|
Poems
Auden had a long poetic
career of nearly half a century. Prior to 1939, influenced by Marx and
Freud, he tried to use Marxism and psychoanalysis to evaluate social
phenomena and inclined much to the Left. But he never became a Marxist.
After moving to the States, Auden gradually deserted Marxism for Anglicanism
and his political views tended to be moderate. Hoping for a better future,
he meditated much on love and friendship and thus eventually turned to
Christian belief.
“Spain 1937” is one of his best poems condemning fascism and
imperialist wars. In the poem, the poet first recalled “yesterday” from the
middle age to the Enlightenment Movement and Industrial Revolution, and then
vividly depicted “today the struggle” of death and sufferings to be endured.
Finally the poem ended in pessimism:
The stars are dead; the animals will not look:
We are left alone with our day, and the time is short and
History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.
Although defeated, the poem showed the enthusiasm of the
International Brigade for a republican cause and their great courage and
heroism.
This theme can also be seen in poems like “Epitaph on a
Tyrant”, “So this city has Ten Million Souls” and “In Memory of Ernest
Toller”.
In the early period, Auden was famous for his satirical
poems, which were pungent but implicit, serious but humorous. A well-known
poem of this kind must be “Musée des Beaux Arts”:
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
This poem was written after Auden visited the Museum of Fine
Arts in Brussels, where hang the painting of The Fall of Icarus, by
Pieter Brueghel. Icarus and his father, in Greek mythology, used wax to
fasten wings to their shoulders in order to fly away from the Labyrinth. But
Icarus ignored his father’s warning and flew too high and too closed to the
sun so that the wax was melted. In the painting, both the boats on the sea
and the plowman on the shore saw Icarus falling into the water, yet none of
them paid the least attention to him. The words “leisurely” and “calmly”
effectively created a sharp contrast between the sacrifice and the
indifference.
Another distinguished feature of Auden’s style is his
skillful use of short lines and alliteration, following the tradition of Old
and Middle English poetry. This was due to his keen study on Old and Middle
English at Oxford and the strong influence of
John Skelton and
Gerard Manley
Hopkins. One stanza from “The Orator” (1932) is a good illustration:
‘O do you imagine’, said fearer to farer,
‘That dusk will delay on your path to the pass,
Your diligent looking discover the lacking
Your footsteps feel from granite to grass?’
Here alliteration was used with great skill everywhere
in the poem, especially in the second stanza quoted above.
During his traveling to China, Auden wrote 27 sonnets
in irregular rhyme schemes concerning the war going on in China then. They
were later collected in his In Time of War. In these poems, Auden
showed great sympathy to Chinese soldiers and the modern techniques he
adopted in them influence many Chinese poets.
In his early poetic career, Auden was very sensitive to
the modern society. He wrote many poems on places he visited, such as
“Macao”, “Hong Kong”, “Dover” and “Brussels in Winter”, and writers he read,
such as “Herman Melville”, “Voltaire at Ferney”, “Letters to Lord Byron”,
“In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, “In Memory of Ernst Toller”, “In Memory of
Sigmund Freud”, etc.
 |
