W.H. Auden Flashcards
Auden
Writers should leave themselves alone
Karl Marx
‘Labour itself becomes an object which [the worker] can acquire only by the greatest effort and with unpredictable interruptions’
‘Religion… is the opium of the people.’
September 1st 1939
sardonic tone, talks about human nature, democracy, language, love, the mundane
7 syllables a line
9 11 line stanzas
‘I sit in one of the dives/ On Fifty-Second Street/ Uncertain and afraid’
‘What all schoolchildren learn,/ Those to whom evil is done/ Do evil in return’
‘Each language pours its vain/ Competitive excuse’
‘Faces along the bar/ Cling to their average bar’
‘each woman and each man/ Craves what it cannot have […] to be loved alone’
‘All I have is a voice/ To undo the folded lie’
‘We must love one another or die’
‘Beleaguered by the same/ Negation and despair,/ Show an affirming flame.’
A Communist to Others
left-wing intellectuals, encouraging others to join his fight
shifting pronouns, who is he, they, you?
patronising tone, critics don’t think he pulls it off v well
not entirely successful
performance of solidarity
regular structure, 7 line stanzas
‘Brothers who when the siren roar/ From office, shop and factory pour/ ‘Neath evening sky’
‘We cannot put on airs with you/ The fears that hurt you hurt us too’
‘You hide the boss’ simple stuma/ Among the foes which we enumer/ You are included’
everyone who doesn’t subscribe to this view ‘shall turn blue/ Shall fade away like morning dew/ With club-room fossils’
Auden, Spain
later became Spain 1937, grounds it in its moment
in quatrains
about the past vs the present
sardonic tone
‘Yesterday all the past. The language of size/ Spreading to China along the trade-routes’
‘Yesterday the Sabbath of witches; but to-day the struggle’
‘ “What’s your proposal? To build the just city? I will./ I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic/ Death? Very well, I accept, for/ I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain.” ‘
‘Tomorrow the rediscovery of romantic love’
‘To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death’
‘The stars are dead. The animals will not look./ We are left alone with our day, and the time is short’
The Shield of Achilles
irregular stanza lengths
watching from the sidelines
‘A plain without a feature, bare and brown’
‘an unintelligible multitude’
‘A crowd of ordinary decent folk/ Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke/ As three pale figures were led forth and bound/ To three posts driven upright in the ground’
‘they were small/ And could not hope for help and no help came’
‘the strong/ Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles/ Who would not live long’
Musee des Beaux-Arts
engorged sonnet
13 line stanza and an 8 line stanza
‘About suffering they were never wrong,/ The Old Masters […] how it takes place/ While someone is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along’
‘dogs go on with their doggy life’
‘everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster’
‘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.’
Auden
poetry must ‘move our emotions, or excite our intellect, for only that which is moving or exciting is memorable’
Stan Smith
enduring nature of Auden’s verse, Sept 1st quoted after 9/11
the embattled self in Auden
In Memory of W.B. Yeats
‘The words of a dead man/ Are modified in the guts of the living’
‘your gift survived it all’
3 parts
