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Biography of W. H. Auden

Wystan Hugh Auden is considered one of the finest poets of the twentieth century,
occupying a position among the likes of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. He was
remarkably prolific and experimental in his poetry; his early stage was
characterized by an Eliot-like modernism, his middle stage incorporated Marxist
and Freudian themes, and his late stage was more conversational and dealt with
Christianity. He experimented with a variety of forms and was virtuosic at all of
them: lyric poetry, odes, ballads, meditations, arguments, satires, conversations, and
more. He used both formal and free verse.

Auden was born in York, England, in 1907 to an Anglican doctor and a nurse. His
childhood was typical, and he proved himself very early on as a bright child. He was
educated at Oxford, first studying natural history and then switching to English, and
his first volume of poems was printed in 1921. After graduating he lived in Berlin for
a while, exploring the cafe lifestyle and embracing his homosexuality. He sent a few
poems to Eliot, who was editor at Faber and Faber, and the older poet returned
them with favorable comments. A new selection was selected for publication in
1930.

His second volume, The Orators, was published in 1932. It yielded immediate fame.
His name was given to a new generation of poets, the "Auden Generation" or the
"Auden Group," who were concerned with political and ethical commitment but a
commitment that was tinged with ambiguity. They acknowledged modernism's
influence but exemplified a desire to escape the poetic conventions of the age.
Auden wrote three plays with Christopher Isherwood in the early 1930s and
published a new volume of poetry, On This Island, in 1936. He traveled to Spain and
Iceland and published writings on both places. He received the King's Gold Medal for
poetry in 1937. In 1935 he married Erika Mann to secure her a British passport.
Before the outbreak of the Second World War, Auden immigrated to America and
converted to Christianity. This event augured a significant change in his poetry,
although sometimes critics overstate this division of an early and late period, also
split by his move to America. He began a relationship that would last the rest of his
life with Chester Kallmann, an American poet. He lived in New York but traveled to
Italy and Venice. He worked in several universities in New York as well as Michigan.
He received two Guggenheim awards in 1942 and 1945, the Pulitzer Prize in 1947,
and the National Book Award. He wrote poetry as well as librettos while in America.

In 1972 Auden returned to England to teach at Oxford. He relished the Northern

climate, and he and Kallmann established themselves in Austria. Several poetry
collections were published in the 1960s and early 1970s.

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Auden died of a heart attack in a hotel in Vienna in 1973. His last collection of poems
was published posthumously in 1976 by his literary executor Edward Mendelson.

Auden has been profoundly influential on poets of his own generation and those of
subsequent ones. A prominent example of a poet indebted to Auden is John Ashbery.
Auden is a mainstay in English courses in high schools and universities throughout
the United States and England, and he is a critic's darling.

Funeral Blues (Stop All the Clocks)"

The poet calls for the clocks to be stopped, the telephone to be cut off, and the dog and
pianos silenced. The coffin will be brought out to the mourners with a muffled drum and
under the moan of airplanes that spell out the message, “He Is Dead.” Doves are to be
decked with bows around their necks, and the traffic policemen are to wear black cotton
gloves.

The poet thinks of the deceased as “my North, my South, my East and West,” his work and
his rest, his noon and his midnight, his talk and his song. He incorrectly thought their love
would last forever.

The stars, moon, sun, ocean, and forests, the poet writes, should be sent away; they are no
longer needed, and “nothing now can ever come to any good.”

Analysis
“Funeral Blues” has an interesting composition history. It originally appeared as a song in a
play Auden co-wrote with Christopher Isherwood called The Ascent of F6. In this form the
last two stanzas were not included, and three others followed instead. The characters in the
play were specifically invoked, and the play was an ironic statement on how “great men”
are lionized after their deaths. The poem was then included in Auden’s poetry collection of
1936 (sometimes under the book title Look, Stranger!, which Auden hated). The poem was
titled “Funeral Blues” by 1937, when it was published in Collected Poems. Here it had been
rewritten as a cabaret song to fit with the kind of burlesque reviews popular in Berlin, and
it was intended for Hedli Anderson in a piece by Benjamin Britten. It is also sometimes
referred to as “Funeral Blues (Stop All the Clocks)” due to its famous first line. It is perhaps
most famous for its delivery by a character in the English comedy/drama Four Weddings
and a Funeral, in which a character mourns his dead lover.
The poem in the format readers usually see it today is a dirge, or a lament for the dead. Its
tone is much more somber than early iterations, and the themes more universal, although it
speaks of an individual. It has four stanzas of four lines each with lines in varying numbers
of syllables but containing about four beats each. Auden plays with the form a bit in the
poem, and critics debate whether or not this was a manifestation of his tendency to do just
that—whether he was simply playing around or intended a larger point.

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As with many of his poems, there is a mingling of the high and the low. This is in the style of
a classical elegy, though it features informal language and objects of everyday life such as a
telephone. This mingling, writes one scholar, “is a powerful modernist move, one which
suggests that only by embracing the modern world can art come to terms with the
complexities of human experience.”

The poem appears from the perspective of a man (seemingly the poet himself) deeply
mourning the loss of a lover who has died. He begins by calling for silence from the
everyday objects of life—the telephone and the clocks—and the pianos, drums, and
animals nearby. He doesn’t just want quiet, however; he wants his loss writ large. He wants
the life of his lover—seemingly a normal, average man—to be proclaimed to the world as
noble and valuable. He wants airplanes to write the message “He Is Dead” in the sky, crepe
bows around doves, and traffic policemen wearing black gloves. What seems unbearable to
him is the thought that this man’s passing from life to death will be unmarked by anyone
other than the poet.

In the third stanza the poet reminisces about how much the man who died meant to him. It
is a beautifully evocative section that illustrates the bond between the two; note the theme
of completeness in the language, which covers all four primary compass directions and all
seven days of the week. Similarly, “noon” and “midnight” together cover, by synecdoche
(parts standing for the whole), all hours of the day. The stanza, at the same time, reveals the
tragedy of human life, which is that everyone must die and that almost everyone will
experience being severed from a loved one; love does not, after all, last forever in this
world.

In the fourth stanza the poet’s anguish rings out even more fervently. Here he demands
that Nature heed his grief, calling her to extinguish the stars and the moon and the sun and
get rid of the ocean. He wants the world to reflect the emptiness within him. Human
memorials to the dead will not be sufficient. There is no hope at the end of the poem; the
reader is left with the very real and very bitter sense of the man’s grief, since no end can be
achieved without the poet’s lover.

"September 1, 1939"

The poet sits in a dive bar on 52nd Street, disappointed in the bad decade of the “low
dishonest” 1930s. The decade and recent events have consumed people’s private lives. The
odor of death “offends” the night of September 1, 1939.

Future scholars will describe how a cultural problem led from the time of Martin Luther to
the time of Hitler’s hometown of Linz, a pattern which has driven the German culture into
madness. Meanwhile, schoolchildren and the average person know well enough: “Those to
whom evil is done / Do evil in return.”

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The ancient Greek historian Thucydides knew about dictators and so-called democracy,
their “elderly rubbish” of arguments that enable the dictator to cause pain,
mismanagement, and grief while an apathetic population permits it. It is happening again in
1939.

The “neutral” New York skyscrapers demonstrate the power of “Collective Man” to
accomplish great things, but America is in a “euphoric dream” of neutrality as war breaks
out in Europe. America looks “out of the mirror” and sees the face of imperialism and the
“international wrong.”

Normal people continue their average American days, keeping up the music and keeping on
the lights. Though we make ourselves seem comfortable and at home, we are actually “lost
in a haunted wood,” like children who are afraid of the dark and “have never been happy or
good.”

The most pompous pro-war speeches spouted by “Important Persons” are not as base as
our own jealous wish “to be loved alone.” This is a normal error and not just what “mad
Nijinsky wrote / About Diaghilev” (after Diaghilev left him for Diaghilev’s lover); each
person selfishly wants what she or he cannot have.

Commuters come from their “conservative dark” families into “the ethical life” of the public
sphere, vowing to improve their lives. Meanwhile, “helpless governors” make their
“compulsory” political moves now that war has broken out. Do they have any choice? They
seem deaf to advice and unable to speak for those who have no voice.

Yet, all the poet has is his voice, which can expose the lie of neutrality rhetoric and the
romanticism of the “man-in-the-street,” who goes along with the authorities and enjoys his
“sensual” pleasures. To the poet, there is no “State,” but we are all interconnected and rely
on each other. That is, “We must love one another or die.” (Auden’s later version reads: “We
must love one another and die.”)

While the world slumbers, flashes of hope come from “the Just,” exchanging their messages.
The poet seeks to be among them, human all the same, troubled by despair but still holding
up “an affirming flame.”

Analysis
“September 1, 1939,” one of Auden’s most famous and oft-quoted poems, gained new
prominence after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
Curiously, though, Auden came to dislike this work, finding it “dishonest” and a “forgery.”
He had his publisher include a note that the work was “trash he was ashamed to have
written”; he also tried to keep it out of later collections of his poems. It is unclear why he
felt so embarrassed by the poem. It has remained a staple of Auden’s work as well as an
inspiring call to speak out in hope for justice and brotherhood despite times of war or
terror.

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The poem was written in 1939, just as German troops invaded Poland and began the
Second World War. It was published in The New Republic that year and included in the
collection Another Time the following year. Hitler’s invasion of Poland declared his
military strength and flouted the agreement of the Munich Conference, shocking the entire
world. The United States did not enter the war until 1941.
Auden begins his poem with the speaker sitting in a dive bar in New York City. Hitler’s
actions have brought the “low dishonest decade” to a close, bringing “the unmentionable
odour of death” to the September evening. He contemplates Hitler’s psychology using a
Jungian concept—a “huge imago,” a psychological concept of the idealized self—and he
imagines that historians will explain how German culture, perhaps starting with Martin
Luther’s Protestant shakeup of Christianity hundreds of years earlier, led Germans to go
along with Hitler’s psychopathic evil.

Yet, even the average person perceives the basic human patterns in the story: doing evil to
someone leads that person to do evil in return. More than 2,000 years ago, Thucydides saw
how dictators abuse an apathetic population to accomplish their ends, even in a democracy
like Germany (or the United States). The same pattern keeps occurring. Perhaps this is a
reason why Auden’s nine stanzas all have the same pattern of eleven lines that, while they
do not rhyme, tend to repeat vowel and consonant sounds at the ends of lines (for example,
the last four lines of stanza 1: earth/lives/death/night; stanza 2: know/learn/done/return;
stanza 3: away/pain/grief/again). The story told here is not new.

In the fourth stanza the poet focuses on New York City, a paragon of modern capitalism,
which has yielded “blind skyscrapers” that “proclaim / the strength of Collective Man” via
competition and diversity rather than coordinated socialistic efforts. Yet, one cost of this
social blindness is isolationism. People cling to their average lives; they are content to
pursue their happy dreams, and they keep the music playing and the lights on so that they
never see how morally lost they are. They trust “Authority” (the government or the
capitalist telling them to remain neutral for their own good), which fits their selfish and
sensual desires to fulfill their goals regardless of what is happening in Europe.

What is missing is awareness of this basic human jealousy that privileges oneself over
others, leading not only to evil but also complacency and apathy when evil is happening
elsewhere, as in Europe. Meanwhile, politicians inevitably take advantage of these
tendencies as the geopolitical “game” plays out.

In the last two stanzas the poetic voice tries to overcome the problems identified in the
previous stanza: “Who can reach the deaf, / Who can speak for the dumb?” Auden scholar
James Persoon notes that the speaker only has one voice with which to “undo the folded
lie” that humans are too jealous to seek justice.

Yet, the speaker is one of many people who provide “points of light” like this poem. In
contrast to the points of light that come from a firing gun, the poem’s rhetorical points
“flash out” as a message exchanged with other members of “the Just,” those who seek
justice. Although each person writes selfishly and separately, “dotted everywhere,” poems
about solidarity and justice create a kind of solidarity. In this way, the network of poems

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“ironically” emerges spontaneously, mirroring the network of New York skyscrapers which
emerge without coordination and make the city.

The poet knows he is just like everyone else, “composed like them / Of Eros [alluding to the
god of love, representing the passions] and dust [alluding to Biblical passages about human
mortality and returning to the natural dust of the earth upon death].” It is a time of
“negation and despair” for anyone who is paying attention to Europe. Nonetheless, the
speaker hopes his words can show “an affirming flame” of human connectedness and
concern.

If Auden’s speaker is speaking against apathetic neutrality in the face of German

aggression, is he calling for the United States to go to war? Or is the role of such a poet to
affirm common humanity and justice along with the others who are “Just,” taking a
prophetic route while hoping that people will turn from their selfish ways? When Auden
changed the key line from the idealistic “We must love one another or die” to “We must
love one another and die,” the meaning seems to have changed to express that going to war
in the name of love was, in the case of the Second World War, perhaps in hindsight,
justified.

"Musée des Beaux Arts"

The old Masters were never wrong about human suffering and its position in context with
the rest of human society. While someone is suffering, others are going about their regular
business. The elderly live in desperate hope for a miracle, but children are not particularly
concerned. Even a martyr dies on the margins of society.

For example, in the painter Brueghel’s depiction of Icarus falling from the sky, “everything
turns away” uncaringly from his disaster. The ploughman might have heard Icarus splash
into the water, but it mattered little to him. The sun glimmers on white legs disappearing
below the water. On the nearby ship, people must have seen the amazing sight of a boy
falling from the sky, but they have somewhere to go, so they sail away.

Analysis
“Musée des Beaux Arts” was composed in 1938, published under the title “Palais des beaux
arts” in a newspaper in 1939, and included in the volume Another Time in 1940. It was
written after Auden had spent time in Brussels, Belgium. The title refers to the museum
that the poet visited while he was there, and the painting mentioned in the poem was
hanging during the time of his visit. It is often considered a transition poem, as it occupies
the space between the poet’s early stage of abstruse, complicated poems and his latter,
simpler, and more conversational period. The structure of the short poem is relatively
simple, and it uses ekphrastic description (verbal description of images).

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The museum Auden visited is known for its prominent collection of the Old Masters,
particularly painters from the Netherlands. Many critics have discussed the painting
mentioned in the poem, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” (1558), and others by Pieter
Brueghel the Elder, a Renaissance-era painter, that were hanging in the gallery and may
have influenced Auden in writing his poem. The identity of painter and painting is in doubt;
critic Arthur F. Kinney maintains that while Brueghel painted this very scene, his version
included the figure of Daedalus while the painting mentioned by Auden is actually a copy
painted by Brueghel’s son Pieter the Younger, which is exactly the same but leaves out
Daedalus (father of Icarus). The painting depicts the end of the myth of Daedalus and his
son Icarus told by Ovid, in which the two fashion wings for themselves to escape
imprisonment, but Icarus flies too close to the sun and the wax on the wings melts, causing
him to plunge to his death in the sea. This is the “disaster” mentioned in the poem.

Another Brueghel is The Numbering of Bethlehem, which depicts Joseph and Mary’s
arrival in Bethlehem to be counted for taxes, as told in the New Testament. The painting is
full of small details, and Auden’s lines about people walking “dully” along and the elderly
waiting for the miraculous birth and the children skating happily along likely derive from
this scene. There is also The Massacre of the Innocents, which Auden may have alluded to
in the lines, “They never forget / That even the dreadful martyrdom must / run its course /
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot / Where the dogs go on with their doggy / life, and
the torturer’s horse / Scratches its innocent behind against a tree.” The dogs and horses are
present in that painting, and no doubt inspired the lines.
These examples in the poem’s first stanza (with the interlocking rhyme scheme
ABCADEDBFCFCE) provide the context for the extended description of the Icarus painting
in the second stanza (with a tighter rhyme scheme AABCDDBC). In each case, people go
about their business or their play without comprehending, caring much about, or even
knowing about another person’s experience of suffering or hope or disaster. Children and
animals do not have the elevated sympathy necessary to understand someone else’s plight;
they just keep “skating.” Animals are blithely unaware of human suffering and merely
attend to their biological needs.

Meanwhile, many adults remain unaware of or unconcerned by others’ suffering. The

ploughman “may” have noticed “the splash, the forsaken cry” of Icarus, but it was not “an
important failure,” and the plowing must go on. The ship nearby “must” have noticed, but it
had “somewhere to get to,” so it sailed “sailed calmly on.” In the painting, another
character, a shepherd is looking up, perhaps at Daedalus, but the poem does not explicitly
mention this part of the scene; the poem notes only that “everything turns away / Quite
leisurely from the disaster.” Brueghel placed the ploughman’s head, looking down at the
ground, right by the shepherd’s head, which emphasizes the contrast and the ploughman’s
unconcern. (A man on shore, near the legs of Icarus, does seem to be looking at him and
even reaching out, but this character also is not mentioned in the poem.)
Auden’s tone in the poem is measured, precise, and matter-of-fact. He does not use
superfluous words or stick to traditional rhyme or meter. The poem is not didactic; its
moralizing is delicate. The diction is certainly proletarian and accessible: “When someone
else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” The reader senses that this
is Auden’s quiet contemplation of a painting; one can almost see him standing before it,

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thinking about the nature of suffering amidst those who do not care. It is important to
remember that the poem derives from the time immediately before the Second World War
as nations were shoring up their militaries and preparing for conflict, and in this way its
theme of unconcern prefigures those who go about their business in New York City in
Auden’s “September 1, 1939.”

"In Memory of W. B. Yeats"

William Butler Yeats died in winter: the brooks were frozen, airports were all but empty,
and statues were covered in snow. The thermometer and other instruments told us the day
he died “was a dark cold day.”

While nature followed its course elsewhere, mourners kept his poems alive without letting
the poet’s death interfere. Yet, for Yeats himself, mind and body failed, leaving no one to
appreciate his life but his admirers. He lives through his poetry, scattered among cities and
unfamiliar readers and critics, who modify his life and poetry through their own
understandings. While the rest of civilization moves on, “a few thousand” will remember
the day of his death as special.

In the second section of the poem, Yeats is called “silly like us.” It was “Mad Ireland” that
caused Yeats the suffering he turned into poetry. Poetry survives and gives voice to
survival in a space of isolation.

In the third, final section of the poem, the poet asks the Earth to receive Yeats as “an
honoured guest.” The body, “emptied of its poetry,” lies there. Meanwhile, “the dogs of
Europe bark” and humans continue their “intellectual disgrace.” But the poet is to “follow
right / To the bottom of the night,” despite the dark side of humanity somehow persuading
others to rejoice in existence. Despite “human unsuccess,” the poet can sing out through the
“curse” and “distress.” Thus one’s poetry is a “healing fountain” that, although life is a
“prison,” can “teach the free man how to praise” life anyway.

Analysis
Along with his piece on the death of Sigmund Freud, Auden's tribute to the poet William
Butler Yeats is a most memorable elegy on the death of a public figure. Written in 1940, it
commemorates the death of the poet in 1939, a critical year for Auden personally as well as
for the world at large. This was the year he moved to New York and the year the world
catapulted itself into the Second World War.

Yeats was born in Ireland 1856 and embraced poetry very early in his life. He never
abandoned the traditional verse format of English poetry but embraced some of the tenets
of modernism, especially the modernism practiced by Ezra Pound. He was politically active,

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mystical, and often deeply pessimistic, but his work also evinces intense lyrical beauty and
fervent exaltation in Nature. He is easily considered one of the most important poets of the
20th century, and Auden recognized it at the time.

The poem is organized into three sections and is a commentary on the nature of a great
poet’s art and its role during a time of great calamity—as well as the ordinary time of life’s
struggles.

The first, mournful section describes the coldness of death, repeating that “The day of his
death was a dark cold day.” The environment reflects the coldness of death: rivers are too
frozen to run; hardly anyone travels by air; statues of public figures are desecrated by
snow. These conditions symbolize the loss of activity and energy in Yeats’ death.

At the same time, far away, wolves run and “the peasant river” flows outside of the rest of
civilization (“untempted by the fashionable quays”), keeping the poetry alive. The
implication is that the poems live even though the man may be dead. The difficulty with
this situation, however, is that the man can no longer speak for himself; “he became his
admirers.” His poems, like ashes, are “scattered” everywhere and are misinterpreted
(“unfamiliar affections” are brought into the poems). The ugly fact of bad digestion
modifies the poems as “The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living.”

Furthermore, as in “Funeral Blues” and “Musée des Beaux Arts,” the events of the average
day go on—a trader yells on the floor, the poor suffer—for most people, the day goes
unmarked. It takes a special soul to mark the importance of the day of the death of a great
poet, and only “a few thousand” have such a soul. As scholar James Persoon writes, “These
two elements—the poet's death as national and natural crisis and the poet’s death as
almost completely insignificant—describe a tension within which Auden explores the life of
the work after the death of the author.” Thus, in addition to the thermometer telling us so,
the speaker of the poem tells us that it is a “dark cold day” with respect to the popular
reception of Yeats’ poetry.

In the second section the speaker briefly reflects on the generative power behind Yeats’
poetry. It was “Mad Ireland” that “hurt” him and inspired his poetry as a form of survival.
For Yeats, “silly” like other poets or, more broadly, like other Irishmen or humans, poetry
was a “gift” that survived everything other than itself—even Yeats’ own physical
degeneration, the misinterpretations of “rich women,” and Yeats’ own failings. Poetry itself,
from this perspective, survives in the midst of everything, not causing anything, but flowing
out from isolated safety (perhaps the Freudian subconscious) and providing voice
(metaphorically a “mouth”) to that deep level of raw and unassailable humanity.

The third and final part brings the reader back into more familiar territory, with six stanzas
of AABB verse, every line in seven-syllable trochaic verse (three long-short feet followed by
a seventh stressed syllable).

The body of Yeats (“the Irish vessel”) rests in the ground, the warring nations fight
(metaphorically, the “dogs of Europe bark”), people misinterpret his work (“intellectual
disgraces”), yet somehow, his poetry retains a place somewhere. The true poet, like Yeats

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himself, will “follow right / To the bottom of the night” (to the primordial humanity
expressed in Yeats’ poetry), to that fundamental human freedom where an “unconstraining
voice” can “persuade us to rejoice” in our existence.

True enough, the human “curse” (evoking the Fall of Man in Genesis) remains; death
awaits. This is all too true in a time of war. But the poet can turn the curse into a “vineyard”
where sweet poetic drink can form. On the one hand there are “deserts of the heart” and
human distress, yet on the other hand, with this wine a “healing fountain” can release a
man from “the prison of his [mortal] days.” A poet like Yeats, despite everything, can “teach
the free man how to praise” that fundamental spark of existence that survives in one’s
poetry.

"The Shield of Achilles"

Thetis looks at the images on the shield that Hephaestos has been making for Achilles
during the Trojan War. She expected to see olive trees and vines and marble cities and
ships on windy seas, but Hephaestos has forged “an artificial wilderness” under a leaden
sky. The plain is bare and brown, but a great multitude of boots stand ready for war. A
faceless voice dryly explains with statistics why war is required for justice, so they march
forth.

Thetis also expected scenes of religious piety, but that is not what Hephaestos has been
making. Barbed wire encloses a military camp in “an arbitrary spot,” and civilians observe
from a distance while the camp punishes three pale prisoners by binding them to upright
posts. No hope comes from outside. The prisoners and the citizens are too “small,” and the
prisoners (perhaps also the other characters) “lost their pride / And died as men before
their bodies died.”

Thetis has looked a third time over the shoulder of Hephaestos while he works. She looks
for athletes and dancers enjoying games and music, but on the shield there was a “weed-
choked field” instead of a dancing floor. One poor child wanders about alone, throwing a
stone at a bird that flies away to escape. To him rape and murder seem normal. The child
has never heard of a place with kept promises or even human sympathy.

Hephaestos limps away, revealing the whole shield to Thetis, who cries out in horror at its
imagery. This is what the armorer decided to put on the shield of Achilles, son of Thetis,
Achilles the man-slayer doomed to soon die.

Analysis
“The Shield of Achilles” provides a chilling confrontation between love and war. Written in
1952, it was included in his volume of poetry of the same name, which was published in
1955. The volume won the National Book Award in 1956. It is written in alternating seven-

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line stanzas of rime royal (ABABBCC) and eight-line stanzas in a ballad format
(ABCBDEFE).

The contents of the poem derive from Homer’s Iliad, an ancient epic poem concerning a
key part of the Trojan War. A lot has happened by this point. In book 18, the goddess
Thetis, the mother of Achilles, asks the god Hephaestos (Latinized as Hephaestus) to create
a shield for son so he can triumph in the war against Troy. Achilles’s earlier shield was
taken by Hector after he killed Achilles’ close friend Patroclus, who had taken the armor
into battle thinking that seeing this armor would scare the Trojans (Achilles had stayed out
of the fight over a dispute with Agamemnon about a woman). Homer goes into great detail
describing the shield that Hephaestos makes; it contains a veritable history of the world in
its scenes of pastoral calm, marriage, war, the cosmos, art, and nature.
The poem begins Thetis looking over the armorer’s shoulder with disappointment. In each
of her three stanzas, employing the repetition “She looked over his shoulder” in the first
line, she is hoping to see images of civilization, joy, piety, and peaceful employment of
athletic and musical arts. She loves her son and is thinking ahead to what he should be
fighting for. But instead she sees images of irrationality, war, wilderness, immorality,
injustice, and punishment. The contrast between what Thetis expects and what Hephaestos
delivers, what Thetis desires and what the armorer thinks appropriate for Achilles, is stark.

The pattern of hope and disappointment occurs all three times, followed by the concluding
stanza wrapping up the point: after all, Achilles is doomed to live a short but heroic
warrior’s life. Achilles, like people in general, can try to live average but boring lives
instead, but Achilles has chosen heroism, and his mother is dismayed.

Critic Scott Horton argues that the poem has contemporary resonance for Auden and his
audience, reflecting a warning about the Cold War and the authoritarian warmongering of
the 1950s: “Auden is not portraying the tragedies of the last war as such. He is warning of a
world to come in which totalitarian societies dominate and the worth and dignity of the
individual human being are lost. He warns those who stand by, decent though they may
seemingly be, and say nothing.” This perspective is supported by anachronistic images on
the shield. Thetis sees a scene that seems more like one from the Second World War:
barbed wire around a military base. Modern war engages “millions” and spreads
propaganda through “statistics.”

Another allusion on the military base concerns the three people punished. A crowd watches
from a distance as three figures are brought forth and bound to three posts in the ground.
This scene alludes to the Crucifixion of Jesus between two others, as though the three posts
are crosses, and it makes the horrors of war seem more universal. Horton writes, “the
anonymous image also displaces the greater spiritual significance of the Christian sacrifice,
suggesting that in the modern world such sacrifice has lost its ultimate meaning and that
the victims, Christ in particular, have become nameless and insignificant.” Poet Anthony
Hecht has noted that the executed men were not martyrs, just victims. One also might see
in this image an allusion to the Jews and others killed in Nazi concentration camps.

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When Hephaestos hobbles away (in myth he is lame) without comment, the shield is his
only statement. He put a mirror up to reality and reproduced it on the “shining metal.” In
contrast, Thetis’ “shining breasts” reflect her motherly love, less with reality than with
hope. Auden once said, “A society which was really like a good poem, embodying the
virtues of beauty, order, economy, and subordination of detail to the whole, would be a
horror.” As much as we might strive for the virtues, reality—whether presented by
Hephaestos, Homer, or Auden—shows us a different, more distressing world.

Summary and Analysis of "O Tell Me the Truth About Love"

Some people say that love is like a little boy or a bird. Others say it makes the
world go round, which some people find absurd. A man who seemed to know annoyed
his wife when he defined it.

Maybe love looks like pajamas or smells like llamas, or does it smell comforting? Is
it rough or smooth? What is the truth about love?

History books are cryptic, and people talk about love while crossing the ocean. It is
mentioned in suicide accounts and is etched on the backs of train guides.

Does love howl like a hungry dog or boom like a military band? Can it be
represented on a singing saw or a piano? Does it sing at parties, or does love prefer
classical music? Can it be quiet on command? What’s the truth?

The speaker tried looking for love in a summer house, and at the River Thames at
Maidenhead and Brighton, but he didn’t find it. He doesn’t know what the blackbird
or tulip said about it. He couldn’t find it in the chicken run or under the bed.

Can love make special faces? Does it get sick on a swing? Does it get bored or
preoccupied? Does it have a special relationship to money? Is patriotism enough
for love? Does it tell vulgar tales? Tell the truth!

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Will love come and surprise him, knock on his door, step on his feet, or turn up like
the weather, mildly or roughly? When it comes, will it change his life? He asks for
the fourth time, “O tell me the truth about love.”

Analysis

In this delightful poem from the 1930s, Auden playfully considers the nature and
form of love. Many of his poems are abstruse, complicated paragons of modernist
erudition, but as he moved into his middle and late period, his poems became more
conversational and vernacular. He took up the subject of love numerous times,
leading him to be considered something of a poetic philosopher on the subject.

In his article on Auden’s poetic treatment of love, scholar Zsuzsa Rawlinson writes,
“on a more personal and private level the subject of love, the trope of ‘in or out,’
with an equal persistence, also fills a large place in his work. It was here, in the
personal, everyday things of life where Auden seems to have truly triumphed in
giving a reflection and confirmation of our own comparable experiences.”

The poem was included in Tell Me the Truth About Love, a small volume of ten love
poems and cabaret songs. In this volume, as in the poem itself, love is celebrated in
and for its various guises –as joy, despair, mockery, fulfillment, and yearning.

What is love? This poem provides questions but no firm answers. At the ends of
stanzas two, four, six, and seven (out of seven), he demands, using the title of the
poem, “O tell me the truth about love,” although he asks only one person directly,
his next-door neighbor. The answer was insufficient, at least to the ears of the
man’s wife, who “got very cross.” The man “looked as if he knew,” but he may have
said some cliché like “it makes the world go around.” Perhaps it was better for the
man to act loving without trying to put it into words.

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Indeed, the poem expresses the idea that love cannot be pinned down. A metaphor
like “love’s a little boy” or “it’s a bird” will not do; love cannot be reduced to one
simple thing. Auden extends the point in the second stanza to humorous effect:
“Does it look like a pair of pyjamas, / Or the ham in a temperance hotel?” There is
wit and absurdity in the metaphors and similes, which has led critic Lytton
Strachey to compare Auden to court jesters of the Middle Ages and the
philosophers of the 18th century, who were fond of pranks and buffoonery.

The poem does not directly mention sex, but one might catch references to the act
(“odour … of llamas”) or various kinds of pubic hair in the second stanza, as well as
“ham” doing double duty as buttocks and “pair of pyjamas” relating to an overnight
tryst. Alternatively, a G-rated reading might see this stanza evoking emotions:
sometimes love may seem “prickly” or “sharp,” and sometimes it may seem “soft” or
“smooth.”

The third stanza turns to words written or spoken about love. Here it seems quite
different from how it seems in poets who write verbosely and floridly of roses and
swooning and deep metaphysical connections. Here Auden grants that love might be
discovered in unlikely or unattractive places, such as “scribbled on / The backs of
subway guides” or as “cryptic little notes” as footnotes in a history book. People
often seem to discuss love in passing, on a Transatlantic cruise. Newspapers
mention it when explaining suicides.

The fourth stanza suggests that love might also have its own sound that one could
try to imitate. Perhaps it is like a hungry dog howling or the regular pulsation of a
booming military band. Perhaps it makes an odd and playful noise like a singing saw,
or perhaps it is grand and sweeping like classical music played on a fancy piano.

Each image, here and in the next two stanzas, seems to add something to the
varieties of love and the different ways it is experienced. The regular pattern of
the stanzas, each generally following an ABABCDCD rhyme scheme, together with
the refrain “O tell me the truth about love,” reinforces the idea that the poem is
unified in presenting different variations on the same theme.

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In the final stanza, the speaker wonders how love might enter his life. Again the
low diction and imagery reflect the humor of the poem generally: will love come as a
surprise while “I’m picking my nose?” The speaker’s coarseness reinforces the
poem’s immediacy and approachability, which might be a reason it has been one of
his most popular poems.

Overall, the poem suggests that love can be subtle or bombastic, private or public,
eternal or fleeting. As Rawlinson notes, reason is hardly any help on this subject,
since it provides only “partial truths,” which is the same limitation in the poem’s
imagery. Auden successfully conveys the playful irrationality and confusing
character of love. The "truth about love" is unsayable.

Summary and Analysis of "Night Mail"

The train is crossing the border overnight with mail, bringing letters and checks
and orders for rich and poor. Though the way is steep, she is still on time. She
passes moors and boulders, her white steam flowing behind her. She noisily passes
through the “silent miles” of grassland. Birds peer at her, and sheepdogs cannot
make her alter her course. Passing one farm, the dwellers sleep on, but a jug
“gently shakes.”

In the dawn she descends into Glasgow. There she heads toward dark furnaces set
up like “gigantic chessmen.” All of Scotland craves her arrival, for the men want
news.

There are letters of all sorts and for all people: receipts, invitations, applications,
declarations of love, gossip from around the world, news both “circumstantial” and
“financial,” letters from family members, letters with doodles in the margins,
letters from all over Europe, letters of condolences, all written on papers of every
color imaginable. The letters have all tones and styles: catty, friendly, cold, boring,
clever, stupid, long, short. Some are typed, some are printed, some are misspelled.

Thousands still sleep and dream and have nightmares. They are asleep in Glasgow,
asleep in Edinburgh. They dream on, but they hope that when they awake they will
have letters. Their hearts will pound when they hear the knock on the door of the
postman, for “who can bear to feel himself forgotten?”

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Analysis

The charming poem “Night Mail” was written in 1936 to accompany the
documentary film of the same year and the same title. The film concerned a
London, Midland, and Scottish Railway (LMS) mail train traveling from London to
Scotland. It was produced by GPO Film Unit, directed by Harry Watt and Basil
Wright, and narrated by John Grierson and Stuart Legg. Auden’s poem was read
toward the end of the film, set to music by Benjamin Britten. Lines were chopped
and changed to fit the film. The basic intent of the film, at least superficially, was
to reveal how the mail was distributed by train.

The rhythm of the film matches the train’s movement, and dreamy loneliness
pervades much of it. It has become a classic in film circles. Auden is said to have
written the verses with the aid of a stopwatch as he set them to the film. A
reader can almost hear the train chugging along as it brings the letters to the
people of England and Scotland, especially in the first part, made up of eight
rhymed, four-beat couplets. Auden was happy to embrace the new medium of film,
as well as to tout the accomplishments of 1930s laborers, perhaps influenced by
Karl Marx.

The train brings a variety of letters to a variety of people. The mail is open to all,
rich and poor. The train itself is personified as a calm, methodical, and kind being,
no mere bureaucratic functionary. It is always on time despite the “steady climb”
as it barely disturbs the countryside. Warmth and fondness about the train
suffuse the poem.

The poem’s second section writes of the train’s descent into Scotland. The
landscape is a bit more industrial, with “fields of apparatus, the furnaces / Set on
the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.” The one stanza’s eight lines have irregular
meter. Scotland longs for its news with anticipation. International news was
particularly important as Adolf Hitler was becoming increasingly aggressive and
attempts at appeasement were faltering, far from the glens and lochs of Scotland.

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In the third section one might imagine the excitement of a crowd receiving all the
letters, though in reality most people are still asleep. Auden beautifully shows the
vast array of things sent by post, things that most people have received at one
time or another: letters, bills, applications, statements of love, gossip, news. In a
sense this is the written version of the entire spectrum of human interaction, from
the most quotidian to the most meaningful, everything that is worth communicating
across the border. People are knit together by this correspondence, no matter how
trivial the mail might seem.

More than 75 years later, a reader must remember the physicality of getting
letters. While electronic communication was far from new, it was extremely
common to communicate through the mail, and a postman might even knock on the
door to deliver the mail. The diversity of people and communications is mirrored by
the kinds of paper, “of every hue, / The pink, the violet, the white and the blue.”

In the final section Auden depicts local people asleep in their warm beds, dreaming
of local things or of monsters. Soon they will be awake and eager for the mail. The
end of the poem asks, after all, “Who can bear to feel himself forgotten?” The
poem thus is deeply sympathetic and compassionate for individual human beings,
expressing the “quickening of the heart” of the person who might learn he has been
remembered by someone else as the mail comes to the door. The poem celebrates
human connections. It is hopeful and sweet, charming and memorable.

W. H. Auden: Poems Themes

Love is Fleeting
While Auden is known for his poems about heady themes such as death,
totalitarianism, and the role of poetry, he is also renowned for his love poems.
Many of them, such as “As I Walked Out One Evening,” “Lullaby,” and “O Tell Me
the Truth About Love,” feature stirring passages about how beautiful and inspiring
love can be, and “Funeral Blues” features a man deeply in love with another.
However, for Auden, that is not all he has to say about love. Almost all of these
poems have a sobering undercurrent of sorrow, or of the desire to remind readers
that life, and love, are short and are affected by the vicissitudes of existence like

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sickness and time. Love is sweet, but it does not exist in a universe devoid of
suffering, waning of affection or, of course, death.

Poetry Reveals Reality

Auden’s poetry evokes the terror of living in the middle of the 20th century, when
dictators in Europe suppressed their people’s freedoms, led their countries into
war, and resorted to barbaric tactics of mass slaughter. In a few of his poems he
wonders what the role of poetry can be in the face of such nightmares, and why he
should honor the death of one man when so many were being killed on the
battlefield, on the streets, and in gas chambers. Writing about Freud, he asks, “of
whom shall we speak” when “there are so many we shall have to mourn.” In the elegy
for Yeats, he asserts his belief that poetry can still lift the human spirit and
“persuade us to rejoice” and “teach the free man how to praise.” Auden is a realist
in that he understands poetry might not directly influence anything, but its habit
of calling things by their real names (the sun, the law, death, love) can bring us into
a better relationship with reality.

Modern Horrors

Auden's poetry is sometimes cerebral, sometimes brutally honest and evocative of

the historical context in which he is writing. He is renowned for addressing the
issues of his day in a moving and relevant manner. The horrors of the modern world
do not escape his incisive pen; he deals with the dictators and their mad quest for
world domination, the fall of the masses under their leaders' spell, the stultifying
bureaucratic state, the Spanish Civil War, the bleakness and perhaps impossibility
of the future, the psychic side of warfare, the bleak landscape, the martyrdom of
heroes and the death of poets, the unthinking use of modern tools, and the
bludgeoning of the human spirit through the great weight of history. Through all
this, though, Auden retains some hope for the future, pointing out the freedom
that comes from recognizing our true condition whatever our circumstances are.

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Death

Death is an ever-present reality in Auden’s poems, cutting life and love short. It
affects every man, even those of prominence and stature, like Yeats and Freud and
Bonhoeffer. It can come in the form of martyrdom, sickness, or old age, or through
war. Death is a weapon used by dictators as well as a natural part of the human
cycle of life and death. Auden does not shy away from this theme, nor the
difficulties associated with it. He openly grieves for a deceased lover, suggests the
futility of the fight between soldiers and their enemies in “Ode V,” and showcases
how a great mind (Yeats) can be rendered useless with the onslaught of physical
erosion. Death cuts short careers (Freud) and poses difficult religious questions
(Bonhoeffer), but the living can carry their messages and restate their work, albeit
at a remove from the original. Overall, Auden’s poems celebrate life, while we have
it, and they directly face the fact that life is always cut short by death one way or
another.

Bureaucracy and Totalitarianism

Auden lived during the age of the great totalitarian dictators Hitler, Mussolini,
Stalin, and Franco, and saw the rise of the bureaucratic state. His poems deal with
both of these issues. Poems including “The Shield of Achilles,” “Friday’s Child,” and
“September 1, 1939” address the hubris and greed that led dictators to amass
armies, brainwash their citizens, and unleash war upon the world. He catalogs the
various ways the bureaucracy keeps tabs on its citizens and tries to reduce them
to statistics and figures. Governments do everything they can to quench the human
spirit, but Auden's belief in the value of poetry as well as the enduring human
spirit counteracts this malicious tendency.

The Value of the Everyman

Auden may occasionally write of great men, such as Freud, Yeats, and Bonhoeffer,
but his poetry is equally famed for its celebration of the common man. In poems

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like "Night Mail" and "O Tell Me The Truth About Love," Auden's imagery and
language are common, earthy. He presents a panoply of people, rich and poor, silly
and smart, busy and idle. His depiction of love in the latter poem is not the
swooning love of the Romantic poets, but love scribbled in notes, arriving without
warning while the poet is "picking my nose." Average people populate his poems and,
while he criticizes them for not paying attention to important things ("September
1, 1939" and "Musée des Beaux Arts"), he seems to sum up his views with the last
line of "Night Mail": "For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?" Auden
remembers his brethren and neighbors of all kinds and celebrates their freedom
and individuality.

Suffering

Auden's poetry can be funny, light, and sweet, but many of his greatest works deal
with the suffering that comes from being human. He writes of the rise and rule of
the dictators and the deadening bureaucratic state; the extinguishing of the light
of great men who have been valuable to the world; the attrition of love through
unfaithfulness, sickness, time, and death; the crippling nature of pride and greed;
religious doubt; warfare; and the complacency and apathy evinced by others when
we are undergoing this suffering. Sometimes we suffer at others' hands, and
sometimes we bring it upon ourselves.

Auden is a modern poet or Modernism in Auden

Both thematically and structurally, Auden’s poems show the very essence of
modernism. The characteristics that are needed to consider him as a modern poet
are all in profusely blended in his poems. In the following passages, I have tried to
demonstrate the elements of modernism both thematically and structurally to prove
him as a modern poet.

Formal/Stylistic characteristics:

Symbolism and Imagery:

In terms of Formal/Stylistic characteristics, Auden is also a modern poet. He uses

in his poetry a wide range of Imagery, symbolism and other figures of speech. He

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adopted the style of symbolism in order to represent his experience in the modern
world.

In Petition, he represents the old, decaying and rotten Western civilization as the
house of the deads. Praying to God, he writes:

“Harrow the house of the dead; look shining at

New style of architecture, a change of heart.”

Auden’s landscape imagery is, also modern. In the poem entitled In Memory of
W.B.Yeats, he represents the atmosphere of the then Europe as follows:

“In the nightmare of the dark

All the dogs of Europe bark,

And the living nations wait,

Each sequence in his hate.”

Metre and Versification:

The most peculiar quality of the modern poetry is the poet’s tendency is to
experiment with different kinds of metre and versification. Auden is also modern in
this respect. He has experimented with free verse, blank verse, the ballad metre
etc. In this connection Lawrence Durrell Observes:

“He tried his hand at everything, from jazz lyrics in two-four time, to
free verse; and all his production are stamped with authority and
feeling of mastery over his medium.” (Durrell, 1952)

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Thematic Characteristics:

War and violence:

Auden’s social concerns are mostly expressed in the context of war. Auden is an avid
observer of war. He surveys different social, political, and economic upheavals
caused by World Wars. He argues that most of the ills of the contemporary society
results from war., Modern age is marked by violence and war. Auden says that war
and violence had always been in the primitive age but they were not as brutal as the
modern savages. In “The Shield of Achilles”, he says,

“Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles

Who would not live long.”

In “In Memory of W. B Yeats”, he refers that all Europe is in the grip of the terror
of war and the bloodthirsty leaders of Europe are threatening each other. Nations
live in isolation in constant dread of each other,

“In the nightmare of the dark

All the dogs of Europe bark,

And the living nations wait,

Each sequence in his hate.”

Auden is here indicating that all the European nations are crying for war, like the
dogs barking loudly. There is no fellow-feeling among the European nations. Rather
they are separated from each other by their hatred.

Mendelson writes in an essay entitled “Auden’s Revision of Modernism” that the

poet “welcomed into his poetry all the disordered conditions of his time”

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Barrenness:

Auden shows the barrenness of modern age as well as the modern human soul. Auden
refers that Modern age is totally barren without any feature

"A plain without a feature, bare and brown,

“No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood”

Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down."

Auden’s description of modern souls also likens the waste land of Eliot. Human souls
are infertile and incapable of love. Forster in “A Passage to India”, says,

“Everything exists, nothing has value.”

Auden portrays that modern soul are hollow. Their mind are unable to communicate
their emotions and their heart are like "the desert” where the

“the seas of pity lie

Locked and frozen in each eye’’

Human Suffering and Lack of Morality:

Auden portray in his poems modern people’s lack of morality. In Musée des Beaux
Arts Auden presents the philosophical truth about human suffering.. Moreover,
people generally remain indifferent to the pain and suffering of an individual. While
a man suffers, others are engaged in their usual labour In Musee Des Beaux Arts;
the poet upholds the lack of morality through the mythical incident of Icarus Here

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he shows that in the human suffering. “Human is indifferent”. The painting painted
by Brueghels shows that while some people of the worlds suffer, others are busy
doing their work. The pains are generally so much absorbed in their lives that they
remain unconcerned rather people eat, drink and enjoy and the children enjoy and
play without any concern. This human condition leads our poet to the worlds of
suffering. Auden says,

“While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.”

There always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen”

Icarus had the intention to fly to the sun. In order to put his ambition into practice,
he tries to reach the sun with the help of artificial wings made of feather and wax.
But after flying a little distance, his wings melted and he fell down head-long into
the sea,

”the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,’’

And the expensive delicate ship must have seen,

“Something amazing, a boy fallen out of the sky

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”

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But no one comes to rescue and pays no attention rather all become busy with their
own tasks. Actually this is the highlighted mentality of the modern man which is
diagnosed in Auden’s poetry

“how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster;”

Auden portrays that modern people have lost their love or sympathy towards other.
Even when a man dies, they do not care about it but continues their daily life style.

Richard Hoggart says, “Auden combines an intense interest in the human heart with
a desire to reform society and he thinks over psychological ills greater than our
political”

The above mentioned passages indicate that Auden in a true modern poet expressing
the very ideals of modernity through his poems. Both thematically and structurally,
his poems are landmark in modernism.

Auden’s Social Consciousness

W.H Auden is widely considerd as one of the most influential and all-around
members of his generation of modernist poets. Even though his status as a modern
poet is well-decided by his bold experimentation with the accepted literary forms
and metres, Auden’s enormous intelligence, complex philosophical and moral vision,
and keen wit distinguish him from his contemporaries. Perhaps the aspect that
gives his poems power and makes Auden the towering figure of the modern age was
the range of his social awareness. He seemed conscious of what was happening not
just in his country, rather across the world. It is this awareness of social concerns
that inspires his greatest poems.

Majority of the great poets write poetry of universal significance being the
representatives of their age. W.H. Auden is no exception in this respect. Like his

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contemporary T.S. Eliot, he mirrors and surveys different issues of his age.
However, he is concerned to a greater degree than Eliot with social problems. His
poetry is more relevant to contemporary social and political realities than that of
T.S. Eliot. Auden explores social injustice, oppression and loss of human values. He
thinks that it is one’s moral duty to protest all the irregularities and injustice. He
finds the need of revolution to change in the structure of the society. Auden is the
spokesman of the masses. He talks about the need for individual freedom and
sympathy for the helpless. Auden finds his objects of writing among everyday
sordid realities of diseased society. To be brief, social consciousness shapes the
poetic career of Auden.

The following discussion hinges round the range or scope of Auden’s social
awareness along with a critical inquiry into the major poems written by this great
originator of modern poetics:

War

Auden’s social concerns are mostly expressed in the context of war. Auden is an
avid observer of war. In his poetry he functions as the critic of war. He surveys
different social, political, and economic upheavals caused by World Wars
I and II, Spanish Civil War, and Communist revolution in Russia. He argues that
most of the ills of the contemporary society results from war. Many of Auden’s
poetry can be studied in this contextual consideration: The Shield of Achilles, In
Memory of W.B. Yeats, Spain 1937, etc.

In the poem The Shield of Achilles Auden embodies in poetic myth, the desolation,
savagery, and uninspiring barrenness of contemporary society. In this poem Auden
compares and contrasts the current social condition with the values and unity of
the glorious past. Here Auden confronts us with two contrasting shields from two
antithetical periods. One is from ancient Greek civilization and the other is from
modern civilization. The classical/Homeric shield reflects a lively and gay picture
of the glorious past, whereas the modern shield reflects an ugly picture of the
degenerative modern civilization, which is full of savagery, violence, aimlessness,
and ailment. Thetis, the silent explorer looks for the classical virtues on her
son Achilles’ shield, but finds instead a negative image, the picture of a barren
land. The modern civilization is full of decay, desolation and frustration. It is an

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era of deficiency, and artificiality, where masses unable to communicate their

emotions, sufferings and spiritual loneliness. The whole world is now involved in
warfare; people have lost their reasoning power and have become mechanical since
they have no individual conscience and initiative. Moreover, the religious beliefs
have been crumbled away and lack of morality is everywhere.

In his poem In Memory of W.B. Yeats Auden gives us an idea of the chaotic politics
of 1930s. Here the poet tells about the atmosphere of war and hatred prevailing
the European nations. When Auden was writing this elegy in memory of W B Yeats,
the threat of Second World War was looming large over European nations. The
rise of Nazism and Fascism was creating a sense of distrust and hatred among
them. The aggressive policy of Hitler was creating a sense of insecurity among the
European people. Thus although in this poem Auden is commemorating the death of
Yeats, his private thing becomes commingled with the public one. Auden is here
indicating that all the European nations are crying for war, like the dogs barking
loudly. There is no fellow-feeling among the European nations. Rather they are
separated from each other by their hatred. Auden seems to say that European
leaders are not behaving in a rational way; rather they have gone mad. In this way,
Auden superbly analyses the situation of Europe immediately before the Second
World War:

In the nightmare of the dark

All the dogs of Europe bark
And the living nations wait
Each sequestered in its hate.

The poem Spain 1937, has the war in Spain as its subject. It is a struggle between
past and present. Like a telephoto lens, the narrative sweeps across the panorama
of history, zooms in on the Spanish Civil War, focuses briefly into the future, and
returns to the scene in Spain and the common realities of war. Spain 1937 is an
urgent call to “Seize the Day”, recognizing the literal and symbolic importance of
the Spanish Civil War. In this poem Auden considers the outcome of Spain's Civil
War as a significant and historical event that will in turn influence the future. By

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placing it in the context of the whole sweep of history, the poet accurately
identifies the struggle between the forces of democracy and fascism as significant
not only for the Spanish but for modern civilization. The poem prophetically
predicts this struggle throughout the 20th century; it has been enacted again and
again in the past decades, both within nations and between them. Many historians
have speculated that had the Republicans been successful, Mussolini and Hitler
might not have been so bold or so successful and history might have taken a
different course. Yet the fascist tyrants were unchecked for years, and with the
end of World War II, civilization entered the postmodern era where the struggle
continues.

Rejection of Conventionality

In his poetry Auden rejects the notion of conventionality and advocates

individualism and its manifestations. In the poem In Praise of Limestone, Auden
speaks against conformity in society, a conformity that would submerge the
individual. Ironically, Auden, in this poem, takes to task the poet who insists on
being pragmatic, on calling “the sun the sun” and who finds the limestone landscape
disturbing to something more truly poetic.

Callousness of Society

In many of his poems he observes the narcissistic side of the contemporary

society. For instance, in Musée des Beaux Arts Auden presents the philosophical
truth about human suffering. He sees suffering at the heart of human existence.
Auden respects the ancient artists because they had a powerful sense to enter
deep into the nature of human suffering. They understood that suffering is
something universal and inevitable for human being. Moreover, people generally
remain indifferent to the pain and suffering of an individual. While a man suffers,
others are engaged in their usual labour.

In order to prove the fact of human indifference and callousness to the suffering
of others, Auden presents the case of the martyrdom of Jesus Christ. Auden here
refers to the painting of Brueghel called “The Numbering at Bathlehem”. The
picture shows that the religious-minded old people wait for Second Coming of
Jesus Christ while children keep skating joyously on a pond at the edge of the

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wood. Thus to the people, even the great fact of crucifixion of Jesus Christ is
nothing but a normal event that happens for other criminals too. Again, the event
of crucifixion did not happen in a sacred place but in an untidy spot of a secluded
place. Here Auden is praising the ability of the artists like Brueghel for their
extraordinary power to observe human nature and present it in their works. These
artists well understood:

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

At the time of crucifixion people went on their regular works, showing no special
concern to it. People saw the event with the same instinctual interest as that of a
dog or a horse. A dog leads its life according to its animal instinct, which the poet
terms “doggy”. In the same way, the horse of the killer of Jesus went on rubbing
its back against a tree. Again Auden refers to another painting by Brueghel namely
“Icarus”. According to the Greek mythology, Icarus managed to flee from Crete by
using wings of feather and wax. But as he flew too close to the sun, the wax melted
and he was drowned into the sea. Brueghel deals with this event in his painting
“Icarus”. What particularly moves Auden while reflecting on Brueghel’s painting
“Icarus” is how the ship and the ploughman look at the falling Icarus and then turn
their attention to their own affairs without any worry or care at all for the boy.
This is the reality of our society where no one cares of any one.

Human Sufferings

Auden’s poetry is also concerned with the predicament of human beings. His As I
Walked Out One Evening is a viciously nihilistic assertion of the triumph of time
over life and the futility and transience of love. The poem is basically labelled a
love poem. But underlying its simple theme of love there is a serious subject
matter. It is about the harsh reality or tragedy of human life. In initial stage the
pot depicts the charming side of human life by showing the fascination of romantic

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love. But very soon, he realizes that life is full of miseries, and it is not made up of
simplicities and certainties. In material life one cannot hide himself from the real
horror, loss and fear of life, nor from the ravages of time. Time destroys
everything. Thus the poem illustrates with great cynicism the sufferings of human
beings in the modern world:

In headaches and in worry

Vaguely life leaks away,
And time will have his fancy
Tomorrow or today.

Loss of Human Values

As a conscious social observer Auden also deals with the moral problems of the
20thcentury society. For instance, his Lullaby gives a trustworthy picture of the
faithlessness of modern lovers. In this poem we are confronted with a pair of
faithless couple who have gathered together to enjoy sexual pleasure. The lover
knows very well that his beloved is disloyal to him and her love for him is just for
one night but still he decides to love her devotedly. As a materialistic man the
lover feels that nothing in this world is perfect. Human beings are subject to decay
and demise. In the same way their physical love is also subject to this decay and
death. His beloved is a human being and she is not free from human imperfections
or characteristic shortcomings. So he ignores her inconstancy and endears her
without any complaint. The problem mentioned in Lullaby is, undoubtedly, one of the
most pervasive problems of modern society. Nowadays the society has become
morally corrupted. So, illicit and unstable relationship between men and women is a
common phenomenon.

Psychological Ills of the 20th Century Society

Auden is the first major poet to incorporate modern psychological insights and
archetypes as a natural element of his work and thought. He was among the first

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English poets to employ Freudian concepts in poetry, for example. In his poems
Auden presents a clinical diagnosis of the psychological ills of the 20th century
society.

In the conclusion we may say that the range of Auden’s’ social conscious is
absolutely imposing. He is a master poet in representing the true aspects of his
age.

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