April is National Poetry Month. I’ll lead off here with my favorite poem, one I come back to again and again and again …It’s even been a bit of a life raft at times. A bit? How about completely? Below the poem I’ve posted a compilation of quotes about and by Auden. This is why one keeps a “commonplace book” – so you can grab quotes easily when you need them.
But first, the most important thing.
The poem. And happy April. And happy Poetry Month.
The More Loving One by WH Auden
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Admirer as I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
W.H. Auden
“The subject of his poetry is the struggle, but the struggle seen, as it were, by someone who whilst living in one camp, sympathises with the other; a struggle in fact which while existing externally is also taking place within the mind of the poet himself, who remains a bourgeois.” – Edgell Rickword, “Auden and Politics”
“I think of Mr. Auden’s poetry as a hygiene, a knowledge and practice, based on a brilliantly prejudiced analysis of contemporary disorders, relating to the preservation and promotion of health, a sanitary science and a flusher of melancholia. I sometimes think of his poetry as a great war, admire intensely the mature, religious, and logical fighter, and deprecate the boy bushranger.” — Dylan Thomas
“One Sunday afternoon in March 1922, a friend suggested that I should [write poetry]: the thought had never occurred to me.” — WH Auden
“For more than a year I read no one else.” — WH Auden – on Thomas Hardy
“Never write from your head, write from your cock.” — WH Auden, in a letter to a friend
“The need to find an expression for his homosexuality was the first technical obstacle to check the torrential course of Auden’s unprecedented facility. A born master of directness was obliged straightaway to find a language for indirection, thus becoming immediately involved with the drama that was to continue for the rest of his life – a drama in which the living presence of technique is the antagonist.” — Clive James
“Auden: great poet or great representative poet? A poet or a ‘classic of our prose’? He overhsadows the poets of his generation. He is Chaucer to the Gower of Betjeman and the Langland of MacNeice.” — Michael Schmidt, “Lives of the Poets
“Then, in June 1933, Auden experienced what he later called a ‘Vision of Agape’. He was sitting on a lawn with three colleagues from the school where he was teaching, when, he wrote, ‘quite suddenly and unexpectedly, something happened. I felt myself invaded by a power which, though I consented to it, was irresistible and certainly not mine. For the first time in my life I knew exactly – because, thanks to the power, I was doing it – what it meant to love one’s neighbor as oneself.” Before this, his poems had only been able to celebrate moments of impersonal erotic intensity, which he called ‘love’. Now, in the poem ‘Out on the lawn I lie in bed,’ prompted by his vision, he had praise for everything around him.” — Edward Mendelson
More information on Auden here.
Thanks for these great quotes and excerpts, which help to piece together a bit of the man behind the words.
One of my favorites and something I am chewing on for Portry Month.
“All Wild Animals Were Once Called Deer
Brigit Pegeen Kelly
Some truck was gunning the night before up Pippin Hill’s steep grade
And the doe was thrown wide. This happened five years ago now,
Or six. She must have come out of the woods by Simpson’s red
trailer-
The one that looks like a faded train car-and the driver
Did not see her. His brakes no good. Or perhaps she hit the truck.
That happens , too. A figure swims up from nowhere, a flying figure
That seems to be made of nothing but moonlight, or vapor,
Until it slams its face, solid as stone, against the glass.
And maybe when this happens the driver gets out. Maybe not.
Strange about the kills we get without intending them.
Because we are pointed in the direction of something.
Because we are distracted at just the right moment, or the wrong.
We were waiting for the school bus. It was early, but not yet light.
We watched the darkness draining off like the last residue
Of water from a tub. And we didn’t speak, because that was our way.
High up a plane droned, drone of the cold, and behind us the flag
In front of the Bank of Hope’s branch trailer snapped and popped in
the wind.
It sounded like a boy whipping a wet towel against a thigh
Or like the stiff beating of a swan’s wings as it takes off
From the lake, a flat drumming sound, the sound of something
Being pounded until it softens, and then-as the wind lowered
And the flag ran out wide-there was a second sound
the sound of running fire.
And there was the scraping, too, the sad knife-against-skin scraping
Of the acres of field corn strung out in straggling rows
Around the branch trailer that had been, the winter before,
our town’s claim to fame
When in the space of two weeks, it was successfully robbed twice.
The same man did it both times, in the same manner.
He had a black hood and a gun, and he was so polite
That the embarrassed teller couldn’t hide her smile when he showed
up again.
They didn’t think it could happen twice. But sometimes it does.
Strange about that. Lightning strikes and strikes again.
My piano teacher watched her husband, who had been struck as a boy,
Fall for good, years later, when he was hit again.
He was walking across a cut cornfield toward her, stepping over
The dead stalks, holding the bag of nails he’d picked up at the
hardware store
Out like a bouquet. It was drizzling so he had his umbrella up.
There was no thunder, nothing to be afraid of.
And then a single bolt from nowhere, and for a moment the man
Was doing a little dance in a movie, a jig, three steps or four,
Before he dropped like a cloth, or a felled bird.
This happened twenty years ago now, but my teacher keeps
Telling me the story. She hums it while she plays. And we were
humming
That morning by the bus stop. A song about boys and war.
And the thing about the doe was this. She looked alive.
As anything will in the half light. As even lawn statues will.
I was going to say as even children playing a game of statues will,
But of course they are alive. Though sometimes
A person pretending to be a statue seems farther gone in death
Than a statue does. Or to put it another way,
Death seems to be the living thing, the thing
That looks out through the eyes. Strange about that…
We stared at the doe for a long time and I thought about the way
A hunter slits a deer’s belly. I’ve watched this many times.
And the motion is a deft one. It is the same motion the swan uses
When he knifes the children down by his pond on Wasigan Road.
They put out a hand. And quick as lit grease, the swan’s
Boneless neck snakes around in a sideways circle, driving
The bill towards the softest spot…All those songs
We sing about swans, but they are mean. And up close, often ugly.
That old Wasigan bird is a smelly, moth-eaten thing.
His wings stained yellow as if he chewed tobacco,
His upper beak broken from his foul-tempered strikes.
And he is awkward, too, out of the water. Broken-billed and gaited.
When he grapples down the steep slope, wheezing and spitting,
He looks like some old man recovering from hip surgery,
Slowly slapping down one cursed flat foot, and the next.
But the thing about the swan is this. The swan is made for the water.
You can’t judge him out of it. He’s made for the chapter
in the rushes. He’s like one of those small planes my brother flies.
Ridiculous things. Something a boy dreams up late at night
When he stares at the stars. Something a child draws.
I’ve watched my brother take off a thousand times, and it’s always
The same. The engine spits and dies, spits and catches-
A spurting match-and the machine shakes and shakes as if it were
Stuck together with glue and wound up with a rubber band.
It shimmies the whole way down the strip, past the pond,
Past the wind bagging the goose-necked wind sock, past the banks
Of bright and blue planes. And as it climbs slowly
Into the air, wobbling from side to side, cautious as a rock climber,
Putting one hand forward and then the next, not even looking
At the high spot above the tree line that is the question,
It seems that nothing will keep it up, not a wish, not a dare,
Not the proffered flowers of our held breath. It seems
As if the plane is a prey the hunter has lined up in his sights,
His finger pressed against the cold metal, the taste of blood
On his tongue…but then, at the dizzying height
Of our dismay, just before the sky goes black,
The climber’s frail hand reaches up and grasps the highest rock,
Hauling, with a last shudder, the body over,
The gun lowers, and perfectly poised now, high above
The dark pines, the plane is home free. It owns it all, all.
My brother looks down and counts his possessions,
Strip and grass, the child’s cemetary, the black tombstones
Of the cedars make on the grassy hill, the wind-scrubbed
Face of the pond, the swan’s white stone…
In thirty years, roughly, we will all be dead…That is one thing…
And you can’t judge a swan out of the water…That is another.
The swan is mean and ugly, stupid as a stone,
But when it finally makes its way down the slope over rocks
And weeds, through the razory grasses of the muddy shallows,
The water fanning out in loose circles around it
And then stilling, when it finally reached the deepest spot
And raises in slow motion its perfectly articulated wings,
Wings of smoke, wings of air, then everything changes.
Out of the shallows the lover emerge, sword and flame,
And over the pond’s lone island the willow spills its canopy,
A shifting feast of gold and green, a spell of lethal beauty.
O bird of moonlight. O bird of wish. O sound rising.
Like an echo from the water. Grief sound. Sound of the horn.
The same ghostly sound the deer makes when it runs
Through the woods at night, white lightning through the trees,
Through the coldest moments, when it feels as if the earth
Will never again grow warm, lover running toward lover,
The branches tearing back, the mouth and eyes wide,
The heart flying into the arms of the one that will kill her.”
I love the 20th century British and Irish poets. Auden, Larking, MacNeice, Yeats are all wonderful!
I also add poetry to many of my posts and last February I had posted about Growing Up With Poetry.
Permalink: http://tourmarm.blogspot.com/2007/02/poetry-for-school-and-soul.html
I think I’m going to like it here!