For the second post in a row, I begin to write with trepidation, with concern that I am Not Up To The Task. I just completed reading a few hundred pages of Auden’s poetry; I enjoyed it, and I want to say something about it in these posts. But I see my stats, and I know that my piece on Shelley’s “A Summer Evening Churchyard” is one of my most popular posts. I hope that people come to it – and I imagine that some people even recommend it – because it helps them read the poem. I definitely know that if my 25-year-old self could have read that post, he would have been grateful.
But I’m not sure I know how to help anyone read Auden. I’m constantly doubtful of my ability to help anyone walking with me on the dusty American road toward the enjoyment of poetry. (The roads to that goal in England are all lush and lined with hedgerows and thorn trees and other delights that make learning poetry easier and more fun, I’m sure.) but with Auden, the task seems doubly daunting. His poetry is cryptic, the meter is sometimes loose, and the language isn’t filled with the rhymes and the grammatical inversions and the luscious archaic words that immediately signify Poetry to my slow brain. At first I didn’t like not knowing what Auden was talking about:
How will you look and what will you do when the basalt
Tombs of the sorceror shatter
And their guardian megalopods
Come after you pitter-patter?
Huh?
But then I started thinking of the poems as songs. “There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold.” “Rhiannon rings like a bell through the night.” “When no one else would come, Shilo, you always came.” “Koo koo ja-joob.” I like all those lyrics without fully understanding them. Shifting my thinking freed me to enjoy watching Auden write the way he wanted to write about the things he liked writing about without always having to understand.
And it’s not like I didn’t understand anything. Auden’s overriding themes seem to me to be (1) that all the noble and loving actions we see in the world are done by sinners, and (2) that every event that seems important to us – an act of love, a great journey. a death – makes no difference to the stars, to the birds, or even to the loving, sinning fellow who lives a couple of blocks away. I get it, and I agree with it, and, whaddayaknow, reading a few hundred pages of difficult poetry saying this gets the message through with a depth that cannot come across in any easier way.
Now I want to have a go at talking through a poem a bit, but the poem I chose doesn’t really fit those themes. In fact, “We Too Had Known Golden Hours,” one of the last poems I read in my Auden frenzy of the last two weeks, gave me a new perspective on everything else I had read by Auden.
We, too, had known golden hours
When body and soul were in tune,
Had danced with our true loves
By the light of a full moon,
And sat with the wise and good
As tongues grew witty and gay
Over some noble dish
Out of Escoffier;
Had felt the intrusive glory
Which tears reserve apart,
And would in the old grand manner
Have sung from a resonant heart.
But, pawed-at and gossiped-over
By the promiscuous crowd,
Concocted by editors
Into spells to befuddle the crowd,
All words like Peace and Love,
All sane affirmative speech,
Had been soiled, profaned, debased
To a horrid mechanical screech.
No civil style survived
That pandaemonioum
But the wry, the sotto-voce,
Ironic and monochrome:
And where should we find shelter
For joy or mere content
When little was left standing
But the suburb of dissent?
Auden began his career in the late 1920s. As a general trend, intellectuals and artists in this modern period, disillusioned by the war of the trenches and worldwide economic depression, broke from the sentimentality and belief in progress that characterized much of nineteenth-century western culture. Painted representations of the human figure, those of women especially, became angular and ugly. Composers presented listeners with successions of unresolved dissonances. Authors rejected traditional forms of morality and searched in their stories for ways to survive in a world that had been, they supposed, proven meaningless. I don’t condemn these artistic movements; I merely point out that they greatly emphasized the ugly, the empty, the aimless, the relative, the confusing, the painful, and the broken side of life.
But Auden says in 1950, after over twenty years of publishing his modern poetry, that he has experienced absolute goodness, truth, and beauty in his life but didn’t always feel free to report it. Faulkner would never tell us that a “body and soul were in tune” (a nice musical metaphor, by the way, that goes back at least two thousand years). Stravinsky never wrote a ballet in which true lovers “danced . . . by the light of a full moon.” Picasso’s people were never “wise and good.” O’Neill eschewed dialog that was “witty and gay.” But Auden says that these things happened to him. He says he felt an “intrusive glory,” i.e. a light from beyond, i.e. transcendent goodness. And he says that these beautiful moments broke down his normal human reserve and prompted him to “sing from a resonant heart.” That word “resonant” suggests again a tuning, a synchronicity of the human soul with the transcendent glory.
So why have his poems up until this time always emphasized that any love or goodness comes from a severely flawed human being and radiates to meet a universally indifferent world? Because “crowds” and “editors” (the public and the profession) have made all language about absolute goodness sound cheap. He has been forced to write in the idiom that his readers will accept. He cannot be good-hearted, only “wry”; he cannot be sincere, only “ironic”; he cannot shine the intrusive glory through a prism and show its colors but must instead stick with the “monochrome” grays of modernism. Ultimately he feels stuck in the “suburb of dissent,” and, after learning of his friendship with Charles Williams, I can’t help thinking that the City his peers excluded him from is Williams’s City of “exchange and coinherence”, the sacred community of harmony, wisdom, and glory.
I was planning to say something about diction and meter and figures of speech, but I’ve said too much already. I’ll just end by noting that I have recently found that Google searches no longer find my posts. I found the link for the post about Williams and the City by using a Bing search.
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