Melancholic Alcoholic: W.H. Auden

Sunday, December 18, 2011

W.H. Auden

–Wystan Hugh Auden, September 1, 1939 (excerpt) first published in The New Republic, Oct. 18, 1939.

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-second Street

Uncertain and afraid

As the clever hopes expire

Of a low dishonest decade:

Waves of anger and fear

Circulate over the bright

And darkened lands of the earth,

Obsessing our private lives;

The unmentionable odour of death

Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can

Unearth the whole offence

From Luther until now

That has driven a culture mad,

Find what occurred at Linz,

What huge imago made

A psychopathic god:

I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew

All that a speech can say

About Democracy,

And what dictators do,

The elderly rubbish they talk

To an apathetic grave;

Analysed all in his book,

The enlightenment driven away,

The habit-forming pain,

Mismanagement and grief:

We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air

Where blind skyscrapers use

Their full height to proclaim

The strength of Collective Man,

Each language pours its vain

Competitive excuse:

But who can live for long

In an euphoric dream;

Out of the mirror they stare,

Imperialism's face

And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar

Cling to their average day:

The lights must never go out,

The music must always play,

All the conventions conspire

To make this fort assume

The furniture of home;

Lest we should see where we are,

Lost in a haunted wood,

Children afraid of the night

Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash

Important Persons shout

Is not so crude as our wish:

What mad Nijinsky wrote

About Diaghilev

Is true of the normal heart;

For the error bred in the bone

Of each woman and each man

Craves what it cannot have,

Not universal love

But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark

Into the ethical life

The dense commuters come,

Repeating their morning vow;

'I will be true to the wife,

I'll concentrate more on my work,'

And helpless governors wake

To resume their compulsory game:

Who can release them now,

Who can reach the dead,

Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice

To undo the folded lie,

The romantic lie in the brain

Of the sensual man-in-the-street

And the lie of Authority

Whose buildings grope the sky:

There is no such thing as the State

And no one exists alone;

Hunger allows no choice

To the citizen or the police;

We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night

Our world in stupor lies;

Yet, dotted everywhere,

Ironic points of light

Flash out wherever the Just

Exchange their messages:

May I, composed like them

Of Eros and of dust,

Beleaguered by the same

Negation and despair,

Show an affirming flame.

― W.H. Auden

Source:

W.H. Auden Quotes (Author of Selected Poems):

This poem achieved great resonance after the events of September 11, 2001—it was widely reproduced, recited on NPR, and interpreted with a link to the tragic events of that day. Indeed, it starts in Manhattan, “in one of the dives on Fifty-second Street,” which Auden later clarified: the Dizzy Club, 62 West 52nd Street (the premises are now occupied by a Beefsteak Charlie’s, I checked). But it captures Auden’s reaction to another tragedy, namely the outbreak of World War II. The poem expresses anger and sadness towards those events, and it questions the historical and mass psychological process that led to the war. In fact, it focuses on the political psychosis of the German people, echoing a few lines of Nietzsche (“Accurate scholarship can / Unearth the whole offence / From Luther until now / That has driven a culture mad”). It then turns to the effect that this war will have on the world and its people, again with psychological overtones. While most of the poem seems thus a chronological bookmark, the last two stanzas—reproduced here–emerge like light from a break in the clouds. They seem to assert defiance in the face of the descending mentality of war. The language is surprisingly naïve but also very moving, and one line, “We must love one another or die” has become a badge for Auden.

It’s curious that Auden felt embarrassed by this poem (he made Penguin include a note saying that it was “trash he was ashamed to have written”) and sought to suppress its inclusion in his later collected works. Perhaps he was concerned about the simplicity and frankness of thought, the somewhat amateurish psychologizing. But the noble note on which the poem ends, its defiant affirmation of love and sympathy in a time of boiling hatred, merits reading, particularly when the troubles and burdens of the world threaten to crush us.

W.H. Auden — September 1, 1939 (read by Dylan Thomas)