Six Poets

by Alan Bennett

  On This Island

  Look, stranger, on this island now

  The leaping light for your delight discovers,

  Stand stable here

  And silent be,

  That through the channels of the ear

  May wander like a river

  The swaying sound of the sea.

  Here at a small field’s ending pause

  Where the chalk wall falls to the foam and its tall ledges

  Oppose the pluck

  And knock of the tide,

  And the shingle scrambles after the suck-

  -ing surf, and a gull lodges

  A moment on its sheer side.

  Far off like floating seeds the ships

  Diverge on urgent voluntary errands,

  And this full view

  Indeed may enter

  And move in memory as now these clouds do,

  That pass the harbour mirror

  And all the summer through the water saunter.

  Much of Auden, even most of Auden, and even some of that first little snatch of Auden, I do not understand. Now, I could say the same for Ezra Pound or Eliot’s The Waste Land, but there the difficulty is plain: you know you don’t understand Pound or T. S. Eliot right from the start. Auden is different. It seems easy. The landscape’s familiar, there are no out-of-the-way references, and as often as not there’s a gripping opening line to get you off to a good start – only it doesn’t last.

  I’m not saying that the poems begin well, then taper off, though they do begin well. Auden has some wonderful opening lines:

  August for the people and their favourite islands …

  What siren zooming is sounding our coming …

  Out on the lawn I lie in bed,

  Vega conspicuous overhead …

  And of course, perhaps his most famous lines:

  Lay your sleeping head, my love,

  Human on my faithless arm …

  But once he’s got you with one of these lines, and certainly in his early poems, he’s off into a territory of his own, an alternative world of leaders, gangs, frontiers and flight, on what Seamus Heaney has called ‘those oddly unparaphrasable riffs’.

  ‘He gets carried away’ would be another way of putting it, though Christopher Isherwood, with whom he often collaborated in the thirties, said that the obscurity could also be put down to the fact that Auden was very lazy:

  He hated polishing and making corrections. If he didn’t like a poem, he threw it away and wrote another. If I liked one line, he would keep it and work it into a new poem. In this way, whole poems were constructed which were simply anthologies of my favourite lines, entirely regardless of grammar or sense.

  ‘This’, said Isherwood, ‘is the simple explanation of much of Auden’s celebrated obscurity.’ More writers have worked like that, Shakespeare included, than is generally admitted, and at least it puts literary criticism in its place.

  Some poems don’t require exposition, though. Auden was fascinated by verse in all its forms, and this is a pastiche of an eighteenth-century ballad, transformed into a nightmare:

  O What Is That Sound

  O what is that sound which so thrills the ear

  Down in the valley drumming, drumming?

  Only the scarlet soldiers, dear,

  The soldiers coming.

  O what is that light I see flashing so clear

  Over the distance brightly, brightly?

  Only the sun on their weapons, dear,

  As they step lightly.

  O what are they doing with all that gear,

  What are they doing this morning, this morning?

  Only their usual manoeuvres, dear,

  Or perhaps a warning.

  O why have they left the road down there,

  Why are they suddenly wheeling, wheeling?

  Perhaps a change in their orders, dear.

  Why are you kneeling?

  O haven’t they stopped for the doctor’s care,

  Haven’t they reined their horses, their horses?

  Why, they are none of them wounded, dear,

  None of these forces.

  O is it the parson they want, with white hair,

  Is it the parson, is it, is it?

  No, they are passing his gateway, dear,

  Without a visit.

  O it must be the farmer who lives so near.

  It must be the farmer so cunning, so cunning?

  They have passed the farmyard already, dear,

  And now they are running.

  O where are you going? Stay with me here!

  Were the vows you swore deceiving, deceiving?

  No, I promised to love you, dear,

  But I must be leaving.

  O it’s broken the lock and splintered the door,

  O it’s the gate where they’re turning, turning;

  Their boots are heavy on the floor

  And their eyes are burning.

  Auden is good at casting a spell, hinting at horrors just around the corner, and he uses Hitchcock’s technique of investing the ordinary and domestic with nightmare and suspense. Some of it manages to be prophetic. If Auden is a great poet, this ability to prophesy is one constituent of his greatness.

  from The Witnesses

  I shouldn’t dance.

  We’re afraid in that case you’ll have a fall;

  We’ve been watching you over the garden wall

  For hours

  The sky is darkening like a stain;

  Something is going to fall like rain,

  And it won’t be flowers.

  Nobody in the thirties was quite sure what war would be like, whether there would be gas, for instance, or aerial bombardment. There’s a stock and rather a silly question: ‘Why was there no poetry written in the Second World War?’ One answer is that there was, but it was written in the ten years before the war started.

  Auden was a landscape poet, though of a rather particular kind. The son of a doctor, he was born in York in 1907 but brought up in Solihull in the heart of the industrial Midlands. Not the landscape of conventional poetic inspiration but, for Auden, magical:

  from Letter to Lord Byron

  But let me say before it has to go,

  It’s the most lovely country that I know;

  Clearer than Scafell Pike, my heart has stamped on

  The view from Birmingham to Wolverhampton.

  Long, long ago, when I was only four,

  Going towards my grandmother, the line

  Passed through a coal-field. From the corridor

  I watched it pass with envy, thought ‘How fine!

  Oh how I wish that situation mine.’

  Tramlines and slagheaps, pieces of machinery,

  That was, and still is, my ideal scenery.

  At Oxford, he was already writing and publishing poetry. To his contemporaries, he was a magnetic figure, partly because he seemed to have all the answers, a characteristic that his later self came to deplore, though he remained a bit of an intellectual bully all his life. As a man, he was insecure and unhappy and doesn’t seem to have fallen in love until he went to America in 1939, but this didn’t stop him prescribing for the love affairs of his friends.

  The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard says that there are two ways: one is to suffer; the other is to become a professor of the fact that another suffers. Auden was to play both roles in his time; but when he was an undergraduate, he was undoubtedly a professor.

  Who’s Who

  A shilling life will give you all the facts:

  How Father beat him, how he ran away,

  What were the struggles of his youth, what acts

  Made him the greatest figure of his day:

  Of how he fought, fished, hunted, worked all night,

  Though giddy, climbed new mountains; named a sea:

  Some of the last researchers even write

  Love made him weep his pints like you and me.

  With all his honours on, he sighed for one


  Who, say astonished critics, lived at home;

  Did little jobs about the house with skill

  And nothing else; could whistle; would sit still

  Or potter round the garden; answered some

  Of his long marvellous letters but kept none.

  Auden taught at various prep schools in the early thirties, and one of the criticisms that contemporaries made of his poetry was that his view of the world was dictated by his unhappy experiences at school. ‘The best reason I have for opposing Fascism’, he said, ‘is that at school I lived in a Fascist state.’ Not a statement that would commend itself to someone actually having to live in a Fascist state, and the kind of remark that made him blush once he got away from England in 1939. ‘All the verse I wrote,’ Auden said later,

  all the positions I took in the thirties didn’t save a single Jew. These writings, these attitudes only help oneself. They merely make people who think like one admire and like one, which is rather embarrassing.

  Which is true, but which says nothing about the poetry, and embarrassing though the older Auden found his younger self, the poetry of that younger self survives the embarrassment.

  The turning point in Auden’s life came, or is supposed to have come, when he and Isherwood went to the United States at the start of 1939 and stayed there, both eventually becoming American citizens. Silly people at the time took this to be cowardice, which it wasn’t, and even people who admired him thought Auden’s poetry was never as good afterwards. But this wasn’t true either.

  Why Auden left England has been much discussed. Auden liked feeling at home, but he didn’t like feeling at home where he felt at home. England was too cosy. He would never grow up there, he thought. He would always be the enfant terrible, the prisoner of his public and court poet to the Left. At least this is how Auden came to see it.

  But it wasn’t quite like that either. All that had happened was that he had gone to America in 1939, seemingly with no plans to stay, and, for the first time in his life, he had fallen in love – with Chester Kallman, with whom he was to live happily and unhappily for the rest of his life. It just happened that change in private places went with change in public places, love and war coinciding: Auden really was just an early ‘GI bride’. Somebody who cared more about what people thought would have come back when war started, but Auden – and it was one of the winning characteristics in a personality that was not always attractive – didn’t care tuppence what people thought.

  As it turned out, going to America turned out to be a deliverance, the kind of escape an established writer often craves, a way of eluding his public, of not having to go on writing in the same way, of not having to imitate himself. ‘By the time you have perfected a style of writing’, said George Orwell, ‘you have always outgrown it.’ ‘You spend twenty-five years learning to be yourself,’ said Auden, ‘and then you find you must now start learning not to be yourself’ – and it took him a while. This next poem Auden called a ‘hangover from home’. He wrote it in America, but one of the reasons he left England, he said, was to stop writing poetry like this.

  September 1, 1939

  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 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.

  In America, Auden’s poetry began to take on a different tone. His ‘old grand manner’, as he described it, proceeded from ‘a resonant heart’. With the war and the Cold War that followed:

  from We Too Had Known Golden Hours

  All words like Peace and Love,

  All sane affirmative speech,

  Had been soiled, profaned, debased

  To a horrid mechanical screech.

  And so the tone of his poetry grew more wry and ironic and, as he got older, increasingly intimate and domestic.

  Not that his circumstances were ever conventionally cosy; he and Kallman lived in some squalor. They weren’t homemakers, either of them, though Kallman was a good cook. The Stravinskys came round to supper one night. Madame Stravinsky – endearingly named Vera – was paying a call of nature when she spotted a bowl of dirty water on the bathr
oom floor. In a forlorn attempt to give the place a woman’s touch, she emptied the contents down the wash-basin, only to discover later that this was to have been the pièce de résistance of the meal: a chocolate pudding. The basin was, incidentally, the same in which Auden routinely pissed. Where, one wonders, did one wash one’s hands after one had washed one’s hands?

  The next poem was written in 1948.

  A Walk After Dark

  A cloudless night like this

  Can set the spirit soaring:

  After a tiring day

  The clockwork spectacle is

  Impressive in a slightly boring

  Eighteenth-century way.

  It soothed adolescence a lot

  To meet so shameless a stare;

  The things I did could not

  Be so shocking as they said

  If that would still be there

  After the shocked were dead.

  Now, unready to die

  But already at the stage

  When one starts to resent the young,

  I am glad those points in the sky

  May also be counted among

  The creatures of middle-age.

  It’s cosier thinking of night

  As more an Old People’s Home

  Than a shed for a faultless machine,

  That the red pre-Cambrian light

  Is gone like Imperial Rome

  Or myself at seventeen.

  Yet however much we may like

  The stoic manner in which

  The classical authors wrote,

  Only the young and the rich

  Have the nerve or the figure to strike

  The lacrimae rerum note