“When Obama left office, he presided over a record seven wars, including America’s longest war and an unprecedented campaign of extrajudicial killings – murder – by drones.
In his last year, according to a Council on Foreign Relations study, Obama, the “reluctant liberal warrior”, dropped 26,171 bombs – three bombs every hour, 24 hours a day. Having pledged to help “rid the world” of nuclear weapons, the Nobel Peace Laureate built more nuclear warheads than any president since the Cold War.”
And now we have President Trump. Again war seems inevitable, desired.
Which brings us to todays poem.
SEPTEMBER 1, 1939
by W.H. Auden
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 dead,
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.
Defenseless 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.
And now let us have Ira Maine, Poetry Editor take us though this extraordinary poem again.
Auden is in a New York Bar when Hitler invades Poland. All of the ‘Peace in our time’ preaching has been discovered to be untrue. for the past ‘low dishonest decade’ the West has been lauding the German economic miracle, whilst turning a blind eye to Hitler’s butchery, ‘the unmentionable odour of death’.
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
‘Accurate scholarship’ not lies, not propagenda, demonstrate why Hitler rose to power. Born in Linz, Austria, Hitler rose to power (‘a psychopathic God’) as a result of reparations imposed on Germany after World War 1. Germany was humiliated deliberately, not from a sense of justice, but from the need for revenge. This was evil and Germany does 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.
And now for the Greek lesson; Thucydides, the Greek Historian beleived that democracy got in the way of strong leaders. Military and economic power were all that mattered. As a result ethics and morality were a waste of time. ‘…Pain, mismanagement and grief…’ were an inevitable, unavoidable by-product of power. Thucydides is very much a part of the American Military Academy Curriculum. Neo-Cons love him.
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.
Both this and the next verse are almost self explanatory. ‘Euphoric dreams’. ‘Competitive excuses’ are mean reasons for a neutral country not to get involved, especially in view of ‘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.
People cling to the familiar, ‘Their average day’ and don’t want it to crumble away. They don’ want to face their own fears, ‘afraid of the night’ we don’t want to confront evil so we turn our heads in the hope it will go away. We know it is hypocrisy but it is easier than doing something about it.
Equally, Auden is in a Gay Bar, filled with ex-pats, and all terrified of the ‘night’, the unfamiliar surroundings, the War, and the destruction of the familiar.
Gays have ‘never been happy or good’, because we in the thirties would not allow them to be either. You could go to jail simply for being a homosexual. Entrapment was commonplace among the police forces.
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.
Auden was gay, or queer, as they called it then. In 1939 on of the pore popular pursuits amongst louts was ‘queer bashing’ so Auden is being quite courageous here. Nijinsky was the principal dancer with Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe in the early years of the 20th Century. Nijinsky and Diaghilev had an affair. Nijinsky eventually left to get married. Incensed, Diaghilev refused to let him rejoin the company. Briefly, Nijinsky had kids, developed schizophrenia, wrote horrible things about Diaghilev in his diary and never really danced effectively again.
So here’s a plea from a gay man, a man born with ‘the error bred in the bone’, a plea for all gay men and women to be granted the right to live their lives with dignity and love. ‘Craves what it cannot have’ because he lacks ‘the normal heart’ points up just how terrifying things were for gays in the 1930’s.
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 dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?
There’s a lot of Ts Eliot in this verse, who compared the early morning thousands pouriing over London Bridge into the city to one of Dante’s Circles of Hell. ‘Who would have thought death had undone so many?’
Or maybe there is more Auden in Eliot than I suspected….
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.
Now then, here we arrive at the centre, the nub, a last two verses which reach out and choke off Thucydide’s lie, the lie of the enlightenment, the rubbish cult, ‘the romantic lie’ of ‘the indiviual’ which has done so much to destroy societies all over the world. Basically it comes down to ‘we must love one another or die’
Defenseless 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.
What lunacy, what ‘stupor’, seizes us and allows these horrors to occur? The great majority allow these things to happen because it’s easier than objecting. Despite this, Auden says, there will always be a life affirming minority, ‘ironic points of light…’wherever the Just exchange their messages…‘ Here and only here will we find the life affirming flame, only here will we find the ethics and morality which are entirely absent from Thucydides thinking.