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WYSTAN HUGH AUDEN:
'Poetry makes nothing happen'
 Whilst yet an undergraduate at Oxford, WH Auden (1907-1973)
proclaimed his intention of becoming "a great poet." When he burst on
the literary scene with his first volume of "Poems" in 1930, his project
seemed to be under way. Here, it seemed, was a new voice, one that was
alive in its own age and speaking directly to it. He seemed to have all
the desirable qualifications for a poet of his time. He was politically
and socially up to date, au fait in matters psychological and scientific
and stylistically versatile with an arresting turn of phrase He was
hailed as the successor to TS Eliot, even his superior.
"The Wanderer" is a good example of this early harvest. It is Auden's
imitation of the longer Old English poem of the same name and bears
features of Anglo Saxon poetry that influenced his style - as they had
Hopkins over half a century earlier. (In fact, the first two verses
provide a good indication of the feel of the Old English poetic style.)
For example, the heavy alliteration of the first lines of the first two
verses: "Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle" and "There head
falls forward, fatigued at evening." Omission of the definite article,
compressed adjectival phrases and the overpowering influence of
landscape: "In spring, day-wishing flowers appearing", "A bird
stone-haunting", "Avalance sliding, white snow from rock-face" and "Or
lonely on fell as chat by pot-holed becks". There is also Auden's
"metaphysical" gift for the strikingly unusual image: "gradual ruin
spreading like a stain", as well as an echo of Eliot: "Save him from
hostile capture, From sudden tiger's spring at corner."
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W H Auden |
"Look, Stranger!" and "Another Time" are volumes that preceded and
followed Auden's emigration in 1939 to the USA, of which he went on to
become a citizen. The title poem of the former shows advancement in
technical fluency and a new lyricism. It seems to be addressed to
himself as he contemplates the departure that would make him a stranger
to England, and there is an underlying sadness to its contemplative
tone. It opens, "Look, stranger, on this island now The leaping light
for your delight discovers, Stand stable here And silent be, That
through the channels of the ear May wander like a river The swaying
sound of the sea." And it ends, "And this full view Indeed may enter And
move in memory as now these clouds do, That pass the harbour mirror And
all the summer through the water saunter."
"Our Hunting Fathers" contains one of Auden's most poignant phrases -
"the sadness of the creatures" (as dominated by man). Here, within the
framework of the lyric, he adopts a rhetorical and ratiocinative
approach to his subject: "Our hunting fathers told the story, Of the
sadness of the creatures, Pitied the limits and the lack Set in their
finished features; Saw in the lion's intolerant look Behind the quarry's
dying glare, Love raging for the personal glory That reason's gift would
add.....Who nurtured in that fine tradition Predicted the result....That
human ligaments could so His southern gestures modify, And make it his
mature ambition, To think no thought but ours, To hunger, work illegally
And be anonymous?"
The poem reads like an indictment of the theory of evolution. Our
putative ancestors pitied their animal victims for their inability to
attain, despite their "love" or yearning, to the human "gift of reason".
Yet, that "fine tradition" has "resulted" not in an evolutionary
improvement of mankind but in our "human ligaments" being modified to
the extent that we "think no thought" but to behave as the beasts we
once pitied.
In "Musee des Beaux Arts" we find Auden equally at home, and in
control, in a more discursive, meditative style. It refers to the famous
painting by Breughel, one of the Old Masters of art, in the Parisian
Museum of Fine arts, of the Greek mythological character, Icarus. He was
the son of master craftsman Daedalus, who fashioned two pairs of wings
for both of them to escape by air from the island of Crete. Despite his
father's warning Icarus, in the exhilaration of flight, flew too near
the sun, causing the wax fastening of his wings to melt so that he fell
into the sea and drowned. "About suffering they were never wrong, The
Old Masters; how well they understood Its human position; how it takes
place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking
dully along;.....In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything
turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have
heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important
failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into
the green Water..." Most of the tragedies "in this harsh world" take
place without sympathetic response from those immediately in the know.
Their tragic nature is only realised subsequently, like the Icarus myth
itself, when they become the subject of belated, usually retrospective,
media and artistic attention.
Notwithstanding Milton's "Lycidas" and Tennyson's "In Memoriam", the
much shorter poem "In Memory of WB Yeats" is one of the finest elegies
in the language. The poem is revealing of Auden's views not only about
Yeats (who was one of his influences vide "Our Hunting Fathers" above)
but about the poetic profession itself. It is in three parts, the first
and the second in free verse, the third in rhyming tetrameter after the
manner of Blake. 1) "By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept
from his poems." The subject of death passed on from the tongue of the
poet to that of his mourners. 2) "You were silly like us; your gift
survived it all.....mad Ireland hurt you into poetry, Now Ireland has
her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen: it
survives In the valley of its saying....A way of happening, a mouth."
Poetry may be influenced by life, but it does not affect life.
Nevertheless, it has a life of its own that survives indifference,
despite the limitations of the poet himself.3) "Follow, poet, follow
right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still
persuade us to rejoice....In the prison of his days Teach the free man
how to praise." Though man is imprisoned by external circumstances the
poet, through his inspirational words, can kindle man's innate yearning
for freedom and encourage him to hope.
The poems we have considered are some of Auden's best, but they are
not representative of the whole of his output. There are other fine
pieces but, in line with his undergraduate declaration much of it is
marked by a self-conscious intellectualism, whimsicalness and lack of
emotional depth. In fact, FR Leavis maintained that Auden's remained an
essentially undergraduate type of brilliance. This was unfair, and
Auden's achievement could more fairly be compared to that of Tennyson.
He reflected the concerns of his age in his poetry, he drew attention to
life's unsavoury features, and his technical mastery and versatility in
the process were overpowering Yet, even the poems discussed above are
essentially in the nature of intelligent and sensitive commentary, one
senses insufficiently that personal involvement or suffering that speaks
directly to the heart of the reader. Ultimately, Auden is a poet who
speaks primarily to his reader's mind. He fails sufficiently or
consistently to reach one's heart and transform one's consciousness.
This is why it could be said of him - in a decidedly regretful way for
such was his brilliance - in his own words, that his "poetry makes
nothing happen."
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