apollo ask;

For Art and Life agree in this

That each intends a synthesis.

28
That order which must be the end

That all self-loving things intend

Who struggle for their liberty.

Who use, that is, their will to be.

Though order never can be willed

But is the state of the fulfilled,

For will but wills its opposite

And not the whole in which they fit,

The symmetry disorders reach

When both are equal each to each.

Yet in intention all are one.

Intending that their wills be done

Within a peace where all desires

Find each in each what each requires,

A true Gestalt where indiscrete

Perceptions and extensions meet.

Art in intention is mimesis

But, realised, the resemblance ceases;

Art is not life and cannot be

A midwife to society.

For art is a fait accomplu

What they should do, or how or when

Life-order comes to living men

It cannot say, for it presents

Already lived experience

Through a convention that creates

29
Autonomous completed states.

Though their particulars are those

That each particular artist knows.

Unique events that once took place

Within a unique time and space.

In the new field they occupy.

The unique serves to typify,

Becomes, though still particular.

An algebraic formula.

An abstract model of events

Derived from dead experiments,

And each life must itself decide

To what and how it be applied.

Great masters who have shown mankind

An order it has yet to find.

What if all pedants say of you

As personalities be true?

All the more honor to you then

If, weaker than some other men.

You had the courage that survives

Soiled, shabby, egotistic lives,

If poverty or ugliness.

Ill-health or social unsuccess

Hunted you out of life to play

At living in another way;

30
Yet the live quarry all the same

Were changed to huntsmen in the game,

And the wild furies of the past,

Tracked to their origins at last,

Trapped in a medium s artifice,

To charity, delight, increase.

Now large, magnificent, and calm,

Your changeless presences disarm

The sullen generations, still

The fright and fidget of the will.

And to the growing and the weak

Your final transformations speak.

Saying to dreaming ''I am deed.’

To striving 'Courage. I succeed.

To mourning remain. Forgive.

And to becoming '1 am. Live.'

They challenge, warn and witness. Who

That ever has the rashness to

Believe that he is one of those

The greatest of vocations chose.

Is not perpetually afraid

That he’s unworthy of his trade,

As round his tiny homestead spread

The grand constructions of the dead,

31
Nor conscious, as he works, of their

Complete uncompromising stare.

And the surveillance of a board

Whose warrant cannot be ignored?

O often, often must he face.

Whether the critics blame or praise.

Young, high-brow, popular or rich.

That summary tribunal which

In a perpetual session sits.

And answer, if he can, to its

Intense interrogation* Though

Considerate and mild and low

The voices of the questioners.

Although they delegate to us

Both prosecution and defence.

Accept our rules of evidence

And pass no sentence but our own.

Yet, as he faces them alone,

O who can show convincing proof

That he is worthy of their love?

Who ever rose to read aloud

Before that quiet attentive crowd

And did not falter as he read.

Stammer, sit down, and hang his head?

Each one, so liberal is the law.

May choose whom he appears before.

32
Pick any influential ghost

From those whom he admires the most.

So, when my name is called, I face.

Presiding coldly on my case.

That lean hard-bitten pioneer

Who spoiled a temporal career

And to the supernatural brought

His passion, senses, will and thought,

By Amor Rationalis led

Through the three kingdoms of the dead,

In concrete detail saw the whole

Environment that keeps the soul.

And grasped in its complexity

The Catholic ecology,

Described the savage fauna he

In Malebolge’s fissure found,

And fringe of blessed flora round

A juster nucleus than Rome,

Where love had its creative home.

Upon his right appears, as I

Reluctantly must testify

And weigh the sentence to be passed,

A choleric enthusiast.

Self-educated William Blake

Who threw his spectre in the lake.

33
Broke off relations in a curse

With the Newtonian Universe,

But even as a child would pet

The tigers Voltaire never met,

Took walks with them through Lambeth, and

Spoke to Isaiah in the Strand,

And heard inside each mortal thing

Its holy emanation sing.

While to his left upon the bench.

Muttering that terror is not French,

Frowns the young Rimbaud guilt demands.

The adolescent with red hands.

Skilful, intolerant and quick,

Who strangled an old rhetoric.

The court is full; I catch the eyes

Of several I recognise.

For as I look up from the dock

Embarrassed glances interlock.

There Dryden sits with modest smile.

The master of the middle style.

Conscious Catullus who made all

His gutter-language musical.

Black Tennyson whose talents were

For an articulate despair.

Trim, dualistic Baudelaire,

34
Poet of cities, harbours, whores,

Acedia, gaslight and remorse.

Hardy whose Dorset gave much joy

To one unsocial English boy,

And Rilke whom die Dinge bless.

The Santa Claus of loneliness.

And many others, many times.

For I relapse into my crimes.

Time and again have slubbered through

With slip and slapdash what I do.

Adopted what I would disown,

The preacher’s loose immodest tone;

Though warned by a great sonneteer

Not to sell cheap what is most dear.

Though horrible old Kipling cried

"'One instant s toil to Thee denied

Stands all eternity ^s offence,""

I would not give them audience.

Yet still the weak offender must

Beg still for leniency and trust

His power to avoid the sin

Peculiar to his discipline.

The situation of our time

Surrounds us like a baffling crime.

There lies the body half-undressed,

35
We all had reason to detest,

And all are suspects and involved

Until the mystery is solved

And under lock and key the cause

That makes a nonsense of our laws.

O Who is trying to shield Whom?

Who left a hairpin in the room?

Who was the distant figure seen

Behaving oddly on the green?

Why did the watchdog never bark?

Why did the footsteps leave no mark?

Where were the servants at that hour?

How did a snake get in the tower?

Delayed in the democracies

By departmental vanities.

The rival sergeants run about

But more to squabble than find out,

Yet where the Force has been cut down

To one inspector dressed in brown.

He makes the murderer whom he pleases

And all investigation ceases.

Yet our equipment all the time

Extends the area of the crime

Until the guilt is everywhere.

And more and more we are aware,

However miserable may be

36
Our parish of immediacy.

How small it is, how, far beyond,

Ubiquitous within the bond

Of one impoverishing sky.

Vast spiritual disorders lie.

Who, thinking of the last ten years.

Does not hear howling in his ears

The Asiatic cry of pain,

The shots of executing Spain

See stumbling through his outraged mind

The Abyssinian, blistered, blind.

The dazed uncomprehending stare

Of the Danubian despair.

The Jew wrecked in the German cell.

Flat Poland frozen into hell.

The silent dumps of unemployed

Whose arete has been destroyed.

And will not feel blind anger draw

His thoughts towards the Minotaur,

To take an early boat for Crete

And rolling, silly, at its feet

Add his small tidbit to the rest?

It lures us all; even the best,

Les hommes de honne volonte, feel

Their politics perhaps unreal

And all they have believed untrue,

37
Are tempted to surrender to

The grand apocalyptic dream

In which the persecutors scream

As on the evil Aryan lives

Descends the night of the long knives;

The bleeding tyrant dragged through all

The ashes of his capitol.

Though language may be useless, for

No words men write can stop the war

Or measure up to the relief

Of its immeasurable grief,

Yet truth, like love and sleep, resents

Approaches that are too intense.

And often when the searcher stood

Before the Oracle, it would

Ignore his grown-up earnestness

But not the child of his distress,

For through the Janus of a joke

The candid psychopompos spoke.

May such heart and intelligence

As huddle now in conference

Whenever an impasse occurs

Use the good offices of verse;

May an Accord be reached, and may

This aide-memoire on what they say,

38
This private minute for a friend,

Be the dispatch that I intend;

Although addressed to a Whitehall

Be under Flying Seal to all

Who wish to read it anywhere.

And, if they open it, En Clair.

Part II

Tonight a scrambling decade ends.

And strangers, enemies and friends

Stand once more puzzled underneath

The signpost on the barren heath

Where the rough mountain track divides

To silent valleys on all sides,

Endeavouring to decipher what

Is written on it but cannot.

Nor guess in what direction lies

The overhanging precipice.

Through the pitch-darkness can be heard

Occasionally a muttered word.

And intense in the mountain frost

The heavy breathing of the lost;

Far down below them whence they came

Still flickers feebly a red flame,

A tiny glow in the great void

Where an existence was destroyed;

39
And now and then a nature turns

To look where her whole system burns

And with a last defiant groan

Shudders her future into stone.

How hard it* is to set aside

Terror, concupiscence and pride,

Learn who and where and how we are.

The children of a modest star,

Frail, backward, clinging to the granite

Skirts of a sensible old planet.

Our placid and suburban nurse

In Sitter’s swelling universe.

ow hard to stretch imagination

To live according to our station.

For we are all insulted by

The mere suggestion that we die

Each moment and that each great I

Is but a process in a process

Within a field that never closes;

As proper people find it strange

That we are changed by what we change,

That no event can happen twice

And that no two existences

Can ever be alike; we’d rather

Be perfect copies of our father,

40
Prefer our idees fixes to be

True of a fixed Reality.

No wonder, then, we lose our nerve

And blubber when we should observe

The patriots of an old idea

No longer sovereign this year,

Get angry like Labelliere,

Who, finding no invectives hurled

Against a topsy-turvy world

Would right it, earn a quaint renown

By being buried upside-down:

Unwilling to adjust belief.

Go mad in a fantastic grief

Where no adjustment need be done,

Like Sarah Whitehead, the Bank Nun,

For, loving a live brother, she

Wed an impossibility.

Pacing Threadneedle Street in tears.

She watched one door for twenty years

Expecting, what she dared not doubt,

Her hanged embezzler to walk out.

But who, though, is the Prince of Lies

If not the Spirit-that-denics,

The shadow just behind the shoulder

Claiming it’s wicked to grow older.

41
Though we are lost if we turn round

Thinking salvation has been found?

Yet in his very effort to

Prevent the actions we could do,

He has to make the here and now

As marvellous as he knows how

And so engrossing we forget

To drop attention for regret;

Defending relaxation, he

Must show impassioned energy,

And all through tempting us to doubt

Point us the way to find truth out.

Poor cheated Mephistopheles,

Who think you re doing as you please

In telling us by doing ill

To prove that we possess free will,

Yet do not will the will you do,

For the Determined uses you,

Creation s errand-boy creator,

Diaholus egredietur

Ante fedes ejus — foe.

But so much more effective, though,

Than our well-meaning stupid friends

In driving us towards good ends.

Lame fallen shadow, retro me,

Retro but do not go away:

42
Although, for all your fond insistence.

You have no positive existence.

Are only a recurrent state

Of fear and faithlessness and hate.

That takes on from becoming me

A legal personality.

Assuming your existence is

A rule-of-thumb hypostasis.

For, though no person, you can damn.

So, credo ut intelligam.

For how could we get on without you

Who give the savoir-faire to doubt you

And keep you in your proper place.

Which is, to push us into grace?

Against his paralysing smile

And honest realistic style

Our best protection is that we

In fact live in eternity.

The sleepless counter of our breaths

That chronicles the births and deaths

Of pious hopes, the short careers

Of dashing promising ideas,

Each congress of the Greater Fears,

The emigration of beliefs.

The voyages of hopes and griefs,

43
Has no direct experience

Of discontinuous events.

And all our intuitions mock

The formal logic of the clock.

All real perception, it would seem,

Has shifting contours like a dream.

Nor have our feelings ever known

Any discretion but their own.

Suppose we love, not friends or wives,

But certain patterns in our lives,

Effects that take the causers name.

Love cannot part them all the same;

If in this letter that I send

I write ‘'Elizabeth's my friend,"

I cannot but express my faith

That I is Not-Elizabeth.

For though the intellect in each

Can only think in terms of speech

We cannot practise what we preach.

The cogitations of Descartes

Are where all sound semantics start;

In Ireland the great Berkeley rose

To add new glories to our prose.

But when in the pursuit of knowledge,

Risking the future of his college,

44
The bishop hid his anxious face,

‘Twas more by grammar than by grace

His modest Church-of-England God

Sustained the fellows and the quad.

But the Accuser would not be

In his position, did not he,

Unlike the big-shots of the day.

Listen to what his victims say.

Observing every man's desire

To warm his bottom by the fire

And state his views on Education,

Art, Women, and The Situation,

Has learnt what every woman knows.

The wallflower can become the rose,

Penelope the homely seem

The Helen of Odysseus' dream

If she will look as if she were

A fascinated listener,

Since men will pay large sums to whores

For telling them they are not bores.

So when with overemphasis

We contradict a lie of his.

The great Denier won't deny

But purrs: ^^You're cleverer than I;

Of course you're absolutely right,

45
I never saw it in that light.

I see it now: The intellect

That parts the Cause from the Effect

And thinks in terms of Space and Time

Commits a legalistic crime.

For such an unreal severance

Must falsify experience.

Could one not almost say that the

Cold serpent on the poisonous tree

Was Vesprit de geometrie.

That Eve and Adam till the Fall

Were totally illogical.

But as they tasted of the fruit

The syllogistic sin took root?

Abstracted, bitter refugees.

They fought over their premises.

Shut out from Eden by the bar

And Chinese Wall of Barhara.

O foolishness of man to seek

Salvation in an ordre logique!

O cruel intellect that chills

His natural warmth until it kills

The roots of all togetherness!

Lovers vigour shrinks to less and less,

On sterile acres governed by

Wage’s abstract prudent tie

46
The hard self-conscious particles

Collide, divide like numerals

In knock-dovm drag-out laissez-faire,

And build no order anywhere.

O when will men show common sense

And throw away intelligence,

That killjoy which discriminates.

Recover what appreciates.

The deep unsnobbish instinct which

Alone can make relation rich,

Up on the Beischlaf of the blood

Establish a real neighbourhood

Where art and industry and moeurs

Are governed by an ordre du coeur?'*

The Devil, as is not surprising —

His business is self-advertising —

Is a first-rate psychologist

Who keeps a conscientious list.

To help him in his ticklish deals,

Of what each client thinks and feels,

His school, religion, birth and breeding.

Where he has dined and what he's reading,

By every name he makes a note

Of what quotations to misquote.

47
And flings at every author's head

Something a favorite author said.

'The Arts? Well, Flaubert didn't say

Of artists: 'Us sont dans le vrai!

Democracy? Ask Baudelaire:

“\Un esprit Beige” a soiled affair

Of gas and steam and table-turning.

Truth? Aristotle was discerning:

In crowds I am a friend of myth.' "

Then, as I start protesting, with

The air of one who understands

He puts a Rilke in my hands.

"You know the Elegies, I'm sure —

O Seligkeit der Kreatur

Die immer hleiht in Schoosse — womb,

In English, is a rhyme to tomb."

He moves on tiptoe round the room.

Turns on the radio to mark

Isolde's Sehnsucht for the dark.

But all his tactics are dictated

By problems he himself created.

For as the great schismatic who

First split creation into two

He did what it could never do.

48
Inspired it with the wish to be

Diversity in unity.

An action which has put him in.

Pledged as he is to Rule-by-Sin,

As ambiguous a position

As any Irish politician.

For, tom between conflicting needs.

He's doomed to fail if he succeeds,

And his neurotic longing mocks

Him with its self-made paradox

To be both god and dualist.

For, if dualities exist.

What happens to the god? If there

Are any cultures anywhere

W^ith other values than his own,

How can it possibly be shown

That his are not subjective or

That all life is a state of war?

W^hile, if the monist view be right.

How is it possible to fight?

If love has been annihilated

There's only hate left to be hated.

To say two different things at once.

To wage offensives on two fronts.

And yet to show complete conviction.

Requires the purpler kinds of diction.

49
And none appreciate as he

Polysyllabic oratory.

All vague idealistic art

That coddles the uneasy heart

Is up his alley, and his pigeon

The woozier species of religion.

Even a novel, play or song,

If loud, lugubrious and long;

He knows the bored will not unmask him

But that he s lost if someone ask him

To come the hell in off the links

And say exactly what he thinks.

To win support of any kind

He has to hold before the mind

Amorphous shadows it can hate,

Yet constantly postpone the date

Of what he s made The Grand Attraction,

Putting an end to them by action

Because he knows, were he to win,

Man could do evil but not sin.

To sin is to act consciously

Against what seems necessity,

A possibility cut out

In any world that excludes doubt.

So victory could do no more

Than make us what we were before.

50
Beasts with a Rousseauistic charm

Unconscious we were doing harm.

Politically, then, he^s right

To keep us shivering all night,

Watching for dawn from Pisgah's height.

And to sound earnest as he paints

The new Geneva of the saints.

To strike the poses as he speaks

Of David's too too Empire Greeks,

Look forward with the cheesecake air

Of one who crossed the Delaware.

A realist, he has always said:

“It is Utopian to be dead.

For only on the Other Side

Are Absolutes all satisfied

Where, at the bottom of the graves.

Low Probability behaves/^

The False Association is

A favorite strategy of his:

Induce men to associate

Truth with a lie, then demonstrate

The lie and they will, in truth’s name.

Treat babe and bath-water the same,

A trick that serves him in good stead

At all times. It was thus he led

51
The early Christians to believe

All Flesh unconscious on the eve

Of the Word’s temporal interference

With the old Adam of Appearance;

That almost any moment they

Would see the trembling consuls pray.

Knowing that* as their hope grew less

So would their heavenly worldliness.

Their early agape decline

To a late lunch with Constantine.

Thus Wordsworth fell into temptation

In France during a long vacation,

Saw in the fall of the Bastille

The Parousia of liberty.

And weaving a platonic dream

Round a provisional regime

That sloganised the Rights of Man,

A liberal fellow-traveller ran

With Sans-culotte and Jacobin,

Nor guessed what circles he was in.

But ended as the Devil knew

An earnest Englishman would do.

Left by Napoleon in the lurch,

Supporting the Established Church,

The Congress of Vienna and

The Squire s paternalistic hand.

52
Like his, our lives have been coeval

With a political upheaval,

Like him, we had the luck to see

A rare discontinuity,

Old Russia suddenly mutate

Into a proletarian state.

The odd phenomenon, the strange

Event of qualitative change.

Some dreamed, as students always can.

It realised the potential Man,

A higher species brought to birth

Upon a sixth part of the earth,

While others settled down to read

The theory that forecast the deed

And found their humanistic view

In question from the German who.

Obscure in gaslit London, brought

To human consciousness a thought

It thought unthinkable, and made

Another consciousness afraid.

What if his hate distorted? Much

Was hateful that he had to touch.

What if he erred? He flashed a light

On facts where no one had been right.

The father-shadow that he hated

Weighed like an Alp; his love, frustrated.

53
Negating as it was negated.

Burst out in boils; his animus

Outlawed him from himself; but thus,

And only thus, perhaps, could he

Have come to his discovery.

Heroic charity is rare;

Without it, what except despair

Can shape the hero who will dare

The desperate catabasis

Into the snarl of the abyss

That always lies just underneath

Our jolly picnic on the heath

Of the agreeable, where we bask.

Agreed on what we will not ask.

Bland, sunny and adjusted by

The light of the accepted lie?

As he explored the muttering tomb

Of a museum reading room.

The Dagon of the General Will

Fell in convulsions and lay still;

The tempting Contract of the rich.

Revealed as an abnormal witch,

Fled with a shriek, for as he spoke

The justifying magic broke;

The garden of the Three Estates

Turned desert, and the Ivory Gates

54
Of Pure Idea to gates of horn

Through which the Governments are born.

But his analysis reveals

The other side to Him-who-steals

Is He-who-makes-what-is-of-use,

Since, to consume, man must produce;

By Man the Tough Devourer sets

The nature his despair forgets

Of Man Prolific since his birth,

A race creative on the earth.

Whose love of money only shows

That in his heart of hearts he knows

His love is not determined by

A personal or tribal tie

Or color, neighbourhood, or creed,

But universal, mutual need;

Loosed from its shroud of temper, his

Determinism comes to this:

None shall receive unless they give;

All must cooperate to live.

Now he is one with all of those

Who brought an epoch to a close,

With him who ended as he went

Past an archbishop’s monument

The slaveowners^ mechanics, one

55
With the ascetic farmer’s son

Who, while the Great Plague ran its course.

Drew up a Roman code of Force,

One with the naturalist, who fought

Pituitary headaches, brought

Man’s pride to heel at last and showed

His kinship with the worm and toad.

And Order as one consequence

Of the unfettered play of Chance.

Great sedentary Caesars who

Have pacified some dread tabu.

Whose wits were able to withdraw

The numen from some local law

And with a single concept brought

Some ancient rubbish heap of thought

To rational diversity.

You are betrayed unless we see

No codex gentium we make

It is difficult for Truth to break;

The Lex Ahscondita evades

The vigilantes in the glades;

Now here, now there, one leaps and cries

I’ve got her and I claim the prize,^'

But when the rest catch up, he stands

With just a torn blouse in his hands.

56
We hoped; we waited for the day

The State would wither clean away,

Expecting the Millennium

That theory promised us would come.

It didn’t. Specialists must try

To detail all the reasons why;

Meanwhile at least the layman knows

That none arc lost so soon as those

Who overlook their crooked nose,

That they grow small who imitate

The mannerisms of the great,

Afraid to be themselves, or ask

What acts are proper to their task,

And that a tiny trace of fear

Is lethal in man’s atmosphere.

The rays of Logos take effect.

But not as theory would expect.

For, sterile and diseased by doubt,

The dwarf mutations are thrown out

From Eros^ weaving centrosome.

O Freedom still is far from home.

For Moscow is as far as Rome

Or Paris. Once again we wake

57
With swimming heads and hands that shake

And stomachs that keep nothing down.

Here’s where the devil goes to town

Who knows that nothing suits his book

So well as the hang-over look,

That few drunks feel more awful than

The Simon-pure Utopian.

He calls at breakfast in the role

Of blunt but sympathetic soul:

^Well, how s our Socialist this morning

I could say Tet this be a warning/

But no, why should I? Students must

Sow their wild oats at times or bust.

Such things have happened in the lives

Of all the best Conservatives,

I’ll fix you something for your liver.’

And thus he sells us down the river.

Repenting of our last infraction

We seek atonement in reaction

And cry, nostalgic like a whore,

was a virgin still at four.’^

Perceiving that by sailing near

The Hegelian whirlpool of Idea

Some foolish aliens have gone down,

Lest our democracy should drown

We’d wreck her on the solid rock

58
Of genteel anarchists like Locke,

Wave at the mechanised barbarian

The vorpal sword of an Agrarian.

O how the devil who controls

The moral asymmetric souls

The either-ors, the mongrel halves

Who find truth in a mirror, laughs.

Yet time and memory are still

Limiting factors on his will;

He cannot always fool us thrice.

For he may never tell us lies.

Just half-truths we can synthesise.

So, hidden in his hocus-pocus.

There lies the gift of double focus,

That magic lamp which looks so dull

And utterly impractical

Yet, if Aladdin use it right.

Can be a sesame to light.

Part III

Across East River in the night

Manhattan is ablaze ^vith light.

No shadow dares to criticise

The popular festivities.

Hard liquor causes everywhere

59
A general detente, and Care

For this state function of Good Will

Is diplomatically ill:

The Old Year dies a noisy death.

Warm in your house, Elizabeth,

A week ago at the same hour

I felt the unexpected power

That drove our ragged egos in

From the dead-ends of greed and sin

To sit down at the wedding feast.

Put shining garments on the least.

Arranged us so that each and all,

The erotic and the logical.

Each felt the placement to be such

That he was honored overmuch.

And Schubert sang and Mozart played

And Gluck: and food and friendship made

Our privileged community

That real republic which must be

The State all politicians claim,

Even the worst, to be their aim.

O but it happens every day

To someone. Suddenly the way

Leads straight into their native lands.

60
The temenos small wicket stands

Wide open, shining at the centre

The well of life, and they may enter.

Though compasses and stars cannot

Direct to that magnetic spot.

Nor Will nor willing-not-to-will.

For there is neither good nor ill.

But free rejoicing energy.

Yet anytime, how casually.

Out of his organised distress

An accidental happiness.

Catching man off his guard, will blow him

Out of his life in time to show him

The field of Being where he may.

Unconscious of Becoming, play

With the Eternal Innocence

In unimpeded utterance.

But perfect Being has ordained

It must be lost to be regained.

And in its orchards grow the tree

And fruit of human destiny.

And man must eat it and depart

At once with gay and grateful heart.

Obedient, reborn, re-aware;

For, if he stop an instant there.

The sky grows crimson with a curse.

61
The flowers change colour for the worse.

He hears behind his back the wicket

Padlock itself, from the dark thicket

The chuckle with no healthy cause.

And, helpless, sees the crooked claws

Emerging into view and groping

For handholds on the low round coping.

As Horror clambers from the well:

For he has sprung the trap of Hell.

Hell is the being of the lie

That we become if we deny

The laws of consciousness and claim

Becoming and Being are the same,

Being in time, and man discrete

In will, yet free and self-complete;

Its fire the pain to which we go

If we refuse to suffer, though

The one unnecessary grief

Is the vain craving for relief.

When to the suffering we could bear

We add intolerable fear,

Absconding from remembrance, mocked

By our own partial senses, locked

Each in a stale uniqueness, lie

62
Time-conscious for eternity.

We cannot, then, will Heaven where

Is perfect freedom; our wills there

Must lose the will to operate.

But will is free not to negate

Itself in Hell; we’re free to will

Ourselves up Purgatory still.

Consenting parties to our lives.

To love them like attractive wives

Whom we adore but do not trust,

Who cannot love without their lust,

And need their stratagems to win

Truth out of Time. In Time we sin.

But Time is sin and can forgive;

Time is the life with which we live

At least three quarters of our time.

The purgatorial hill we climb,

Where any skyline we attain

Reveals a higher ridge again.

Yet since, however much we grumble.

However painfully we stumble.

Such mountaineering all the same

Is, it would seem, the only game

At which we show a natural skill,

63
The hardest exercises still

Just those our muscles are the best

Adapted to, its grimmest test

Precisely what our fear suspected,

We have no cause to look dejected

When, wakened from a dream of glory.

We find ourselves in Purgatory,

Back on the same old mountain side

With only guessing for a guide.

To tell the truth, although we stifle

The feeling, are we not a trifle

Relieved to wake on its damp earth?

It’s been our residence since birth.

Its inconveniences are known.

And we have made its flaws our own*

Is it not here that we belong.

Where everyone is doing wrong.

And normal our freemartin state.

Half angel and half 'petite hete?

So, perched upon the sharp arete.

When if we do not move we fall.

Yet movement is heretical,

Since over its ironic rocks

No route is truly orthodox,

O once again let us set out.

64
Our faith well balanced by our doubt.

Admitting every step we make

Will certainly be a mistake.

But still believing we can climb

A little higher every time.

And keep in order, that we may

Ascend the penitential way

That forces our wills to be free,

A reverent frivolity

That suffers each unpleasant test

With scientific interest.

And finds romantic, faute de mieux

Its sad nostalgic des adeux.

Around me, pausing as I write,

A tiny object in the night,

Whichever way I look, I mark

Importunate along the dark

Horizon of immediacies

The flares of desperation rise

From signallers who justly plead

Their cause is piteous indeed :

Bewildered, how can I divine

Which is my true Socratic Sign,

Which of these calls to conscience is

65
For me the casus foederis.

From all the tasks submitted, choose

The athlon I must not refuse?

A particle, I must not yield

To particles who claim the field,

Nor trust the demagogue who raves,

A quantum speaking for the waves.

Nor worship blindly the ornate

Grandezza of the Sovereign State.

Whatever wickedness we do

Need not be, orators, for you;

We can at least serve other ends.

Can love the polis of our friends

And pray that loyalty may come

To serve mankind s imperium.

But why and where and when and how?

O none escape these questions now:

The future which confronts us has

No likeness to that age when, as

Rome’s huggermugger unity

Was slowly knocked to pieces by

The uncoordinated blows

Of artless and barbaric foes.

The stressed and rhyming measures rose;

The cities we abandon fall

66
To nothing primitive at all;

This lust in action to destroy

Is not the pure instinctive joy

Of animals, but the refined

Creation of machines and mind.

We face our self-created choice

As out of Europe comes a voice,

A theologian who denies

What more than twenty centuries

Of Europe have assumed to be

The basis of civility.

Our evil Daimon to express

In all its ugly nakedness

What none before dared say aloud.

The metaphysics of the Crowd,

The Immanent Imperative

By which the lost and injured live

In mechanised societies

Where natural intuition dies,

The international result

Of Industry's Quicunque vult.

The hitherto-unconscious creed

Of little men who half succeed

Yet maps and languages and names

Have meaning and their proper claims.

There are two atlases: the one

67
The public space where acts are done.

In theory common to us all.

Where we are needed and feel small.

The agora of work and news

Where each one has the right to choose

His trade, his corner and his way.

And can, again in theory, say

For whose protection he will pay.

And loyalty is help we give

The place where we prefer to live;

The other is the inner space

Of private ownership, the place

That each of us is forced to own.

Like his own life from which it's grown,

The. landscape of his will and need

Where he is sovereign indeed.

The state created by his acts

Where he patrols the forest tracts

Planted in childhood, farms the belt

Of doings memorised and felt,

And even if he find it hell

May neither leave it nor rebel.

Two worlds describing their rewards.

That one in tangents, this in chords;

Each lives in one, all in the other,

Here all are Icings, there each a brother:

68
In politics the Fall of Man

From natural liberty began

When, loving power or sloth, he came

Like Burke to think them both the same.

England to me is my own tongue.

And what I did when I was young.

If now, two aliens in New York,

We meet, Elizabeth, and talk

Of friends who suffer in the torn

Old Europe where we both were born.

What this refutes or that confirms,

I can but think our talk in terms

Of images that I have seen.

And England tells me what we mean.

Thus, squalid beery Burton stands

For shoddy thinking of all brands;

The wreck of Rhondda for the mess

We make when for a short success

We split our symmetry apart.

Deny the Reason or the Heart;

Ye Olde Tudor Tea-Shoppe for

The folly of dogmatic law.

While graceless Bournemouth is the sloth

Of men or bureaucrats or both.

69
No matter where, or whom I meet,

Shopgazing in a Paris street,

Bumping through Iceland in a bus.

At teas when clubwomen discuss

The latest Federation Plan,

In Pullman washrooms, man to man.

Hearing how circumstance has vexed

A broker who is oversexed.

In houses where they do not drink.

Whenever I begin to think

About the human creature we

Must nurse to sense and decency.

An English area comes to mind,

I see the nature of my kind

As a locality I love.

Those limestone moors that stretch from Brough

To Hexham and the Roman Wall,

There is my symbol of us all.

There, where the Eden leisures through

Its sandstone valley, is my view

Of green and civil life that dwells

Below a cliff of savage fells

From which original address

Man faulted into consciousness.

Along the line of lapse the fire

Of life's impersonal desire

70
Burst through his sedentary rock

And, as at Dufton and at Knock,

Thrust up between his mind and heart

Enormous cones of myth and art.

Always my boy of wish returns

To those peat-stained deserted burns

That feed the Wear and Tyne and Tees,

And, turning states to strata, sees

How basalt long oppressed broke out

In wild revolt at Cauldron Snout,

And from the relics of old mines

Derives bis algebraic signs

For all in man that mourns and seeks.

For all of his renounced techniques,

Their tramways overgrown with grass.

For lost belief, for all Alas,

The derelict lead-smelting mill,

Flued to its chimney up the hill.

That smokes no answer any more

But points, a landmark on Bolts Law,

The finger of all questions. There

In Rookhope I was first aware

Of Self and Not-self, Death and Dread:

Adits were entrances which led

Down to the Outlawed, to the Others,

The Terrible, the Merciful, the Mothers;

71
Alone in the hot day I knelt

Upon the edge of shafts and felt

The deep U rmutterfurcht that drives

Us into knowledge all our lives,

The far interior of our fate

To civilise and to create.

Das Weibliche that bids us come

To find what we’re escaping from.

There I dropped pebbles, listened, heard

The reservoir of darkness stirred;

"O deine Mutter kehrt dir nicht

Wieder. Du selhst bin ich, dein’ Pflicht

Und Liebe. Brack sie nun mem Bild.”

And I was conscious of my guilt.

But such a bond is not an Ought,

Only a given mode of thought,

Whence my imperatives were taught.

Now in that other world I stand

Of fully alienated land.

An earth made common by the means

Of hunger, money, and machines,

Where each determined nature must

Regard that nature as a trust

That, being chosen, he must choose.

Determined to become of use;

72
For we are conscripts to our age

Simply by being born; wc wage

The war we are, and may not die

With Polycarp’s despairing cry.

Desert or become ill: but how

To be the patriots of the Now?

Here all, by rights, are volunteers.

And anyone who interferes

With how another wills to fight

Must base his action, not on right.

But on the power to compel;

Only the “idiot” can tell

For which state office he should run.

Only the Many make the One.

Eccentric, wrinkled, and ice-capped,

Swarming with parasites and wrapped

In a peculiar atmosphere.

Earth wabbles on down her career

With no ambition in her heart;

Her loose land-masses drift apart.

Her zone of shade and silence crawls

Steadily westward. Daylight falls v

On Europe's frozen soldiery

And millions brave enough to die

For a new day; for each one knows

73
A day is drawing to a close.

Yes, all of us at least know that.

All from the seasoned diplomat

Used to the warm Victorian summers

Down to the juveniles and drummers.

Whatever nonsense we believe.

Whomever we can still deceive.

Whatever language angers us.

Whoever seems the poisonous

Old dragon to be killed if men

Are ever to be rich again,

We know no fuss or pain or lying

Can stop the moribund from dying,

That all the special tasks begun

By the Renaissance have been done.

When unity has come to grief

Upon professional belief.

Another unity was made

By equal amateurs in trade.

Out of the noise and horror, the

Opinions of artillery.

The barracks chatter and the yell

Of charging cavalry, the smell

Of poor opponents roasting, out

Of Luthers faith and Montaigne's doubt,

74
The epidemic of translations.

The Councils and the navigations.

The confiscations and the suits.

The scholars' scurrilous disputes

Over the freedom of the Will

And right of Princes to do ill,

Emerged a new Anthropos, an

Empiric Economic Man,

The urban, prudent, and inventive.

Profit his rational incentive

And Work his whole exercitus,

The individual let loose

To guard himself, at liberty

To starve or be forgotten, free

To feel in splendid isolation

Or drive himself about creation

In the closed cab of Occupation.

He did what he was born to do.

Proved some assumptions were untrue.

He had his half-success; he broke

The silly and unnatural yoke

Of famine and disease that made

A false necessity obeyed;

A Protestant, he found the key

To Catholic economy.

75
Subjected earth to the control

And moral choices of the soul;

And in the training of each sense

To serve with joy its evidence

He founded a new discipline

To fight an intellectual sin.

Reason’s depravity that takes

The useful concepts that she makes

As universals, as the kitsch,

But worshipped statues upon which

She leaves her effort and her crown.

And if his half-success broke down.

All failures have one good result:

They prove the Good is difficult.

He never won complete support;

However many votes he bought.

He could not silence all the cliques.

And no miraculous techniques

Could sterilise all discontent

Or dazzle it into assent.

But at the very noon and arch

Of his immense triumphal march

Stood prophets pelting him with curses

And sermons and satiric verses.

And ostentatious beggars slept.

76
Blake shouted insults, Rousseau wept,

Ironic Kierkegaard stared long

And muttered "'All are in the wrong,''

While Baudelaire went mad protesting

That progress is not interesting

And thought he was an albatross.

The great Erotic on the cross

Of Science, crucified by fools

Who sit all day on office stools.

Are fairly faithful to their wives

And play for safety all their lives.

For whose Verhiirgerlichung of

All joy and suffering and love

Let the grand pariah atone

By dying hated and alone.

The World ignored them; they were few.

The careless victor never knew

Their grapevine rumour would grow true,

Their alphabet of warning sounds

The common grammar all have grounds

To study; for their guess is proved:

It is the Mover that is moved.

Whichever way we turn, we see

Man captured by his liberty.

The measurable taking charge

77
Of him who measures, set at large

By his own actions, useful facts

Become the user of his acts.

And Chance the choices of his soul;

The beggar put out by his bowl,

Boys trained by factories for leading

Unusual lives as nurses, feeding

Helpless machines, girls married off

To typewriters, old men in love

With prices they can never get,

Homes blackmailed by a radio set,

Children inherited by slums

And idiots by enormous sums.

We see, we suffer, we despair:

The well-armed children everywhere

Who envy the self-governed beast

Now know that they are bound at least,

Die Aufgeregten without pity

Destroying the historic city,

The ruined showering with honors

The blind Christs and the mad Madonnas,

The Gnostics in the brothels treating

The flesh as secular and fleeting,

The dialegesthai of the rich

At cocktail parties as to which

Technique is most effective in

78
Enforcing labour discipline.

What Persian Apparatus will

Protect their privileges still

And safely keep the living dead

Entombed, hilarious, and fed,

The Disregarded in their shacks

Up on the wrong side of the tracks.

Poisoned by reasonable hate,

Are symptoms of one common fate.

All in their morning mirrors face

A member of a governed race.

Each recognises what Lear saw.

The homo Thurber likes to draw.

The neuter outline that’s the plan

And icon of Industrial Man,

The Unpolitical afraid

Of all that has to be obeyed.

But still each private citizen

Thanks God he’s not as other men.

O all too easily we blame

The politicians for our shame

And the hired officers of state

For all those customs that frustrate

Our own intention to fulfil

Eros’s legislative will.

79
Yet who must not, if he reflect.

See how unserious the effect

That he to love’s volition gives.

On what base compromise he lives?

Even true lovers on some bed

The graceful god has visited

Find faults at which to hang the head.

And know the morphon full of guilt

Whence all community is built.

The cryptozoon with two backs

Whose sensibility that lacks

True reverence contributes much

Towards the soldier’s violent touch.

For, craving language and a myth

And hands to shape their purpose with,

In shadow round the fond and warm

The possible societies swarm,

Because their freedom as their form

Upon our sense of style depends.

Whose eyes alone can seek their ends.

And they are impotent if we

Decline responsibility.

O what can love's intention do

If all his agents are untrue?

The politicians we condemn

Are nothing but our L. C. M.

80
The average of the average man

Becomes the dread Leviathan,

Our million individual deeds,

Omissions, vanities, and creeds,

Put through the statistician's hoop

The gross behaviour of a group :

Upon each English conscience lie

Two decades of hypocrisy.

And not a German can be proud

Of what his apathy allowed.

The flood of tyranny and force

Arises at a double source:

In Plato's lie of intellect

That all are weak but the Elect

Philosophers who must be strong.

For, knowing Good, they will no Wrong,

United in the abstract Word

Above the low anarchic herd;

Or Rousseau's falsehood of the flesh

That stimulates our pride afresh

To think all men identical

And strong in the Irrational.

And yet, although the social lie

Looks double to the dreamer’s eye,

The rain to fill the mountain streams

That water the opposing dreams

81
By turns in favour with the crowd

Is scattered from one common cloud.

Up in the Ego’s atmosphere

And higher altitudes of fear

The particles of error form

The shepherd-killing thunderstorm.

And our political distress

Descends from her self-consciousness.

Her cold concupiscence d'esprit

That looks upon her liberty

Not as a gift from life with which

To serve, enlighten, and enrich

The total creature that could use

Her function of free-will to choose

The actions that this world requires

To educate its blind desires,

But as the right to lead alone

An attic life all on her own,

Unhindered, unrebuked, unwatched,

Self-known, self-praising, self-attached.

All happens as she wishes till

She ask herself why she should will

This more than that, or who would care

If she were dead or gone elsewhere,

And on her own hypothesis

Is powerless to answer this.

82
Then panic seizes her; the glance

Of mirrors shows a countenance

Of wretched empty-brilliance. How

Can she escape self-loathing now?

What is there left for pride to do

Except plunge headlong vers la houe.

For freedom except suicide.

The self-asserted, self-denied?

A witch self-tortured as she spins

Her whole devotion widdershins.

She worships in obscene delight

The Not, the Never, and the Night,

The formless Mass without a Me,

The Midnight Women and the Sea.

The genius of the loud Steam Age,

Loud Wagner, put it on the stage:

The mental hero who has swooned

With sensual pleasure at his wound,

His intellectual life fulfilled

In knowing that his doom is willed.

Exists to suffer; borne along

Upon a timeless tide of song.

The huge doll roars for death or mother.

Synonymous with one another;

And Woman, passive as in dreams.

Redeems, redeems, redeems, redeems.

83
Delighted with their takings, bars

Are closing under fading stars;

The revellers go home to

Back into something far more strange.

The tightened self in which they may

Walk safely through their bothered day,

With formal purpose up and down

The crowded fatalistic town,

And dawn sheds its calm candour now

On monasteries where they vow

An economic abstinence.

Modern in their impenitence,

Blonde, naked, paralysed, alone,

Like rebel angels turned to stone

The secular cathedrals stand

Upon their valuable land.

Frozen forever in a lie.

Determined always to deny

That man is weak and has to die.

And hide the huge phenomena

Which must decide America,

That culture that had worshipped no

Virgin before the Dynamo,

Held no Nicea nor Canossa,

Hat keine verfallenen Schldsser,

84
Keine Basalte, the great Rome

To all who lost or hated home.

A long time since it seems today

The Saints in Massachusetts Bay

Heard theocratic Cotton preach

And legal Winthrop’s Little Speech;

Since Mistress Hutchinson was tried

By those her Inner Light defied.

And Williams questioned Moses' law

But in Rhode Island waited for

The Voice of the Beloved to free

Himself and the Democracy;

Long since inventive Jefferson

Fought realistic Hamilton,

Pelagian versus Jansenist;

But the same heresies exist.

Time makes old formulas look strange.

Our properties and symbols change.

But round the freedom of the Will

Our disagreements centre still,

And now as then the voter hears

The battle cries of two ideas.

Here, as in Europe, is dissent.

This raw untidy continent

Where the Commuter can’t forget

85
The Pioneer; and even yet

A Volkerwanderung occurs:

Resourceful manufacturers

Trek southward by progressive stages

For sites with no floor under wages.

No ceiling over hours; and by

Artistic souls in towns that lie

Out in the weed and pollen belt

The need for sympathy is felt.

And east to hard New York they come;

And self-respect drives Negroes from

The one-crop and race-hating delta

To northern cities helter-skelter;

And in jalopies there migrates

A rootless tribe from windblown states

To suffer further westward where

The tolerant Pacific air

Makes logic seem so silly, pain

Subjective, what he seeks so vain

The wanderer may die; and kids.

When their imagination bids,

Hitch-hike a thousand miles to find

The Hesperides that’s on their mind.

Some Texas where real cowboys seem

Lost in a movie-cowboy’s dream.

More even than in Europe, here

86
The choice of patterns is made clear

Which the machine imposes, what

Is possible and what is not,

To what conditions we must how

In building the Just City now.

However we decide to act.

Decision must accept the fact

That the machine has now destroyed

The local customs we enjoyed,

Replaced the bonds of blood and nation

By personal confederation.

No longer can we learn our good

From chances of a neighbourhood

Or class or party, or refuse

As individuals to choose

Our loves, authorities, and friends,

To judge our means and plan our ends;

For the machine has cried aloud

And publicised among the crowd

The secret that was always true

But known once only to the few,

Compelling all to the admission,

Aloneness is man's real condition.

That each must travel forth alone

In search of the Essential Stone,

87
“The Nowhere-without-No" that is

The justice of societies.

Each salesman now is the polite

Adventurer, the landless knight

Gawaine-Quixote, and his goal

The Frauendieiist of his weak soul;

Each biggie in the Canning Ring

An unrobust lone Fisher-King;

Each subway face the Pequod of

Some ISHMAEL hunting his lost love,

To harpoon his unhappiness

And turn the whale to a princess;

In labs the puzzled KAFKAS meet

The inexplicable defeat:

The odd behaviour of the law,

The facts that suddenly withdraw.

The path that twists away from the

Near-distant Castle they can see,

The Truth where they will be denied

Permission ever to reside;

And all the operatives know

Their factory is the champ-clos

And drawing-room of Henry James,

Where the debat decides the claims

Of liberty and justice; where.

Like any Jamesian character,

88
They learn to draw the careful line.

Develop, understand, refine,

A weary Asia out of sight

Is tugging gently at the night.

Uncovering a restless race;

Clocks shoo the childhood from its face,

And accurate machines begin

To concentrate its adults in

A narrow day to exercise

Their gifts in some cramped enterprise.

How few pretend to like it : O

Three quarters of these people know

Instinctively what ought to be

The nature of society

And how they’d live there if they could.

If it were easy to be good,

And cheap, and plain as evil how.

We all would be its members now;

How readily would we become

The seamless live continuum

Of supple and coherent stuff,

Whose form is truth, whose content love.

Its pluralist interstices

The homes of happiness and peace,

Where in a unity of praise

89
The largest 'publicum's a res,

And the least res a puhlicum;

How grandly would our virtues bloom

In a more conscionable dust

Where Freedom dwells because it must.

Necessity because it can.

And men confederate in Man.

But wishes are not horses, this

Annus is not mirahilis;

Day breaks upon the world we know

Of war and wastefulness and woe;

Ashamed civilians come to grief

In brotherhoods without belief.

Whose good intentions cannot cure

The actual evils they endure.

Nor smooth their practical career,

Nor bring the far horizon near.

The New Year brings an earth afraid.

Democracy a ready-made

And noisy tradesman’s slogan, and

The poor betrayed into the hand

Of lackeys with ideas, and truth

Whipped by their elders out of youth.

The peaceful fainting in their tracks

With martyrs’ tombstones on their backs,

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And culture on all fours to greet

A butch and criminal elite,

While in the vale of silly sheep

Rheumatic old patricians weep.

Our news is seldom good: the heart.

As Zola said, must always start

The day by swallowing its toad

Of failure and disgust. Our road

Gets worse and we seem altogether

Lost as our theories, like the weather,

Veer round completely every day,

And all that we can always say

Is: true democracy begins

With free confession of our sins.

In this alone are all the same,

All are so weak that none dare claim

have the right to govern,” or

'"Behold in me the Moral Law,”

And all real unity commences

In consciousness of differences.

That all have needs to satisfy

And each a power to supply.

We need to love all since we are

Each a unique particular

That is no giant, god, or dwarf.

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But one odd human isomorph;

We can love each because wc know

All, all of us, that this is so:

Can live since we are lived, the powers

That we create with are not ours.

O Unicorn among the cedars.

To whom no magic charm can lead us.

White childhood moving like a sigh

Through the green woods unharmed in thy

Sophisticated innocence,

To call thy true love to the dance,

O Dove of science and of light.

Upon the branches of the night,

O Ichthus playful in the deep

Sea-lodges that forever keep

Their secret of excitement hidden,

O sudden Wind that blows unbidden.

Parting the quiet reeds, O Voice

Within the labyrinth of choice

Only the passive listener hears,

O Clock and Keeper of the years,

O Source of equity and rest,

Quando non fiuerit, non est.

It without image, paradigm

Of matter, motion, number, time,

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The grinning gap of Hell, the hill

Of Venus and the stairs of Will,

Disturb our negligence and chill,

Convict our pride of its offence

In all things, even penitence,

Instruct us in the civil art

Of making from the muddled heart

A desert and a city where

The thoughts that have to labour there

May find locality and peace.

And pent-up feelings their release.

Send strength sufficient for our day,

And point our knowledge on its way,

O da quod jubes, Domine.

Dear friend Elizabeth, dear friend

These days have brought me, may the end

I bring to the grave’s dead-line be

More worthy of your sympathy

Than the beginning; may the truth

That no one marries lead my youth

Where you already are and bless

Me with your learned peacefulness.

Who on the lives about you throw

A calm solificatio,

A warmth throughout the universe

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That each for better or for worse

Must carry round with him through life,

A judge, a landscape, and a wife.

We fall down in the dance, we make

The old ridiculous mistake.

But always there are such as you

Forgiving, helping what we do.

O every day in sleep and labour

Our life and death are with our neighbour,

And love illuminates again

The city and the lion’s den.

The world s great rage, the travel of young men

The Shield of Achilles

She looked over his shoulder

For vines and olive trees,

Marble well-governed cities

And ships upon untamed seas,

But there on the shining metal

His hands had put instead

An artificial wilderness

And a sky like lead.

A plain without a feature, bare and brown,

No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,

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Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,

Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood

An unintelligible multitude,

A million eyes, a million boots in line,

Without expression, waiting for a sign.

Out of the air a voice without a face

Proved by statistics that some cause was just

In tones as dry and level as the place:

No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;

Column by column in a cloud of dust

They marched away enduring a belief

Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

She looked over his shoulder

For ritual pieties,

White flower-garlanded heifers,

Libation and sacrifice,

But there on the shining metal

Where the altar should have been,

She saw by his flickering forge-light

Quite another scene.

Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot

Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)

And sentries sweated for the day was hot:

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A crowd of ordinary decent folk

Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke

As three pale figures were led forth and bound

To three posts driven upright in the ground.

The mass and majesty of this world, all

That carries weight and always weighs the same

Lay in the hands of others; they were small

And could not hope for help and no help came:

What their foes like to do was done, their shame

Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride

And died as men before their bodies died.

She looked over his shoulder

For athletes at their games,

Men and women in a dance

Moving their sweet limbs

Quick, quick, to music,

But there on the shining shield

His hands had set no dancing-floor

But a weed-choked field.

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,

Loitered about that vacancy; a bird

Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:

That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,

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Were axioms to him, who'd never heard

Of any world where promises were kept,

Or one could weep because another wept.

The thin-lipped armorer,

Hephaestos, hobbled away,

Thetis of the shining breasts

Cried out in dismay

At what the god had wrought

To please her son, the strong

Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles

Who would not live long.

References

Auden, W. H., and Stephen E. Severn. “The Library of Congress Variant of ‘The Shield of
Achilles.’” PMLA, 124(5), 2009, pp. 1761–67. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25614400.
Accessed 21 Feb. 2023.

Bone, Christopher. “W. H. Auden in the 1930’s: The Problem of Individual Commitment to
Political Action.” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, 4(1), 1972,
pp. 3–11. https://doi.org/10.2307/4048362. Accessed 19 Feb, 2023.

Farrell, John. “Auden’s Call to Arms: ‘Spain’ and Psychoanalysis.” The Cambridge
Quarterly, 38(3). 2009, pp. 225–42. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42966949.

Firchow, Peter. “The American Auden: A Poet Reborn?” American Literary History, 11(3),
1999, pp. 448–79. http://www.jstor.org/stable/490128. Accessed 19 Feb. 2023.

Grass, Sean C. “W. H. Auden, from Spain to ‘Oxford.’” South Atlantic Review, 66(1), 2001,
pp. 84–101. https://doi.org/10.2307/3202030. Accessed 19 Feb. 2023.

Knox, Bernard. “W. H. Auden.” Grand Street, 1(2), 1982, pp. 18–27.
https://doi.org/10.2307/25006379. Accessed 22 Feb, 2023.

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Mendelson, Edward. Early Auden, Later Auden: A Critical Biography, Princeton, New
Jersey, 2017. Princeton University Press

Mendelson, Edward. “Revision and Power: The Example of W. H. Auden.” Yale French
Studies, no. 89, 1996, pp. 103–12. https://doi.org/10.2307/2930341. Accessed 18 Feb. 2023.

Replogle, Justin. “Auden’s Marxism.” PMLA, (0(5). 1965, pp. 584–95.

Replogle, Justin. “Social Philosophy in Auden's Early Poetry.” Criticism, 2(4), 1960, pp.
351–61. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23090949. Accessed 17 Feb, 2023.

Seal, Andrew. “New Year Letter.” Society for U.S. Intellectual History, 2018, https://s-
usih.org/2018/01/new-year-letter/. Accessed 19 Feb, 2023.

Spears, Monroe K. "W. H. Auden.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 2023,

Summers, Claude J. “‘Or One Could Weep Because Another Wept’: The Counterplot of
Auden’s ‘The Shield of Achilles.’” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 83(2),
1984, pp. 214–32. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27709313. Accessed 22 Feb. 2023.

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