‘When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.’ Not the hierarchical position most poets award themselves. However, in these eight poems, Auden, the man who’d initially read Natural Sciences at university (before switching to English) and whose father was a doctor, uses language forensically and to the same purpose as the scientist: the revelation of truth. This pursuit is not necessarily driven by a Keatsian belief that ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’, rather more by conviction that we must bear witness to what is real. Heaney describes his poetry as ‘magnificently sane’.
In ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, the ship in Breughel’s painting Icarus witnessed the fall, ‘the white legs disappearing into the green/Water;’, yet ‘sailed calmly on’. ‘The dreadful martyrdom must run its course’ while we are ‘eating or opening a window or just walking dully along’. Perhaps down Bristol Street, with the clocks chiming out ‘You cannot conquer Time’ as they do in ‘As I Walked Out One Evening’. The poet reminds us ‘In headaches and in worry/Vaguely life leaks away,/And Time will have his fancy/To-morrow or to-day.’ Less carpe diem than acceptance that ‘Life remains a blessing/Although you cannot bless.’ And, even tougher, ‘You shall love your crooked neighbour/With your crooked heart.’ Philip Larkin noted the genius that allowed Auden to convey ‘the inimitable Thirties fear, the sense that something was going to fall like rain’ and, he added, ‘The poetry is in the blaming and warning.’ In ‘September 1, 1939’ the warning couldn’t be clearer: ‘I and the public know/What all schoolchildren learn,/Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return.’
In ‘Song of the Devil’ contempt for man’s ego and vanity drips from every mocking phrase. The three following poems are gentler but never soft. It’s not his style. Of ‘O Tell Me the Truth About Love’, Auden said, ‘For me, personally, it was a very important poem. It’s amazing how prophetic these things can be, because it was just after that that I met the person who did really change things for me completely.’ (Enter Chester Kallman, bearing the gifts of beauty and, as a gifted librettist, brilliance.) in ‘The Love Feast’, Saint Augustine’s cry of ‘Give me chastity . . . but not yet’ echoes in ‘an upper room at midnight’ as the narrator spots ‘Miss Number in the corner/Playing hard to get.’
Auden writes, ‘If I Could Tell You’, but he doesn’t. He can’t. The reason? Love . . . In the poem ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, Auden writes of his fellow poet whom ‘Mad Ireland hurt . . . into poetry’, and who ‘disappeared in the dead of winter: . . . What instruments we have agree/The day of his death was a dark cold day.’ Another line from the poem is equally appropriate to Auden. His ‘gift survived it all.’