In celebration of W H Auden
W H Auden was an undergraduate at Christ Church in the 1920s, and returned to Oxford as Professor of Poetry in the late 1950s. Near the end of his life in the 1970s, he was again in residence at Christ Church.
To mark the hundredth anniversary of his birth, the Senior Common Room at Christ Church held a special gathering on 21st February at which Auden’s poems were read and memories of the poet were recollected by some of the people who knew him. Peter McDonald read out the poem below which was written in celebration of W H Auden and his link with Christ Church.
Lines for W.H. Auden
21st February, 2007
Of course, Wystan, it’s true that tonight I seem to be taking
a liberty, talking thus in public to you
(as though it were worth your infinite time even to listen)
with not, please, your ‘first’ but your Christian name
when we have never been introduced, and didn’t so much as
share this earth for more than eleven-odd years;
nevertheless, to meet in this room brings a presumption
of familiarity, of friends sharing the house,
not just for one time but across times, and it frees us,
even with the dead, to speak on cordial terms.
I presume you are here with us, although we have no right to
compel your presence at this (or any) event
(besides, to importune you now, like Sludge or Sosostris,
would be, at the very least, in dubious taste,
a display of vulgarity, as well as crude self-indulgence,
more suited to such shades as wait to be called –
Yeats and Graves, say, although they don’t speak to each other,
and so can’t attend the same parties, are keen
on invocations, dim lights, brimming glasses of Muscat
which we are above, or simply not up to (thank God)
in their – slightly Southern Californian – versions of heaven).
You on the other hand can, as you’d rather, come in
anytime without fuss, since of course you belong here, and join us
naturally at seven sharp, for pre-dinner drinks
(I’m afraid your fridge has gone west now, and Little has left us,
but an Auden martini, I believe, may still be procured
with some prior notice), break bread, and at the meal listen
politely if need be, impolitely if not,
to the kind of unforced table-talk which still keeps apart from
politics, and away from hobby-horses and shop,
but likes wit given and taken, respects and relishes knowledge,
along with gossip of course, and allusion, and charm.
Though we’re here for your centenary, we mustn’t be formal:
considering you one, we sit together as friends,
perfectly aware that two or even three hundred
years will also be marked in ways we cannot conceive,
and in all those years’ time, whatever will have become of
this place is quite beyond our power to conceive:
a theme-park, perhaps, a hot swamp, or else a touristed ruin
with holograms of you, along with Dodgson and Locke
seated in mid-air, over a crazy babble of voices,
comprehending, uncomprehending; but we can’t know.
The future, doubtless, will make as little sense as the present,
and we should never expect too much of the past.
When you were born this day a hundred years ago, Wystan,
the world was no more happy or wicked than now,
disasters made no more sense (just by flicking a button
I see that the steamship Berlin was lost to the deep
that same day, on its regular route between Harwich and Holland,
Lenin’s piece “The First Step” went into print
(“There is no revolution: that is what happens in Europe”),
and from Vienna Freud wrote a letter to Jung.
If called on, you could have made these things into a poem,
given your brilliance, and given the will to connect;
with one phrase or a rhythm, you might have evoked in an instant
that day as it was here, deep in a winter routine:
dons coughing in armchairs, boys scrubbing pots in the kitchens,
and a low sun splitting Tom Tower, with the light
coruscating on Mercury, on frosty paths and blackening stonework,
while a select generation of braying young men
wasted or made much of their time, the aesthetes and hearties
due, many of them, to die before they were old.
In your childhood, the dead were many: you grew up in their shadow
in a bereaved England, one twitchy with grief
and strange, its eccentricities ingrown, and its fetishes
monstrous, but also redundant and faintly absurd.
Whole worlds of want, of near-to-home misery and injustice,
ghosted the spinsters in tea-rooms, the militant Scouts
and roaring heiresses, stricken explorers and lunatic vicars
down lanes and branch-lines and arterial roads
to burst outrageously in on your middle-class adolescence
just at the point when poetry started to stir,
and that was that: the rest was, as you know, sweated labour
and making the life of letters into a life.
Wystan, you never returned (to skip, for a moment, your lifetime)
here from that last trip abroad, leaving your corpse
in Kirchstetten, and with (by all accounts) a funeral to die for,
booze and Wagner galore, and not a dry eye
in the house – as was proper, for of course every death is too early,
pointless and sore, and yours was early enough.
Does elegy, I wonder, have a shelf-life? These days, Wystan, the poets
apply genuine sadness all over their verse
like some kind of guarantee, hoping that we will cry with them,
(not in vain, it must be said). But you would not
countenance this, thinking it – rightly – a dereliction of duty,
the duty of all poets never to confuse
the tears of things with the tears in our eyes, but to be truthful
above all, and about as much as we can.
There is some embarrassment I know, Wystan, as you did,
between poetry and the truth, there is a glitch
that every true poem hits, and sooner rather than later,
where the very deepest integrity of technique
turns to morality, and poets must converse with the devils
of inauthenticity and of self-worth,
of necessity and emulation, vanity, greed, and emotion,
charmingly, but still without giving an inch:
it isn’t a trick to be learned, but a daily trial to be gone through.
As for writing, that too should get better with time;
any poet’s style cannot remain in hock to his blazing successes,
and the young man’s flashy verse, for which he was praised,
may win more praise and louder, but must not be protracted
into the hard business of long middle-age
for fear – as you knew, Wystan, much better than many –
of falsehood, that flatters and serves a taste for the false.
To be true (a rare condition) style needs a true language
so that when the darkness of the times or of death
falls, a poem can be a point of light, only ironic
from a certain angle: still the forces are ranged
against us all of shame, of ignorance, fear, and dishonour,
holding civility and virtue on edge,
and poets should be able, when the time comes, to engage them
with more than self-parody, mannerisms and tics.
Technique is an easy word, and technique alone can be facile,
but no true poet can ever find out enough
about metre and rhyme, or have his fill of apparently worthless
knowledge; Wystan, you would surely chastise
me for vágaries, which should be vagáries, and couple itself with
Mary’s or fairies, and you would justly reproach
me for otiose made to rhyme with verbose, when in fact its
true rhyme is with ferocious (too easy a word
for most poems, too emphatic by half) and with precocious
(or, for me, stocious, meaning drunker than drunk).
The longer I speak, the more the sound of my own mongrel English
comes to the fore, Wystan, a voice unlike yours,
which still carries oddly in this room, and now this is sounding
strange, yes, strange. Where I come from, the words
sound differently, and are different, an old-fashioned, strong language
in which the verb to doubt can mean to suppose,
and pitch and nuance are everything. Tonight, while we’re comfy
in each other’s presence here, still we do well
to remember our differences and value them, always recalling
that Love is particular and infinite, not
to be presumed upon, flouted or flaunted, not an abstraction,
a puzzle of course, yet at last the point of it all.
Time’s strange excuses, Wystan, are not at the heart of the matter,
not even from your vantage-point in Heaven above,
since there, I presume, time itself is no longer duration,
and history, so cried-up once, is no more
than an obvious joke, one really too jejune to have truck with,
which changes, but never seems to come to an end.
However odd it may be, one’s habitat needs to be chosen,
and our addresses might bear allegorical names:
the shabbily-furnished house of Faith, perhaps, where the curtains
open on videnda difficult to endure,
and the rooms are draughty, outmoded, and generally lived in,
lived in and died in; books all over the place,
and clutter spawning itself, cigarettes growing out of the ashtrays;
or else the expensively decked-out palace of Doubt,
tidy and full of light, with fine views and astonishing gadgets,
always in taste, and on contemporary lines.
But cards and little notes should accumulate on the mantel
in any sane dwelling; how else, Wystan, explain
Alban’s wonderful story: the question he put to you one evening
here, about whether or not, should the good Lord
leave you a billet to await you (after dessert) on returning,
in which He would reveal, and in His own hand,
(just imagine the handwriting – florid, slightly outlandish)
the eternal and immutable fate of your soul,
you would open the letter? And yes, you gave the right answer.
Where you are now, though now isn’t the right
word, there is little call for clever arguments or conundrums,
and you won’t appreciate ours; nevertheless,
I doubt, Wystan, that we’ve gone past your bedtime already,
and you’ll be impatient for me to finish all this
so you can make your exit, not – not now – to the cottage,
but back to the Truly Good and Challenging Place
where company is always the best, and never outstays its welcome
(and where David, who would surely, were he alive,
have joined us tonight, visits you whenever he pleases,
reciting Shakespeare and Goethe, surrounded by dogs).
Away now, while the rest of us drink to you at one hundred;
sure you’re dead too, away now and mind the time;
I doubt there’s nothing we say can disconcert or alarm you;
away now, Wystan, away now and sleep your fill. |
