Auden and Pacifism

By Prof. P. S. SASTRI. M. Litt.. Ph.D.
(University of Saugor)

During the two wars of the century there has been an intense and feverish poetic activity in England. The problems set afloat by one war and the neurosis that preceded the other have made everyone sensitive to the changing phases of the age, and this has resulted in a new vitality, a new energy, in the field of poetry. This vitality has its roots in the sensitive self of the poet and the two outstanding poets of the period are Auden and Spender. Consider the lines:

“Which of you waking early and watching daybreak
Will not hasten in heart, handsome, aware of wonder
At light unleashed, advancing, a leader of movement,
Breaking like surf on turf on road and roof...”

These lines of Auden seem to take us away to the realm of a novel type of propaganda carried through the sensitive reactions of an emotional mind. I t is full to the brim with the images of a bright existence that the age has forgotten. The age has removed all the sources of wonder by rationalising them. This scientific process has resulted in a loss of meaning, of value. As Auden said,

“And in cold Europe, in the middle of Autumn destruction,
Christopher stood, his face grown lined with wincing
In front of ignorance–‘Tell the English’, he shivered,
‘Man is a spirit’...”

The great objects embodying values are rendered prosaic and dull. They have ceased to make man feel anything of value in man as such. This is the rot that crept into the heart of human life. And the poet who is for ever seeking to capture a value cannot be happy in such a period. The very idea of value makes him feel that there is a standard, and that falling away from the standard is nothing short of falling ill. It is an illness that has made the poet fawn on the humour of the reader since democracy has put an end to the halo of patrons. The poet has come to feel with us and he is no longer aloof, posing to be a superior being. It has thus become his duty to tell us plainly the root cause of our moral and mental fall. But the complexity of the modern world has made the poet to purge himself first. He assumes a new role of strategic importance. It is a role governed by the first principle of love. His approach to man is no longer through cynicism and satire but through love and critical examination. The centre of the new poetry thus shifts to the individual:

“Comrades to whom our thoughts return,
Brothers for whom our bowels yearn
When words are over;
Remember that in each direction
Love outside our own election
Holds us in unseen connection:
O trust that ever.”

Thus writes Auden about the duty of the modern poet. And the basis from which the poet can commence his examination of the world is not yet secure. The poet must needs find a starting point which can and does assimilate everything to the poetic spirit. And the attitude too cannot be inspired by hate, for love must precede hate.” Pure hate is an impossibility to a modern poet like Auden. He becomes something like a Psychiatrist.

“Sir, no man’s’ enemy, forgiving all
But will his negative inversion, be prodigal:
Send to us power and light, a sovereign touch
Curing the intolerable neural itch,
The exhaustion of weaning, the liar’s quinsy,
And the distortions of ingrown virginity...
……….. :look shining at
New styles of architecture, a change of heart.”

Auden the faith healer has taken to the task of Curing the mind of the age. He is opposed to all those new diseases that have been made popular by the Freudians. And the only way to cure them is to adopt the method of free association and suggestion.

In ‘The, Orators’, Auden attacks this morbidity that is alleged to have overtaken the age since Freud discovered a Psychological base for it. Here is not a mere Psychological monster exposed. It is an exposition through the transparent film of the new poetic sensibility:

“See him take off his Coat and get down with a spanner
To each unhappy Joseph and repressed Diana,
Say Bo to the invalids and take away their rugs,
The War-memorials decorate with member-mugs...
The few shall be taught who want to understand,
Most of the rest shall live upon the land;
Living in one place with a satisfied face
All of the women and most of the men
Shall work with their hands and not think again.”

This is a necessary treatment, for, as Auden asks at the very beginning of ‘The Orators”; “What do you think about England, this country of ours where nobody is well?” It is not evil that is engulfing society, it is ill-health. What we want is the knowledge of the ailment and the knowledge that love can heal it. And Auden therefore enters sympathetically into those whom he satirises. It is, as Spender called it in a light vein, buffoon-poetry. But it is a poetry wherein we find Auden trying his best to relate the new ideas with a scheme of valdes. His inability to discover these values makes him appear whimsical and doctrinaire. The poet has his roots in the past while his being is in the present; and he has to unite these two into a single harmony. Auden for a time has gone to Marxism to find a stable basis for a system of values and it is from this standpoint that we have to approach ‘The Dance of Death’. The poem is a grand failure in that its very basis is a mere possibility, not an actuality. Auden the man has his faith in Marxism, but Auden the poet has not assimilated into himself Auden the man. The disparity between these two beings has resulted in a cleavage between his poetic faith and fact. He has not yet felt as a man the values of his poetic faith intensely. As a man he is an individualist, an anarchist; and this anarchism is poles asunder from Marxism. The divided self of Auden is visible in the subsequent poems. The conflict between the senses and the intellect, between the emotional tone and the logical acumen must needs be resolved if we are to expect poetry of value. The colloquial and homely tone ofhis verse has a rhetorical cast and out of this he attempts at hewing artistic effects. The assimilation of the new scientific material into the poetic can yield real poetry in the present day, only when the poetic is the governing principle. An inability to harmonise these two trends can give only lines like,

“Me, March, you do with your movements master and rock
With wing-whirl, whale-wallow, silent budding of cell…”

It borders on the doggerel, and instead of emotionally catching us unawares, it takes us by the forelock through its intellectual machine-gunning. Image, situation and idea stand loosely.

The emphasis then shifts to the idea. Personification and animism play a prominent role; and we are trained by Auden to a new way of seeing:

“Consider this and in our time
As the hawk sees it or the helmeted airman.”

Attention to detail and insistence on a broad vision are the two factors at the of this poetry. Along with this tendency there is a tendency to create a new mythology as in Auden’s ‘Captain Ferguson’. There is a vivid and concrete imagination at work here and in his ‘Gerhart Meyer from the sea, the truly strong man’. The element considered to be important in man is raised to a great magnitude; and we arrive at new characters, the exaggerations and intensifications of certain traits in man. Therein we feel that there is still something that man has not yet brought under control, “something that comes at rare moments from the core of the subliminal self: These are strange voices and Auden has a peculiar hold over them:

“There are some birds in these valleys 
Who flutter round the careless
With intimate appeal,
By seeing kindness trained to snaring,
They feel no falseness…
...Alas, the signal tighten.
Fingers on trigger tighten.
The real unlucky dove
Must smarting fall away from brightness
Its love from living.”

A rare poetic quality, breathes .through poems like these. When Auden chooses to be purely poetic, he can be and is as poetic as any. But his tone is distinct. It comes lightly and definitely with a peculiar emphasis. Consider the lines:

“Look, stranger, at this island now
The leaping light for your delight discovers,
Stand stable here
And silent be,
That through the channels of the ear
May wander like a river
The swaying sound of the sea.”

Auden the social poet has moved from being a reporter to the state of a political reporter. He is a reporter busy with his own emotional responses to the happenings of the day. From this state he moved on by the forties to a new stage when he begins to enquire into the meaning of the incarnation in ‘For the time Being’. In ‘The Age of Anxiety’ he reveals the sense of an abandoned world. There is still a sense of crisis felt deeply. And he is aware of two lies, that are devouring life; they are the romantic lie and the lie of authority. But

“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.”

Auden believes in a social synthesis which he endeavours at, formulating; and like all such attempts it is bound to fail. But his power to erect myths is very great, and this power does help him a great deal in overcoming the difficulty here. To this is to be added his deep faith in the future of man. All this is given in and through a peculiar emphasis on psychology and politics. But his psychology does not deal with the individual, but with people in general. It indulges in broad generalisations.

Psycho-analysis is an ingredient in some of his interesting poems. ‘The Orators’ takes neuroties to be the enemies of society, though Auden considers the artist too to be a neurotic. ‘The Ascent of F. 6’ is based on the mother-fixation, though it ends in ridicule. Idea of compensation appears in ‘Miss Gee’. The way in which the psychological material has been employed reveals that he lacks something of the artistic sympathy. We are thus made to laugh at the strange fate that overtakes John Honeymoon, and he is pathetic to the core. Yet it is this curious interest in psychology that has brought him into conflict with his erstwhile Marxist admirers. But Auden the man is interested in a political event from a psychological point of view. Such an interpretation is found in his great poem ‘Spain’. Life is here taken to be the individual’s own conscience, his own sense of responsibility. Life declares in the poem, “I am your choice, your decision: yes, I am Spain.” Only an internal, an inward effort can Spain Spain. Here is anarchism, an emphasis on individualism. Even the battlefield embodies the projections of the psychological conflicts and aberrations.

“On that table-land scored by rivers
Our fever’s menacing shapes are precise and alive.”

It is as an anarchist that he grew intensely conscious of the intellectual disgrace that is aptly said to “stare from every face and the seas of pity lie locked and frozen in each eye”. The evil that is in man is the root cause of human suffering; and the ‘New Year Letter’ confirms it. The Marxist and the Freudian have to part company on the problem of evil; and Auden who has his feet in both the camps for some time, seems to desert both in arriving at the conclusion that, evil is in man; it is not a mere psychic evil since it refers to a long tradition and environment; and it is not social evil since social is subservient and posterior to the individual, This spirit of anarchism appears even in his ‘Paid on Both Sides’. Here are people who have inherited violence and who are unable to overcome the legacy. Thay play at shooting; and they are pacifists. Thus we read:
“I am sick of this feud. What do we want to go on killing each other for?
We are al the same. He’s trash, yet if I cut my finger it bleeds like his.

These people are unwilling to kill, and yet powerless to refrain from killing. This pacifist attitude is the undercurrent of all that Auden wrote so far. It is a creed that is born of  an intense awareness of pain and frustration which we find even in his love poems. He is warring with the “two decades of hypocrisy” and this drove him to an intense consciousness of the velue of the individual and of his creative efforts. He has come to develop an important view of art as given in

“Art is not life and cannot be
A midwife to society,
For art is a fait accompli.”

We are with Patter and Wilde. And applied to politics this creed comes out in the lines

“true democracy begins
With free confession of our sins;
And all true unity commences
In consciousness of differences,
That all have wants to satisfy
And each a power to supply.”

His archist pacifism is fast taking a mystic turn and we can hope for a better consciousness of deep human values. He has been groping after them so far, and just now they are emerging to his conscious level of existence. And he has almost overcome the inward crisis through which every anarchist has to pass.