You probably know W.H. Auden. Yeah, you do, if you sat
through the funeral part of Four Weddings
and a Funeral. That’s where John Hannah recites Auden’s “Funeral Blues”,
leaving not a dry eye on or off-screen.
I can’t take that one seriously, as it’s associated with
another DQ in my life. He often confuses himself with the likes of Paul
McCartney, Gabriel Byrne and other shortish celebs and assumes that everyone
else will also see the resemblance. He watched Hannah in FWAF and couldn’t wait for an occasion—no matter how inappropriate
or insincere—to bring down the house. And I just can’t get that ludicrous image
out of my head.
But I was introduced to “September 1, 1939” in Christopher
Hitchens’ Mortality, and
found it truly powerful. (The line Hitchens latched onto, as he was being
treated for esophageal cancer, was “All I have is a voice.”)
I don’t know exactly when Auden wrote it, beyond sometime
in September, 1939. It must have been after the Third, when France and Britain
finally decided that Hitler had crossed a border too far, and declared war on
Germany.
In contrast to Anna Akhmatova’s “July
1914”,
Auden wastes neither time nor words on the beauty of the deceptively peaceful
preceding summer. No—he captures the deceit and cowardice of the 1930s, ending
in the stench of death. He’s revolted by it all.
In the following decade, Auden tried to obliterate this
poem—renouncing it, removing the last two stanzas and then flat-out denying
anyone permission to reprint it at all. But I’m glad it’s survived.
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
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