April is National Poetry Month. I’ll lead off here with my favorite poem, one I come back to again and again and again …At times, it’s been a life raft. I’m sad right now. I’m sad about so many things. I’m sad for other people in my life and what they are going through, I am sad for myself and what I am going through. I woke up at 4 am this morning weeping. I was having a really really sad dream, I guess. I am not looking for a life raft right now, because the sadness is too acute. But reading over “the More Loving One’ this morning … well. What it says is very difficult. It is not an easy truth. It is not pat, or facile, or easy. It is the hardest truth of all to grasp. When one is in the darkness, how on earth do you learn to love it? Or accept it enough that it seems normal? I don’t have the answer to that. The poem never fails to knock me on my ass. I hate Auden for it. I want to punch him in the face and say, “The dark will be sublime? How DARE you say that? How dare you? ” But there’s a gentleness to Auden, a kindness. That kindness is all in the last line of the poem. If that last line weren’t there, the message would be too much to handle, I think. When life is sad, you don’t want be to told, “This too shall pass.” Everyone’s sadness is singular. It’s a dark tunnel. We all have to go through it. But the last line of his poem gives us breathing room. Says, “It’s okay. It won’t happen now … maybe not tomorrow or even next year … it will take a little time … it will take a little time …” I have ranted before about the idiots who say “Time heals all wounds”. I am convinced that those who say such stupid things have never really been wounded, otherwise they wouldn’t spout such moronic pablum. People ARE marked by events. We may heal, we move on, but we are MARKED. Every event leaves a scar of some kind. It heals, but not completely. And ALL wounds? Really? Time heals ALL wounds? Oh, really? ALL wounds? Every single one? Tell that to mothers who had to watch their babies heads get bashed against the wall by some SS guard in line at Auschwitz. Don’t even get me started.) And, to me, Auden’s poem expresses that ambiguity, that darkness. That knowledge that you will NOT go back to who you were before. The stars will not return. THAT would be time healing completely – to have the heavens reappear, as they used to be. But no. The challenge for us, as living thinking evolving beings, is how to find the “total dark” sublime. It seems impossible. Especially at 4 in the morning when things get too hard, when the darkness is so total. But Auden is gentle, as I mentioned before. And lines 7 and 8 are words to live by. I try. I really do.
Below the poem I’ve posted a compilation of quotes about and by Auden. (The anecdote described by Edward Mendelsohn moves me terribly. It approaches explaining why it is that Auden is so important to me. He’s not just a wonderful writer – but there are times when he teaches me how to live. Or at least gives me guide posts.) This is why one keeps a “commonplace book” – so you can grab quotes easily when you need them. Last year I did a post a day about different poets through National Poetry Month – and because it’s only a month long I had to leave out some of my favorites. I’ll be doing more of that this month, as the spirit moves me.
But first, the most important thing.
The poem.
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 overshadows the poets of his generation. He is Chaucer to the Gower of Betjeman and the Langland of MacNeice.” — Michael Schmidt
“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 on that poem and the moment that inspired it here)
More information on Auden here.
I love the Dylan Thomas quote. /a flusher of melancholia./ Beautiful.
I also love Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” – it’s another all-time favorite of mine. The last stanza is another moment where I feel reminded … of something important, essential, life-giving. Auden has that effect on me.
I
He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
II
You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
III
Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
You said it. Heal all wounds? Time doesn’t heal jack.
A good memory ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.
ephemeral
written in widening waves on the surface of a once still pool
something lurking beneath the muddy green waters took a sneak peak at the air or the land or a bug
and quick as flash sank again into the darkness before a bird of prey could see
waking to summer heat on a Spring day
it is still dark and the birds still do sing to a moonless sky
and the air conditioners which had been still for the best of a season
are in full throat again
the sounds of the highway are beyond audible reach once more
I opened the sliding glass door and felt that the air had cooled a bit over night
so we had locked up the heat in side with us and kept out the refreshing cool air.
Lighted day revealed a restless sea.
Wind up, my chimes won’t stop ringing…