Pilgrimage of poems: Undo the folded lie

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.