The Marxist historian E.P. Thompson, also a fine literary critic, in a now unfortunately forgotten essay, "Inside the Whale," in his likewise unfortunately forgotten book The Poverty of Theory, has a brilliant discussion of Auden's evasions in re-editing this poem for later editions. It is a fine poem, though, even in the bowlderized version. Me, I'm rereading Brecht (I translate and paraphrase from memory):
In the dark times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will be singing about the dark times.
jks
>From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
>Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
>To: lbo-talk <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
>Subject: poetic interlude
>Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2001 12:19:03 -0400
>
>[This was posted to my generally banal Yale Class of 1975 listserv.]
>
>September 1, 1939
>W.H. Auden
>
>I sit in one of the dives
>On Fifty-Second Street
>Uncertain and afraid
>As the clever hopes expire
>Of a low dishonest decade:
>Waves of anger and fear
>Circulate over the bright
>And darkened lands of the earth,
>Obsessing our private lives;
>The unmentionable odour of death
>Offends the September night.
>
>Accurate scholarship can
>Unearth the whole offence
>From Luther until now
>That has driven a culture mad,
>Find what occurred at Linz,
>What huge image made
>A psychopathic god:
>I and the public know
>What all schoolchildren learn.
>Those to whom evil are done
>Do evil in return.
>
>Exiled Thucydides knew
>All that a speech can say
>About Democracy
>And what dictators do,
>The elderly rubbish they talk
>To an apathetic grave;
>Analysed all in his book,
>The enlightenment driven away,
>The habit-forming grief:
>We must suffer them all again.
>
>Into this neutral air
>Where blind skyscrapers use
>Their full height to proclaim
>The strength of Collective Man,
>Each language pours its vain
>Competitive excuse:
>But who can live for long
>In an euphoric dream;
>Out of the mirror they stare.
>Imperialism's face
>And the international wrong.
>
>Faces along the bar
>Cling to their average day:
>The lights must never go out,
>The music must always play,
>All the conventions conspire
>To make this fort assume
>The furniture of home;
>Lest we should see where we are,
>Lost in a haunted wood,
>Children afraid of the night
>Who have never been happy or good.
>
>The windiest militant trash
>Important Persons shout
>Is not so crude as our wish:
>What mad Nijinsky wrote
>About Diaghilev
>Is true of the normal heart;
>For the error bred in the bone
>Of each woman and each man
>Craves what it cannot have,
>Not universal love
>But to be loved alone.
>
>From the conservative dark
>Into the ethical life
>The dense commuters come,
>Repeating their morning vow,
>"I will be true to the wife,
>I'll concentrate more on my work,"
>And helpless governors wake
>To resume their compulsory game:
>Who can reach the deaf,
>Who can speak for the dumb?
>
>All I have is a voice
>To undo the folded lie,
>The romantic lie in the brain
>Of the sensual man-in-the-street
>And the lie of Authority
>Whose buildings grope the sky:
>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.
>
>Defenceless under the night
>Our world in stupor lies:
>Yet, dotted everywhere,
>Ironic points of light
>Flash out wherever the Just
>Exchange their messages:
>May I, composed like them
>Of Eros and of dust,
>Beleaguered by the same
>Negation and despair,
>Show an affirming flame.
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