Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939” | Reason and Meaning

In my last post, I mirrored on Philip Larkin‘s poem “An Arundel Tomb,” particularly it’s haunting final line, “What’s going to survive of us is love.” It jogged my memory of one other nice 20^th century English poet, W. H. Auden, who additionally wrote a poignant line about love and demise, “We should love each other or die.”

Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939“—with its apparent reference to the start of World Battle II—begins like this:

I sit in one of many dives
On Fifty-second Road
Unsure and afraid
Because the intelligent hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and worry
Flow into over the intense
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our personal lives;
The unmentionable odour of demise
Offends the September night time.

And the poem initially had this penultimate stanza:

All I’ve is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie within the mind
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There isn’t any such factor because the State
And nobody exists alone;
Starvation permits no alternative
To the citizen or the police;
We should love each other or die.

Auden famously turned against this stanzas closing line, omitting it when the poem was reprinted in Collected Poems (1945). He later wrote that he loathed the poem, resolving to exclude it from additional collections, refusing to grant permission that it’s reprinted, and calling the poem “trash which he’s ashamed to have written.” He ultimately allowed the poem to be included in a set, however solely after altering the road to learn: “We should love each other and die.”

Clearly the unique sentiment—we should love each other or die—means that love may save us from battle, and even conquer demise. The revised model—we should love each other and die—expresses an existential sentiment. We will love, nevertheless it makes no distinction, for all of us die. Life is finally tragedy.

I’m not positive why Auden turned in opposition to the road so vehemently and publicly. Possibly he was embarrassed by its emotional earnestness or ashamed of such a public show of sentiment. But the road as initially written is not less than partly true—except we develop into extra altruistic, we are going to destroy ourselves. However can we go additional and say that love conquers demise? Right here we have now no solutions, we solely have hope.

The hope that traces of our love will reverberate by way of time, in ripples and waves that can at some point attain peaceable shores now unbeknownst to us.