Thinking Activity - Auden's Poem

   * Here is my blog on Thinking Activity : Auden's poems, which is assigned by our professor. 

1)Which lines of September 1, 1939 you liked the most? Why? 

                     SEPTEMBER 1, 1939

                                                 W.H. Auden's "September 1, 1939" was first published in the October 18, 1939, edition of The New Republic, before being included in the poet's collection Another Time. Written upon the outbreak of World War II, the poem captures feelings of fear and uncertainty in the face of fascism and war—as well as glimmers of hope that people might come together to counter authoritarianism. It is one of Auden's most well-known poems, and widely considered one of the greatest poems of the 20th century; ironically, however, the poet himself grew to despise it. Despite his disavowal of the poem, "September 1, 1939" remains a text to which people turn in times of crisis, including, famously, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001.

                                    The most enduring and popular line from "September 1st, 1939" (the day Hitler's panzers jumped the border into Poland, effectively sparking the Second World War)—"We must love one another or die"—was thought unsuitable by Auden because, strictly speaking, it isn't true. It was perfectly timed, in an historical sense, on the eve of the most destructive war in history, but, as Auden later lamented, not a word of poetry could have prevented the horrors of the Second World War. Of course, great poetry is often at once true and a bit of a reassuring fib. He changed the line to "we must love one another and die" because love cannot avert—even if it may forestall—death (though Dante Alighieri and possibly even Dylan Thomas might dispute that, and John Donne and Christina Rossetti suggest it a bit harsh). He then realized how unlovely the line had become once relieved of its original rhetorical punch, so he eliminated it altogether. It was only much later, when assembling a selected poems, that he was persuaded by friends to reinstate the line.

                                            W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” can be interpreted as having two messages regarding society. On the surface, the poem comments on how the dishonesty and manipulation of government can lead to war. The author uses this primary interpretation as a vessel to mask and deliver his underlying critique of homophobia. In order to create duality in interpretation of the poem, Auden uses codified language to conceal the underlying theme of the lack of acceptance of homosexuality in society. The poem creates metaphors, such as a contrast of light and dark and uses implications through historical figures and government to show the offense done to homosexuals. The two interpretations of the poem are able to coexist without impeding or contradicting one another. By setting up a historical scenario and then commenting on societal errors, Auden is able to effectively shift tones without harshly criticizing the audience on social injustices.

                                              History and scholarship can help explain the origins of this horror to the 15th century with Martin Luther, the leader of the Protestant Reformation—which has right up until today twisted and rotted Germany's entire culture. Look to what happened at Linz (i.e., the birth of Adolf Hitler) and how his youthful influences made him into a psychopathic, power-hungry dictator. For I and everybody else knows what all children learn at school: people who are harmed and bullied harm and bully others in return.

                                   In the poem's most famous line, the speaker declares, “We must love one another or die.” The speaker consistently argues for the benefits of human connection, rejecting the all-too-human impulse to desire “not universal love / but to be loved alone.” It’s far better for society, the speaker argues, for people to acknowledge that “no one exists alone,” and with that knowledge, to connect with others who are “Just.” Only by overcoming selfishness and working together, the speaker insists, can people keep the “affirming flame” of hope and love burning bright. To put it bluntly, human survival itself depends on love.

                                       The first half of the poem is largely concerned with “evil” and all the ways in which society enables bad actors and wrongdoing to flourish. Dictators spew worthless "rubbish," for example, that drives away rational, enlightened thinking. Evil also begets evil, the speaker argues, implying that some "huge imago"—or early influence—shaped Hitler into a cruel, power-hungry dictator. There is also the more subtle but no less damaging “blind[ness]” of people in places like the United States, who “cling to their average day”—that is, go about their regular lives—while avoiding the harsh reality of war overseas. Through these examples, the speaker identifies and condemns people’s selfishness and seeming indifference to brutality. Human beings are all guilty of the same sin of self-absorption, the speaker says, which allows evil to go unchecked.

2)What is so special about 'In memory of W B Yeats'? 

           IN MEMORY OF  W B YEATS

                         ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’ by W. H. Auden (1907-73) was written in 1939, following the death of the Irish poet W. B. Yeats in January of that year.

                                    As well as being an elegy for the dead poet, ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’ is also a meditation on the role and place of poetry in the modern world. 

                         ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’ is in three parts, each of which has its own form and style.

PART I: 

                                  In the first section, W. H. Auden discusses the death of W. B. Yeats ‘in the dead of winter’ (well, Yeats did die in January, after all), a time when the brooks were all frozen over and snow made it difficult to make out the public statues.

                                          It was so cold the mercury in the thermometers dropped. As Yeats lay ill and dying, the world – and, specifically, Ireland – went on as usual (a common theme of Auden’s when dealing with death: consider ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, written just one month before Yeats died). When Yeats died, his death ‘was kept from his poems’: in other words, the poetry Yeats wrote remains unaltered by the fact that Yeats the man has now died.

                                            Auden then describes Yeats’s death, in the third stanza, concluding that, with his passing, Yeats ‘became his admirers’: once Yeats the man had ceased to be, Yeats the poet became whatever his readers and fans decided he was. Here, we can sense Auden making a broader point about the ‘immortality’ of poets: they survive or don’t survive depending on who reads them, and how those readers read them.

                                    Yeats’s work is ‘scattered’ all over the world in those cities where people read him, often finding surprising things in his work which Yeats himself would not recognise (‘unfamiliar affections’). Auden here is prefiguring one of the most influential ideas in twentieth-century literary criticism, that of the ‘intentional fallacy’ or ‘death of the author’, where the worth and meaning of a writer lie with the reader rather than the author. Auden says that the words of a dead man are ‘modified in the guts of the living’: we cannot help but change the meaning of what a poet wrote, adapting it to suit out our times and our own feelings.

                                       Auden concludes this first section of ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’ by acknowledging that the world will go on tomorrow, but a ‘few thousand’ will think of the day Yeats died as ‘one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual’.

                                       There is a refusal to indulge in sentimental public mourning here (something that also underscores the surprising origins of Auden’s most famous poem, which had its roots in parody rather than sincere elegy), and a classical downplaying of the importance of Yeats’s death. It is important and noteworthy, but it is like a day on which one does something out of the ordinary (slightly), rather than a dramatic day that changes everything.

PART II: 

                                       In the second section of ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, Auden turns to address (or apostrophise) the dead Yeats directly. ‘You were silly like us’, he says, and in a single stanza of ten lines utilising pararhyme (all/still, decay/poetry, survives/executives/griefs/survives, and one concluding full rhyme, south/mouth), Auden begins to turn away from Yeats in particular to think about poetry more generally.

                                         It is here that Auden makes his famous statement that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’. This is often analysed as an admission of poetry’s limitations as a tool for social and political change (indeed, Auden once said in an interview that his poetry didn’t help to save a single Jew who was murdered in the Holocaust).

                                        But is it as simple as that? Should poetry make anything happen? Did Wilfred Owen’s war poetry? Did Yeats’s own poems? When we analyse this statement, ‘poetry makes nothing happen’, in the context of the whole stanza, a more complex and interesting ‘argument’ emerges. Auden says in the previous line that ‘Ireland has her madness and her weather still’, because ‘poetry makes nothing happen’. But who in their right mind would expect a poem to change the weather?

                                      This is absurd, and deliberately so: Auden is wryly remarking on the failure of poetry to change things, but this is not quite the cry of despair and powerlessness it is often taken for.

                                        After all, as Auden goes on to say, poetry ‘survives’ in a whole host of places, and although it doesn’t make anything happen, it is itself a ‘way of happening’ (emphasis added), not something that makes history happen but part of history itself, perhaps, and part of life.

PART III:

                                         The final section of ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’ is written in regular quatrains of trochaic tetrameter catalectic (i.e. with the second half of that fourth and final foot lopped off), rhymed aabb. The trochaic metre here evokes the song, and there is something more formal (in both senses of the word) and even incantatory about this concluding section.

                                      Having addressed the burial of Yeats, Auden concludes by addressing the shade of the dead Yeats again, asking him to ‘persuade us to rejoice’ and to heal us with the ‘fountain’ of his work. The final couplet sees Auden commanding Yeats – Yeats the poet, for Yeats the man has gone – to teach the free man, the living, to praise and celebrate in the short time allotted to us (‘the prison of his days’).

                                   Throughout ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, there is a taut restraint that prevents the poem from spilling over into mawkishness or sentimentality. Auden describes the day of Yeats’s death as ‘a dark cold day’, but this is objectively true, rather than mere pathetic fallacy or Romantic expression.

                                       Of course, this doesn’t discount the possibility that Auden feels the day of Yeats’s passing to have been ‘cold’ and ‘dark’ in a more abstract, even metaphysical sense, but it is also something on which all of the instruments can ‘agree’: it was cold and it was dark.

3)Is there any contemporary relevance of 'Epitaph On A Traynt'? 

                EPITAPH ON A TYRANT

                                           Wyston Hughes Auden, or WH Auden, was a British poet, often considered by critics to be one of the best England has ever produced. Auden’s work is known, not only for its remarkable poetic calibre and craftsmanship but also for his skilful portrayal of myriad themes- ranging from the political, social, ethical, to the moral and even the individual.

                                        One of Auden’s best known poems and written, interestingly when Adolf Hitler was at the peak of his power in Europe, is a short, six line piece entitled- “Epitaph on a Tyrant” 

                                    The poem talks about a man- an anonymous “he”- a perfectionist whose poetry was understandable and who, himself, understood “human folly” and the human psyche like “the back of his hand”. 

                                       In fact, there are many critics who believe that this poem was Auden’s own epitaph on Hitler- a personal ode to the man who had wielded such power in the years of his dictatorship and played no small role in shaping the world as we know it today and they had known it then. 

                                    However the poem doesnot restrict itself to a merely historical purview. Auden’s poetry is such that it can be analyzed and interpreted in many more ways than just one and these interpretations themselves can change over time and circumstance. Hence, Epitaph on a Tyrant, though it does, most definitely allude to Hitler, discusses, also the very nature of tyranny itself- and presents it as the dynamic, multifaceted phenomenon it really is. 

                                      By using phrases such as “poetry” and “perfection” Auden portrays the tyrant, almost as a misunderstood artist- a man who wishes to achieve the ultimate in what he shapes, through his creative abilities. On the one hand, it is believed that Auden may be talking about a different sort of tyrant- a benevolent despot whose character and personality are such that people find joy in his laughter and die in the wake of his grief. 

                                 ‘Epitaph on a Tyrant’ is one of Auden’s short masterpieces. In just six lines, W. H. Auden (1907-73) manages to say so much about the nature of tyranny. 

                                          W. H. Auden spent some time in Berlin during the 1930s, and it was here that he probably wrote ‘Epitaph on a Tyrant’, which was published in 1939, the year that the Second World War broke out. The specific tyrant Auden had in mind, then, was probably Adolf Hitler, though the poem can be analysed as a study in tyranny more generally, too.

                                        And besides, what does it mean to talk of somebody having ‘invented’ poetry? Poetry is made, composed, written, created – but invented suggests that the tyrant wishes to take credit for having come up with the idea of poetry itself, or at least a whole new kind of poetry.

                                                The ‘easy to understand’ poetry of the tyrant then feeds into the cliché in the next line, about him knowing folly ‘like the back of his hand’. This seems to be deliberate cliché, a ready-to-wear idiom that everyone can hear, understand, and interpret. But it also summons the more sinister idea of the back of one’s hand – used as a weapon for discipline or control of another – which reminds us that this is a tyrant’s hand, and that the same hand that pens all that accessible poetry also wields weapons to crush those who step out of line.

                                          It makes sense that a tyrant would be interested in armies and fleets – not just his own, of course, but other people’s, with a view to expanding his territory and taking over other nations. And then we have the neat dovetailing of the last two lines: when the tyrant laughs, the senators who serve him all laugh too – they don’t just politely chuckle along but positively ‘burst with laughter’.

                                            Again, this is a cliché – though here, a cliché with a twist. We usually speak of bursting into laughter, although bursting with laughter is not unheard of either. But given that this is a tyrant these senators serve, their (forced, false) laughter would be excessive as if they actually were in danger of exploding with the effort. And then comes the final chilling line: when the tyrant is angry or unhappy, children are killed in the streets because he lashes out and loses any remaining shreds of his humanity.

                                         Here, again, Auden turns a familiar phrase inside out, evoking and then evicting the lines of the New Testament, ‘But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven’ (Matthew 19:14). There is nothing Christlike about this tyrant: he will not suffer the little children to come unto him. The little children, instead, will be the ones to suffer.

                                          But Auden is also inverting a specific phrase by the nineteenth-century writer John Lothrop Motley, in The Rise of the Dutch Republic (1859), citing a report of 1584 about the death of the Dutch ruler William the Silent: ‘As long as he lived, he was the guiding star of a whole brave nation, and when he died the little children cried in the streets.’

                                       It’s not necessary to get this (very precise) allusion, of course, but inverting that last line (we can more readily imagine a chain of cause-and-effect whereby the death of a ruler caused the children to cry, than we can imagine crying bringing about the death of children) does help to bring into sharper focus the contrast Auden is making between a kindly ruler and an evil tyrant.

                              ‘Epitaph on a Tyrant’, like many of Auden’s poems of the 1930s, was inspired by the appalling events of that decade, but it also neatly encapsulates the qualities and behaviour of all tyrants, from Herod to Henry VIII to Hitler. And beyond?