Auden-Bashing: Your trochee trochee anapest is really starting to piss me off...

I am reading poems in an anthology generically titled Love Poems, which was brought out by Barnes & Noble as in an in-store sell, possibly as a holiday-marketed book.

The cover art is a very bland Picasso drawing of a bouquet of flowers being passed between the floating, disembodied hands of lovers.

It was edited by David Stanford Burr, and seems to be one of those anthologies designed to convince people that poets stopped writing poetry about a hundred years ago, because that's approximately when the most recent poems included in here were written.

Most likely this absence of contemporary writing signifies that the editor was restricted to choosing works in the public domain, or making sure the vast majority of the poetry fit that criterion.

That's a guess, but it's an educated one, and I think it's very likely the answer for why so much great contemporary or near-contemporary love poetry was excluded.

Many of these poems included here I have known for many years. Many of these poems I haven't seen in many years. Many of those poems I have not missed, and see no reason to now.

I figured I'd talk about some of these poems in this anthology as I encounter them from this end of time, to see what, if anything, has changed in my reception.

I wanted to talk briefly about an Auden poem I was reading earlier today, which I haven't seen in many years.

I'll start by including the poem here.

     "Lay your sleeping head, my love,"

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral;
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's sensual ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry;
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be pad, but not from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of sweetness show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness see you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.


Prosodically, it's trochee, trochee, anapest fairly obsessively, with some necessary and sane compromise.

Prosodic schemata and rhyme are bitch goddesses. Rigidly enforced, or used in the hands of someone incapable of fluently fusing semantic and formalist requirements, they can negatively affect a poem during its gestation, induce mutations which deliver up a creature with an eye in its belly, or a limb growing out of its forehead.

We've all seen verse creations like that.

In the hands of a thoroughly competent artificer, the result can be astonishing. "If it was a bed of Procrustes, Procustes knew how to nip and tuck! You look damn good!" we tell the poem in all sincerity.

This is the Los Angeles of Verse, populated by poems that have successfully gone under the knife, and are still turning all heads. Despite the ridiculous amount of years that have passed.

In general, that describes Auden very well. What about this particular poem?

Let's look at the first stanza.

The first line opens with a typical appeal one might expect in a traditional love poem, but the second line instantly undermines our likely expectation with a cruel honesty.

This is a tryst, a sexual rendezvous, a hookup, whatever term you choose to use. And it's no more than that.

One could argue with the use of "(h)uman" as a pointlessly non-descriptive adjective here. The general connotation would seem to indicate the speaker's sense of the lover's vulnerability, as in the expression "all too human."

But such pathos really risks bathos, because it's comical if one lets one's mind wander. Does he really need to say that? I mean, did he think we were thinking the poem might say "Lay your sleeping head, my love, canine on my faithless arm?" Or perhaps, "Lay your sleeping head, my love, alien on my faithless arm?"

One is impressed with the near-rhyme of "arm" and "from" Auden sets up with the enjambent swinging around from the fourth line into the fifth. Auden steals a base and does an obnoxious little dance while doing it there.

Lines 3-5 express well the disenchantment that adulthood often brings to youthful conceptions of romantic love, but then he fails terribly in imagination and craft with "...and the grave / Proves the child ephemeral(.)"

That's just bad. The only way I can imagine that showing any craft is if the poet is making a truly weird pun with grave, wherein he is saying the grave nature of love proves the child('s heart) ephemeral.

But I see no justification for that, and I don't believe anyone is going to get that out of the line. If he wanted to set up a pun like that it would have been possible, but not as it's structured now. More likely the line was perceived to set up the necessary near-rhyme for beautiful (line 10) in a satisfactory way.

The next four lines are well-turned and here we begin to feel the possibility that it might be a homosexual tryst Auden is describing. Considering the period in which this was published, the guilty might point in that direction, although it's just as liable to indicate that this tryst is purely sexual, a promiscuous meeting. The actual sex of the lovers is probably irrelevant.

But they are filthy little beastmasters. Fornicators. Guilty. That much we know.

The next stanza is rather bombastic. Venus appears and sends a grave vision. Oh my. "Soul and body have no bounds" is decent, if rather a cliche at that point in time. The language begins to sound dated in this stanza. It's not as contemporary nor as daring as the first stanza. Lines five through seven are poetic gingerbread. He's falling back on received traditions here, nowhere more so than in the awful last three lines of the stanza where a conventional image out of pastoral poetry, that of the hermit (think of Keats and his "nature's patient, sleepless Eremite") is used and abused. The hermit's "abstract insight" is said to wake his "sensual ecstasy." Auden is invoking and contrasting different types of love, to try to find a universal commonality, a defense. The poet tries to create what I would call a "divided oxymoron" here. He's trying to imply that even a hermit's "abstract insight" has a component of "sensual ecstasy." The best line is "(i)n their ordinary swoon," since that serves to advance the argument he is articulating, his apologia for a somewhat spiritual promiscuity.

Alternatively, the last three lines of this stanza might be seen as a picture of the poet awakening to the realization that trysting has a divine imprimatur. The gods want us to fuck.

The third stanza is shapely, if marred by some dated diction, particularly in lines six and seven. It serves to advance the argument, and the last three lines have a moving pathos and are memorable poetry.

The third stanza is notable for its oblique glance at moral censure. The speaker--and the poem--knows the "fashionable madmen" who "raise / (t)heir boring pedantic cry" are correct. This is a fraught path. But as the last few lines insist, the lover is willing to accept the reckoning (or reckonynge, to use the old word which would cover both contexts). The lover accepts that he will later be made to pay.

The last stanza seems rather tight at first, and the flow of vocables is riverine. Auden can even get away with "knocking heart," because here in this context it has a beautiful savor and sweetness of a heart inquiring, a petition for entry. And at the same time there is a soupcon of sexual imagery here, the knocking is a heart excited in the chase and most likely in the acts of love as well. The key line is, of course, "Find the mortal world enough(.)" While this is hardly revolutionary, it has a certain power in its succinctness. Of course this was a common sentiment in much verse of the ancient world. Auden is just hearkening.

I say seems rather tight, because one soon realizes he got away with a grammatical betise there. Look at the grammar: Let the winds of dawn that blow...Such a day of sweetness show. Dawn might "such a day of sweetness show" but the "winds of dawn" are certainly not capable of such an act. One could argue that's catachresis, but I think it's just sloppiness.*

The somewhat cryptic lines here are the closing four.

These lines read almost as shibboleths. The seventh and eighth lines of the stanza could definitely be read as lines celebrating secret daytime trysts, and the ninth and tenth lines as nighttime versions of the same.

The lines suffer for their feyness, their use of pointlessly dry abstractions where images (or at least one concrete image) might have been very powerful.

"Nights of insult let you pass / Watched by every human love."

One senses Auden was desirous of creating end lines with a real negative capability.

Lines that aim for negative capability, and miss, usually are pointlessly oblique.

Unfortunately, I find two of these closing lines pointlessly oblique, and the other two lines joyless and pointless.

The pretentious grammatical inversion in the penultimate line grates as condescending misery masquerading as omniscience. Coupled with the closing line, the poem tries to give us, oh so tepidly, a final despairing annunciation of the side of human sensuality it meant to spiritualize--albeit in a mortally-aware fashion--earlier.

One can't help but feel that the rhetoric, like the narrator, is merely sportfucking.

Overall, I find this poem has memorable sections, but is not a very strong poem.

Even with its failings, the memorable lines are strong enough that they might remain with a reader for a very long time.



* I told my psychopomp, Dead Philip Whalen (D.P.W.), that I had a suspicion the source of this grammatical oddity was an edit by Auden where he had replaced the original end of the line ("X bestow") where "X" is an unknown, but a one syllable word--to comply with the anapestic need there--with "Such a day of sweetness show." Because the rhyme would have still been there and worked, and the grammar would have been sensible then. I'm thinking he rightfully guessed that bestow was simply too archaic and too stilted, and knew he could do better. But then he felt a crunch to finish the poem and slipped a brick quickly in place to keep the wall standing after he had knocked out a brick. He meant to come back and fix it but he never did. Now he's dead and the dead laugh like hell when you even mention editing around them.

Philip thought this sounded plausible and approached Wystan in the afterlife and asked him if this was indeed the case, and Wystan said What the fuck are you doing wearing pyjamas in the afterlife? He said this to D.P.W., not me. (Thank god!)

Philip said that's when he knew we had guessed correctly! But obviously we didn't get to find out what the monosyllabic "X" was.

I have no idea what Philip was doing in his pyjamas in the Afterlife. He's usually naked when he visits me. Once he appeared to me naked with nothing on but a smile and a big hella long purple feather boa wrapped around his neck, his chest and his loins.

D.P.W. can turn his head into a a big red camellia that flushes with fire like one of those ash snakes you create by lighting a little black carbon pill on the Fourth.

Little tiny fire snakes circulate through Philip's camellia head. He nods and laughs while he does this, and the bright afterimages are gorge but blinding.

I asked D.P.W. what Auden looked like in the Afterlife, and he said "an effervencent syllabub mostly."

Me: "As he was in life then?"

Philip: "Yes, exactly."