CERTIFICATE
Dr. Ashok Kumar Mohapatra
Professor in English
Department of English
Sambalpur Univresity
This is to certify that Shri Ajaya Kumar Panda bearing Regd. No.
08/2006/English, Ph.D of Sambalpur University has submitted his Ph.D thesis entitled “Style
as Meaning: A Stylistic Analysis of W.H.Auden’s Poems”, which he wrote under my
guidance. The work is the result of his sincere effort and it is original to the best of my
knowledge and belief.
Ashok Kumar Mohapatra
Professor
Deptt.of English
Sambalpur University
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I thank Professor Dr. Ashok Kumar Mohapatra for his invaluable guidance on almost
everything. I benefitted enormously from his nurturing comments and directives without
which this thesis would not have been completed. The idea of writing a nuclear chapter about
style and stylistic analysis of W H Auden’s poems was entirely his. I am also indebted to him
for his bearing with me throughout and I wish only that there were more space to go into
more details about his help and perseverance.
I am also grateful to the Librarian of English and Foreign Language University,
Hyderabad for his kind help and cooperation in collecting study material for the purpose of
giving this thesis of mine a final shape.
My thanks go also to those who kindled in me the ambition and love of learning and
studying since my childhood and to those who boosted and helped me throughout.
Finally, my gratitude goes to my long-suffering wife Geetanjali for supporting me at
every stage of my work.
Ajaya Kumar Panda
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Page
Certificate
i
Acknowledgment
ii
Chapter I:
Style and Meaning in Stylistic Analysis
1-27
1.1. Introduction
1
1.2. Style
1
1.3. Stylistics
8
1.4. Approaches to Stylistic Analysis
11
1.5. Levels of Stylistic Analysis
13
1.6. Elements in Stylistic Analysis
15
1.6.1. Lexico- Syntactic Pattern
15
1.6.2. Lexico Syntactic Choices
16
1.6.3. Phonological Devices
18
1.6.4. Graphological Devices
19
1.6.5. Morphological Devices
19
1.7. Stylistic Analysis and Literary Criticism
20
1.8. Pedagogical Application of Stylistics: Theoretical Issue
23
1.9. Methodology
25
1.10. Plan for the Chapters
27
Chapter II:
Major Aspects of Auden’s Poetry
28 - 68
2.1. A Brief Introduction of W.H. Auden
28
2.2. Literature Review of Auden’s Poems
29
2.3. Themes of Auden’s Poetry
33
2.3.1. Theme of war
`
35
2.3.2. Rejection of Convention
37
2.3.3. Human Suffering
38
2.3.4. Religious Themes
41
2.3.5. Auden’s Love for Art
45
2.3.6. Significance of Love
46
2.3.7. Loss of Human Values
50
2.3.8. Theme of Death
50
2.4. The Style of Auden
53
2.4.1. Components of Auden’s Style
55
2.4.1.1. Diction
55
2.4.1.2. Imagery
56
2.4.1.3. Symbols
61
2.4.1.4. Rhetorical Devices
64
2.4.1.5. Traditional Verse from-Meters/Subjects, People and Places
64
2.4.1.6. Allegorical Devices
66
2.4.1.7. Use of Adjectives
66
2.5. Conclusion
67
Chapter III:
Lexis As Style
69 - 105
3.1. Introduction
69
3.2. An Overview on the Lexis as Style in Poems by W.H.Auden
72
3.2.1. The Use of Adjectives
73
3.2.2. Use of Archaic Words
73
3.2.3. Use of Rhetorical Device
74
3.3. Lexical Analysis of Auden’s Poems
75
3.3.1. O Where Are You Going?
75
3.3.2. Who’s Who
80
3.3.3. Funeral Blues
85
3.3.4. Mundus et Infans
89
3.3.5. As I Walked out One Evening
94
3.3.6. Canzone
100
Chapter IV:
Sound Pattern As Style
106 - 157
4.1. Introduction
106
4.2. An Overview on the Sound Pattern as Style in Poem by W.H. Auden
118
4.3. Analysis of Sound Pattern
124
4.3.1.O Where are You Going?
124
4.3.2. On This Island
126
4.3.3. Musee des Beaux Arts
129
4.3.4. The cross Roads
133
4.3.5. Refugee Blues
136
4.3.6. If I Could Tell You
141
4.3.7 The More Loving One
146
4.3.8. River Profile
150
Chapter V:
Syntax As Style
158 - 206
5.1 Introduction
158
5.2 Syntactical Analysis
165
5.2.1 That Night When Joy Began
165
5.2.2 Spain -1937
170
5.2.3 In Memory of W.B. Yeats
179
5.2.4 The Unknown Citizen
185
5.2.5 If I Could Tell You
192
5.2.6 The Shield of Achilles
197
Conclusion
207
Select Bibliography
208 – 222
Style and Meaning in Stylistic Analysis
1.1 Introduction
Despite centuries of valiant intellectual effort, style has remained an elusive concept.
It is, as Enkvist puts it, “as common as it is elusive. Most of us speak about it even lovingly,
though few of us are willing to say precisely what it means”(1973:11). Every age, and every
school of criticism, has tried to understand and define the problem of style within its own
parameters, ranging from viewing it as the moulding of the message, to identifying it with th
e author, to rejecting it in part and in toto, to regarding it as a choice and a substantial
determiner and component of meaning, but as Chatman and Levin point out, it has been
“impossible to define in a way that would command it Universal assent”(1967:337).
1.2 Style
Some of the earliest significant treatment of style occurs in the discussion of classical rhetoric
in writings of Aristotle and Quintilian. This tradition views style as persuasion, as a set of
devices to be used according to the occasion and the subject of discourse to produce the right
kind of effect on the listener or the reader. Another classical assumption regarding style is
that it is an ornament of dress of thought. The theoretical assumption underlying this view is
that form and content are separable, and that style consists in giving a pre-existing thought,
an elegant verbal shape. This split between form and content was opposed by people like
Coleridge who held the view that in a work of art both form and content were fused into an
invisible organic unity. Another view which has exercised a strong influence on the modern
mind is the theory of style as meaning advanced by W. K. Wimsatt. For him style is a
function of the selection and arrangement of words, and since words are units of meaning,
style and meaning become inseparable. According to Wimsatt style is “the furthest
elaboration of the one concept that is the centre” (1967:235).
The problem with all these traditional definitions of style is that they are either too
diffused or vague and consequently of not much practical use in the study of style. Further,
all these definitions, in relation to classical notion of style, underscore conformity with
established principles of genre, modes of narration, imagery, phonic patterns and so on. We
know of Attic, Doric, Ionic literary styles of literary communication in classical Greek
literature in the western tradition and Gandhara, Lati, Panchala styles of literary
communication in the ancient Sanskrit tradition. These designate style as a taxonomic
category of collective norm, in conformity with which literary compositions were to be
carried out.
However, style as a concept of the distinctiveness of expression, unique creative
power of an individual is a relatively modern. Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, the
18th century French naturalist and mathematician is one of the earliest proponents of style in
its modern sense when he said before the Académie Française in 1753 in his Discours sur le
style ("Discourse on Style") that “the style is the man himself" ("le style c'est l'homme
même"). He said that style consisting in one’s writing expresses the writer’s individuality of
thinking and expression, and his soul and taste as well. In the modern sense style becomes
less a taxonomic, and normative idea entailing conformity and more an idea of an
individual’s distinctiveness in conceptualizing and executing an art form that involves
deviation from the norm.
It is the distinctiveness of language and culture and a synchronic study of them which
became the focus of Structuralism. In tandem with structuralist theories of language and
culture more adequate models of linguistic description, and analytical tools of structure were
developed by structural linguistics, with greater attempt made to place the study of style in a
more objective basis through the use of certain analytical techniques. In this new approach
the influence exercised by the textual criticism of I.A. Richards and New Criticism of
Ransom, Empson, Allen Tate and Cleanth Brooks have been of paramount importance. The
New critics believed that a poem should be interpreted only in terms of its formal features,
the verbal clues that the text provides. It is in its insistence on the primacy of the text, on a
close reading of the linguistic features, that New Criticism anticipated the scientific nature of
modern stylistics and paved the way for its emergence. The most significant thing about
modern stylistics is that the new, analytical methods of linguistics have been adopted with a
view to provide a precise and adequate description of the language of a given text. The
discipline of stylistics assumes that style is a function of the textual features. What a reader
senses as style is the effect created by the linguistic structures used by the writer and their
deployment within the work. Therefore, an analysis of formal features will yield interesting
facts about a writer’s style. It is in the analysis of the formal features of the text that
linguistics comes to the help of stylistics. To understand what a writer is doing with language,
we need a description of the system itself by reference to which we may identify and
understand an individual’s use of language. Linguistics provides stylistics with the theoretical
framework and analytical tools it needs for studying a writer’s style. The application of
linguistics to stylistic studies is stressed by Sol Saporta when he says that “stylistics is in
some way dependant on linguistics, since style can not be clearly defined without reference to
grammar” (1960:93). Literature, whatever it may be, is language first; therefore the methods
of linguistics may be advantageously used to understand the formal patterning of language.
Though stylistics helps to arrive at an objective description of the literary use of
language, it can not be said that stylistics has solved all the problems of literary analysis. Far
from it, for there are still many unsolved problems. No universally acceptable definition of
style has yet been evolved and in actual practice objectivity is sometimes compromised for
the sake of interpretation. While all this is true, it can not be denied that stylistics has
provided the student of literature with the theoretical framework and analytical tools he needs
for studying a writer’s style.
Stylistics came to be accepted as a discipline in its own right more or less after the
publication of the book Style in Language (1960). New definitions of style have been
formulated which are formal in nature and permit an objective analysis of textual features. Of
all the modern approaches to the study of style, the theory of style as choice has made a farreaching impact in the field of stylistics. The problem of style and the logic of applying
Transformational Generative Grammar (T.G.G.) to the study of style have been succinctly
stated by Richard Ohmann. He writes, “The idea of style implies that words on a page might
have been different or differently arranged without a corresponding difference in substance.
Another writer would have said it another way. For the idea of style to apply, in short, writing
must involve choice of verbal formulation”(1970:264). Using the model developed by
Chomsky, wherein a sentence is captured at two levels, namely the deep structure and the
surface structure, it has been suggested that a writer’s style is constituted by the optional
transformations he consistently and characteristically favours. Richard Ohmann also views
style in more or less similar terms, but he has added a dimension of philosophical depth by
defining style as “epistemic choice” (1972:43). Patterns of language reflect pattern of
thought; stylistic preferences are cognitive preferences. A writer’s style will, therefore, reflect
his attitudes and ideas the way he seeks to order and organize experience. Ohmann’s stylistic
study of Shaw is a pioneering effort in this direction. Through his study of Shaw and
Victorian prose writers, Ohmann has found in the notion of optional transformation an
effective way to formalize the notion of style as choice.
Along with the notion of style as choice, the theory of style as deviation is one of the
most popular approaches to the study of style. An author’s style is said to be deviant when it
differs from the ordinary use of language in certain ways. A message is considered deviant
when it violates the rules of language or when it shows features not found else where. In
poetry, linguistic deviation is the most significant part of the message, which the reader
interprets by measuring (it) against the expected patterns of language. Dylan Thomas’s “a
grief ago”(1972:49) is a classical example of deviation. Here a noun denoting a psychological
condition is filled in a slot which is normally occupied by a temporal world.
The concept of style as deviation from the norm is similar to the concept of
foregrounding developed by Jan Mukarovsky in famous essay “Standard Language and
Poetic Language” (1970:40). By foregrounding he means deviation from linguistic or other
socially accepted norms. According to him “poetic language is an aesthetically purposeful
distortion of standard language”. The violation of the norm of the standard, its systematic
violation, is what makes possible the poetic utilization of language, without this there would
be no poetry” (Ibid: 42). He goes on to say, “the function of poetic language consists in the
maximum of foregrounding of the utterance” (Ibid: 42). The difficulty with this approach,
however, is that it is impossible to establish in quantitative terms the precise boundaries
between what is normal and what is deviant. The probability of establishing norms, which are
final and irrevocable, in a natural language seems dim, because as language keeps on
changing, what is a norm in one century and one period may cease to be a norm in another
century and another period.
The theory of style as poetic function or convergence of textual pattern has stemmed
in large part from Roman Jacobson’s famous dictum given in his closing statement of the
1958 Indiana Conference on style. “The poetic function projects the principles of equivalence
from the axis of selection into the axis of combination”(1960:358). The statement implies that
poetic language systematically exploits in its syntagmatic chain the properties that belong to
the members of a paradigmatic group. That is, the literary artist exploits the principles of
equivalence in sound, syntactic position and meaning in his selection of words at different
levels at different places in the syntagmatic chain.
Samuel Levin’s work “Linguistic Structures in Poetry”, in which he makes an attempt
to characterize the peculiar unity of language, is based on Jacobson’s comment. Using the
framework of Transformational Generative Grammar, Levin asserted that the concept of
coupling is crucial to poetic language. By coupling he means “the convergence of a pair of
semantically related elements and a pair of syntagmatic patterns” (1970:13). In his discussion
of extracts from Pope and of a Shakespearean sonnet, Levin demonstrates how the pattern of
semantically related words occurring in similar syntactic position is consistently repeated to
achieve poetic unity.
The notion of style being largely dependent on textual cohesion is found in the work
of M.A.K. Halliday and Geoffrey Leech. Halliday has characterized cohesion as a grouping
of descriptive categories organized around the lexical and grammatical means of unifying a
literary text through a network of sequential relationship. Geoffrey Leech’s analysis of Dylan
Thomas’s “This bread I break” emphasizes cohesion—the lexical and grammatical means
which the poet draws from standard language to unify the poem. Another significant
contribution of this school to the study of style is the note on lexical sets and collocations.
According to Spencer and Gregory, “the notion of “collocation” is set up to account for the
tendency of certain items of language to occur close to each other. Foe example, the item
‘economy’ is likely to occur in the same linguistic environment as items such as ‘affairs’,
‘policy’, ‘plan’, ‘programme’, ‘disaster’”(1970:78). They define a lexical set as a grouping of
items which have a similar range of collocation. This is an important concept in the study of
style because the creative writer often achieves some of his effects through the interaction
between usual and unusual collocations, and through the creation of new and therefore
stylistically significant collocations. Spencer and Gregory quote examples from Dylan
Thomas, such as, “a grief ago”, “all the Sun long” and “the heart print of man” as instances of
new collocation.
The statistical approach to the study of style is based on the assumption that “style is a
probabilistic concept” (1969:10). This theory which is derived from the information theory
and modern mathematics considers each linguistic unit as a sign, and on the basis of a
mathematical count based on a sample text predicts the probability of occurrence of a
linguistic item in the whole text. Statistical studies have proved most helpful and rewarding
in determining the question of unknown or disputed authorship. In her book “Style and
Proportion”, Josphine Miles, who was the first to use the counting technique on an extensive
scale, used the concept of the relative proportion of nouns, verbs and adjectives in a test for
characterizing style.
In the book Linguistic Perspectives on Literature edited by Ching, Haley and Lunsford,
(1980:85) we find there is grouping of the articles regarding style:
1) Style as choice: those that emphasize content as a constant and form as a variable
which alters only the effects and not the essence of ‘content’
2) Style as meaning: those that emphasize the contributions of ‘form’ to ‘content’ or
which believe that ‘form’ changes or even creates ‘content’.
3) Style as tension between meaning and form: those that emphasize the special meaning
or effect of style arising as a new synthesis from the dialect of “form/content”
interaction.
Thus we see that different scholars have defined the term ‘Style’ differently in their
own way. So it is difficult to arrive at a conclusion for a common definition. Therefore, it
would be wise on our part to use several theories and concepts, in so far as they suit our
purpose. Now I will move on to discuss stylistics and different approaches to stylistic
analysis.
1.3 Stylistics
Many attempts have been made by different scholars to define stylistics. To Freeman
(1971:1) “stylistics is a sub-discipline which started in the second half of the 20th century”. It
can be seen as a logical extension of moves within literary criticism early in the 20th century
to concentrate on studying texts, rather than authors.
To Leech and Short (1981:13) “Stylistics is simply defined as the (linguistic) study of
style, is rarely undertaken for its own sake, simply as an exercise in describing what use is
made of language”. They are also of the view that we normally study style because we want
to explain something, and in general, literary stylistics has, implicitly or explicitly, the goal of
explaining the relation between language and artistic function.
Short and Candlin are of the view that “stylistics is a linguistic approach to the study
of the literary texts. It thus embodies one essential part of the general course - philosophy;
that of combining language and literary study” (1989:183).
Widdowson defines stylistics as “the study of literary discourse from a linguistic
orientation” (1975:3). He holds the view that what distinguishes stylistics from literary
criticism on the one hand and linguistics on the other is that it is a means of linking the two.
He also proposes that stylistics occupies the middle ground between linguistics and literary
criticism and its function is to mediate between the two. In this role, its concerns necessarily
overlap with those of the two disciplines.
Carter is of the same view with Widdowson. He also believes that “stylistics is
essentially a bridge discipline between linguistics and literature and there are always
arguments about the design of the bridge, its purpose, the nature of the materials and about
the side it should be built from” (1988:161).
Stylistics, the study of the devices in languages (such as rhetorical figures and
syntactical patterns) is considered to produce expressive or literary style. Stylistics is,
therefore, a field or study that combines both literary criticism on the one hand and linguistics
on the other as its morphological make-up suggests: the “style” component relating it to
literary criticism and the ‘istics’ component to linguistics. Widdowson (1975:3) claims that
stylistics can serve as a means whereby literature and language as subjects can, by a process
of gradual approximation, move towards both linguistics and literary criticism, and also a
means whereby these disciplines can be pedagogically treated to yield different subjects.
He further suggests that stylistics can provide for the progression of a pupil from
either language or literature towards either literary criticism or linguistics. Carter (1988: 4)
proposes that practical stylistics is a process of literary text analysis which starts from a basic
assumption that the primary interpretative procedures used in the reading of a literary text are
linguistic procedures. He added that stylistics analysis can provide the means whereby the
study of literature can relate a piece of literary writing to his own experience of language and
so can extend that experience.
Carter (1988:10) sub-categorized it into 5 sections:
1. Linguistic Stylistics– In several respects, linguistic stylistics is the purest form of
stylistics in that its practitioners attempt to derive from the study of style and language
variation some refinement of models for the analysis of language and thus contribute
to the development of linguistic theory.
2. Literary Stylistics– A distinguishing feature here is the provision of a basis for
fuller understanding, appreciation and interpretation of avowedly literary texts.
Although a precision of analysis mode available by stylistic methods offers a
challenge to established methods of close reading or practical criticism of texts, the
procedures of literary stylistics remain traditional in character in spite of
developments in literary theory which challenge assumptions about the
role of language in depicting literary realities.
3. Style and Discourse – Work in stylistics within this category acknowledges that
style is not an exclusively literary phenomenon and addresses itself to the description
and characterization of stylistic effects in a wide range of discourse types. Fowler
(1986) calls it ‘linguistic criticism’.
4. Pedagogical Stylistics – There are a number of issues deriving from deep-rooted
divisions between linguistic and literary critics but which still require to be
considered; which emerge in the context of debates concerning the pedagogical
relevance of stylistics.
5. Stylistics and the foreign language learner – Perhaps because questions of language
and learning are more widely addressed in the domain of foreign language learning
than in the no less important area of mother tongue language development, issues of
pedagogy in relation to stylistics, literature and language study can be more easily
surveyed. However, there is a growing recognition that integration of language and
literature can be of mutual benefit in the context of foreign or second language
education and that a situation of literary education; conducted by exposure to a canon
of texts in English literature mainly through a method of lecture may be in need of
modification on a number of counts.
1.4 Approaches to Stylistic Analysis
There are different approaches to the analysis of styles of texts i.e there are various
ways/perspectives from which we can account for the analysis of texts. Lawal (1997) in his
own view identifies these factors as “approaches” while Babajide (2000) on his own part
defines them as “concepts”. The two of them however give similar points:
1. Style as personality/individuality – Style is a relational term: we talk about ‘the
style of x’ referring through “style” to characteristics of language use, and correlating
these with some extralinguistic x… Leech and Short believe that “traditionally, an
intimate connection has been seen between style and an author’s personality”
(1981:11). Deriving largely from “idiolect” – this largely prove that every individual
or person is unique in one way or the other.
2. Style as Choice from Variants – This approach is backed with the fact that every
phenomenon has many possible alternatives that form the variants. It constitutes
selection from a total linguistic repertoire. Each individual has the right to choose
from the available possibilities that which is appropriate and fits in to his work. This
approach is usually prominent in paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations among
linguistic elements.
3. Style as deviation from the norm – Language is a behavior governed by rules and
norms. When something is done in a quite different way from how it is usually done,
then that is said to be a deviation from the norm. This is achieved by reconstruction
from the structural resource of language to extend the frontiers of current usages. This
concept is most common at both the lexical and the syntactic level and used mostly
for effective communication.
4. Style as situation or relationship between message and medium – Language use
does not occur in a vacuum, the message and medium are always of importance. The
medium can be formal or informal, spoken or written and so on. Different language
use is determined by the different context of operation. In other words, there are
variations in language use. For example, the kind of language used in the court room
will be different from the one used in the classroom and so on. By and large it is
obvious that the concept of medium and message is indispensable in stylistics.
5. Style as a temporal phenomenon – According to Babajide (2000) style changes as
nothing in life is static abreast of time. Therefore style can be referred to as being old
or new, in or out of vogue, modern or ancient. There are features for certain periods,
thus language style changes according to time, and style is recognized by the
predominant features of the period. In the language world, there are Chaucerian and
classical time, differentiated by features. Old English, Middle English and Modern
English periods, Elizabethan, Victorian and Renaissance age with peculiar features
(literary and linguistic).
Using any of these approaches explained above, stylistic analysis could be conducted
by means of the levels of analysis. I, therefore, explain briefly the levels of stylistic analysis
and the elements under them.
1.5 Levels of Stylistic Analysis
The levels of stylistics analysis are identified as:
1. Graphology- According to Crystal and Davy, as cited in Alabi (2007: 170),
“Graphology is the analogous study of a languages writing system or orthography as
seen in the various kinds of handwriting or topography” (1969:18). Leech believes
that graphology transcends orthography. “It refers to the whole writing system:
punctuation and paragraphing as well as spacing” (1969:39). Alabi (2007:170) added
that a graphological discussion of style among other features entails the foregrounding
of quotation marks, ellipses periods, hyphens, contracted forms, special structures, the
full stop, the colon, the comma, the semicolon, the question mark, the dash, lower
case letters, gothic and bold prints, capitalization, small print, spacing, italics etc.
2. Phonology – Ofuya is of the view that “phonology describes the ways in which
speech sounds are organized in English into a system” (2007:14). Lodge believes that
“phonology is the study of linguistic systems, specifically the way in which sound
represents differences of meaning in a language” (2009:8). Phonology in stylistics
usually deals with analyzing sound patterns in a piece, the systemic use of sounds to
form words and utterances in language. Phonological devices are obtained through the
repetition exhibited, for example, in rhyme, elements of alliteration, consonance,
assonance and phonaesthesia etc.
3. Morphology – Mark and Kirsten say “Morphology refers to the mental system
involved in word formation or to the branch of linguistics that deals with words, their
internal structure, and how they are formed” (2005:1). Morphological level of
analysis is concerned with word formation processes subjected to specific conditions
and rules of the processes of affixation – the prefix, suffix and the root words,
coining, back formation etc.
4. Lexico-Syntax – This is a word formed by the combination of two different words
“Lexis” and “syntax”. Lexis is the total vocabularies that make up a language or the
body of words known and used by a particular person. Syntax, according to
Tallerman, means “Sentence construction: how words group together to make phrases
and sentences” (1998:1). It is also used to mean the study of the syntactic properties
of languages; in this sense it is used in the same way as we use ‘stylistics’ to mean the
study of literary style. Lexico-Syntactic patterns may be obtained through various
means which include unusual or inverted word order, omission of words and
repetition. Lexico-Syntactic choices are obtained through devices such as piling of
usual collocates, unusual collocates, archaic words, particular parts of speech,
metaphor, simile, oxymoron etc.
1.6 Elements in Stylistic Analysis
The elements under each of the levels of analysis mentioned above are discussed
briefly below:
1.6.1 Lexico-Syntactic Patterns
Lexici-syntatic patterns include:
1. Anastrophe – Alabi says “anastrophe is the inversion of the natural or usual word
order” (2007:163). The use of anastrophe secures emphasis and focuses the
readers’/hearers’ attention.
2. Parenthesis – According to Alabi, “it entails the insertion of some verbal unit (extra
information, and after thought or a comment) in a position that interrupts the normal
syntactical glow of the sentence” (2007:163).
3. Ellipsis – Alabi cites that “Ellipsis entails the deliberate omission of a word or
words, which are readily implied by the content: It is used to create brevity
reemphasis or ambiguity” (2007:163).
4. Asyndeton – This is the deliberate omission of conjunctions between a series of
related clauses. Asyndeton produces a hurried rhythm in the sentence. Corbett cites
Aristotle’s observation that “asyndeton was especially appropriate for the conclusion
of a discourse, because there, perhaps more than in other places in the discourse, we
may want to produce the emotional reaction that can be stirred by, among other
means, rhythm” (1971:470).
5. Anaphora – Alabi cites that “it entails the repetition of the same word or phrase at
the beginnings of successive stages of the chosen pattern” (2007:164). The repetition
of the words helps to establish a marked rhythm in the sequence of clauses, this
scheme is usually reserved for those passages where the author wants to produce a
strong emotional effects.
6. Epizeuxis – According to Alabi, epizeuxis repeats a word or phrase without any
break at all (2007:165).
1.6.2 Lexico-Syntactic Choices
Lexico- syntactic choices include:
7. Pun- Alabi says that “Pun is the genetic name for the figures which play on words”
(2007:167). It is a figurative expression in which a speaker plays on a word or phrase
to suggest double meanings. A speaker may also play on two or more semantically
different but orthographically or phonologically similar words to construct a thought –
provoking statement. It is often employed to display linguistic process or verbal
dexterity and ultimately entertain the audience.
8. Anthimeria – In the words of Alabi “this is the substitution of one part of speech for
another i.e. employing a part of speech in a sentence or a group of words instead of
another”(2007:168).
9. Periphrasis (antonomasia) – Alabi (2007:168) says ‘This is the substitution of a
descriptive word or a phrase for a proper name or of a proper name for a quality
associated with the name’. It can also be described as an expression in which a
celebrated person, event or place is used to represent another person, place or event as
a result of a similar quality present in them.
10. Hyperbole – Alabi cites, “this is the use of exaggerated words, a figurative
expression in which a fact or a situation is blown out of proportion” (2007:168). It is
an overstatement of a fact in the course of emphasizing it or as a result of over
enthusiasm for it. Hyperbole gives emphasis or produces humour.
11. Personification – This invests abstractions or inanimate object with human
qualities. In other words, a quality associated with man is given to a nonliving
phenomenon thereby making it look like a person. It is also called prosopoeia and
personification stirs the emotion.
12. Paradox – Alabi says, “This is a seemingly contradictory statement, which
happens to be true” (2007:168). Paradox is a kind of expanded oxymoron. It is also an
expression which is obviously absurd or unreasonable but will become logical or
reasonable on a closer look or a deeper thought.
13. Synecdoche – Alabi (2007:167) believes that this is the employment of a part of
the referent to stand for the whole or vice versa.
14. Oxymoron – According to Alabi (2007:168), “This is a figure of speech in which
two contradicting words are placed side by side in a statement thereby making it
sound self contradicting. In other words oxymoron yokes two terms which are
ordinarily contradictory”.
15. Simile and Metaphor – Alabi (2007:167) believes that both the metaphor and the
simile are related to the topic of similarity, for although the comparison is made
between two words of unlike nature. Metaphor gives clearness and liveliness to
words.
16. Archaic or difficult words – Alabi (2007:166) says “This is used to show level of
education or social accomplishment, they are attention focusing.”
17. Synonyms, hyponyms are part of lexical means of achieving cohesion in
discourse. They are means of unifying the discourse.
18. Parts of Speech – The deliberate preponderant choice of particular parts of speech
in discourse sometimes give precise and accurate descriptions, precision and intensify
meaning. They are means of achieving cohesion in discourse.
1.6.3 Phonological Devices
Phonological devices include:
19. Rhyme elements – According to Abrams, the Standard English rhyme “consists in
rhyming words, of the last stressed vowel and of all the speech sounds following that
vowel” (1981:163). End rhymes occur at the end of a verse-line while internal rhymes
occur within a verse-line.
20. Alliteration – This is generally taken to be the repetition of the initial consonant in
two or more adjacent words.
21. Consonance – Consonance is a half rhyme in which final consonants are
repeated but with different preceding vowels.
22. Assonance –Assonance is also a half rhyme realized by repeating the same
(stressed) vowel but with different final consonant in a sequence of nearby words.
23. Phonaesthesia (secondary onomatopoeia) are those sounds, which are felt to be
appropriate to the meaning of their words. The repetition of sounds of words helps in
linking related words to reinforce meaning. It provides tone and musical colour and it
aids memorability
1.6.4 Graphological Devices
Graphological devices include:
24. Punctuation – These are marks used in writing that divide sentences and phrases.
It is also the system of using the punctuation marks.
25. Paragraphing – Paragraph involve a section of a piece of writing, usually
consisting of several sentences dealing with a single subject. The first sentence of a
paragraph starts on a new line.
1.6.5 Morphological devices
Morphological devices include:
26. Compounding – In the works of Osundare (1983:28), cited in Alabi (2007:166),
he asserts that “Soyinka employs compounds in a way that boosts the baffling
compactness of his work”. What Soyinka collapses into compounds i.e. simple
compounds (Unhyphenated or hyphenated) or multiple compounds are shown to be
potentially longer expressions and structures.
27. Affixes – This is a process of forming new words by putting certain morphemes
before some words, while adding certain morphemes after some others i.e. prefix and
suffix respectively. We have two popular types of morphological operations
(affixation) in English which are inflection and derivational. Inflected forms of
English words are variants of one and the same word. Inflecting a word does not
necessarily cause it to change its category. A derivational suffix is a morpheme that
usually changes the class of a word to which it is added.
28. Coinages – These are words created from existing word. It is a process of forming
new words through the already existing ones.
The above discussed elements will form the basis of the analysis in the next chapters.
Now I will move on to discuss the relation between stylistic analysis and literary criticism.
1.7 Stylistic Analysis and Literary Criticism
Peter Verdonk (2002:6) in the analysis of the headline found that style does not arise
out of a vacuum but that its production, purpose, and effect are deeply embedded in the
particular context in which both the writer and the reader of the headline play their distinctive
roles. He also says that we should distinguish between two types of context: linguistic and
non-linguistic context. Linguistic context refers to the surrounding features of language inside
a text, like the typography, sounds, words, phrases, and sentences, which are relevant to the
interpretation of other such linguistic elements. Furthermore, he believes that the nonlinguistic context is a much more complex notion since it may include any number of textexternal features influencing the language and style of a text. Analysis in stylistics, therefore
involves a range of general language qualities, which include diction, sentence patterns,
structure and variety, paragraph structure, imagery, repetition, emphasis, arrangement of
ideas and other cohesive devices. Stylistics, Literary Criticism and Practical Criticism have
certain things in common. Stylistics studies and describes the formal features of the text, that
is, the levels of expression vis-à-vis the content, thus bringing out their functional
significance for the interpretation of the work. The stylistician may rely on his intuition and
interpretative skills just as the literary critic, but the former tries to keep at bay, vague and
impressionistic judgment (Chukwuma Nnadi2010: 35).According to what is mentioned
above, it can be concluded that both subjective and objective evidences are used by the
stylistician. Subjective evidence relates to the stylistician’s intuitions and interpretive skills
(in this aspect, as mentioned above, there is a similarity between a literary critic and
stylistician).Objective evidence comes from investigating the form of the language in a text
and here there is no room for intuition and this objective evidence can be considered a basis
which prevents from vague and incorrect interpretations .Here, the confusion between the
terms linguistic stylistics and literary stylistics should be removed. A definition of these terms
provided by Chukwuma Nnadi can remove this confusion:
Stylistics is the scientific study of style. Any such study that leans heavily on external
correlates with none or just a smattering of attention to the ‘rules guiding the
operation of the language’ can be regarded as literary stylistics. The converse of this
premise (i.e. a study that relies heavily on the rules guiding the operation of the
language in the explication of a literary text) is what we regard here as linguistic
stylistics.(2010:36)
Therefore, we have two types of stylistics: literary and linguistic stylistics. To make a
judgment about something, we need different evidences. As far as a literary text is concerned,
two evidences, internal and external evidence, can help us to come to an appropriate
interpretation of a text. Therefore, to interpret a text stylistically both external and internal
evidence are needed. According to the definition provided above by Chukwuma Nnadi, the
literary stylistics can take the form of external evidence and the linguistics study can take the
form of internal evidence .In sum, both literary and linguistic stylistics should be considered
for the process of stylistic analysis to come to a stylistically appropriate interpretation.
Furthermore, Enkvist (1973: 92) observes that linguistic stylistics differs from literary
criticism where brilliant intuitions and elegant, often metaphoric, verbalizations of subjective
responses are at a premium.
Stanley E. Fish’s article “What is Stylistics and why are they Saying such Terrible
Things about it?” in Essays in Modern Stylistics (1981) says:
Stylistics was born of a reaction to the subjectivity and imprecision of literary studies.
For the appreciative raptures of the impressionistic critic, stylisticians purport to
substitute precise and rigorous linguistic descriptions, and to proceed from those
descriptions to interpretations for which they claim a measure of objectivity.
Stylistics, in short, is an attempt to put criticism on a scientific basis. (33)
Generally speaking, both linguistic stylistics and literary criticism are concerned with
the quest for matter and manner in a literary work of art. Like literary criticism, stylistics is
interested in the message of the work, and how effectively it is delivered. Both linguistic
stylistics and literary criticism rigorously analyze and synthesize a work of art with a
common aim of presenting both the merits and the demerits of the work, and in so doing,
elucidate the work. In spite of such common factor existing between linguistic stylistics and
literary criticism, one finds that there lies a difference in their modus operandi, and
consequently a difference in their evaluations. Whereas linguistic stylistics begins and
concludes its analysis and synthesis from the literary text itself, rigorously examining how a
special configuration of language has been used in the realization of a particular subject
matter, quantifying all the linguistic means (including imagery) that coalesced to achieve a
special aesthetic purpose; literary criticism does not suffer that restriction to the work of art
under analysis. In its own analysis, it intermittently works on the text, but occasionally
wanders off and brings in extra-linguistic, extra-textual material (may be from philosophy,
psychology, biography, social history, etc.) to bear on the work. The result is that, whereas
linguistic stylistics comes up with a somewhat objective evaluation, based on realistic
criteria; literary criticism comes up with that which is generally imaginative, speculative,
subjective, and impressionistic ( Chukwuma Nnadi 2010:30).
Finally, here lies the major difference between linguistic stylistics and literary
criticism – a point more lucidly corroborated by Leech and Short (1995) while discussing
“Style, Text and Frequency”:
Aesthetic terms used in the discussion of style (urbane, curt, exuberant, florid, lucid,
plain, vigorous, etc.) are not directly referable to any observable linguistic features of
texts, and one of the long-term aims of stylistics must be to see how far such
descriptions can be justified in terms of descriptions of a more linguistic kind. The
more a critic wishes to substantiate what he says about style, the more he will need to
point to the linguistic evidence of texts; and linguistic evidence, to be firm, must be
couched in terms of numerical frequency…. So, quantitative stylistics on the one
hand… may provide confirmation for the ‘hunches’ or insights we have about style.
On the other, it may bring to light significant features of style which would otherwise
have been overloaded, and so lead to further insights; but only in a limited sense does
it provide an objective measurement of style. Moreover, the role of quantification
depends on how necessary it is to prove one’s point… intuition has a respectable
place both in linguistics and criticism. ( 46-47)
1.8 Pedagogical Application of Stylistics: Theoretical Issues
The aim of the application of stylistics, the language-based approach, in teaching
literary texts for the non-native students is multiple. A central issue is to help students to
develop their response to these texts, for response is the cornerstone of making anything at all
from them. This target is put forwards by stylisticians like Widdowson, Brumfit, Carter,
Short, Trengove Candlin and others. It is by developing the students' abilities to respond
effectively that they can have a genuine access to what they read and will be able to enjoy it
and gain knowledge and experience from it.
Another principal objective of teaching literary texts is to develop the students'
literary competence to assist them in achieving more positive response to, and effective
interaction with texts.
The third vital goal of this kind of teaching is to develop the students' skills and
capacities of experiencing the world created by and within the literary text. It is a
development of all kinds of their potential abilities necessary for them to read, understand
and respond to literary works via language.
The fourth aim is to further and sharpen the students' awareness of the stylistic
patterning of language, which they will put to extended use in non-literary texts. This will be
helpful in the gradual and simultaneous elimination of their prejudices against non-literary
language and of their elevation of literary language. It is a fact that the non-native students
rate literary language highly more than the native students. The result of that is the inevitable
demotion and misconception of the non-literary by regarding it as incompatible with the
literary. This, what may be called Polarisation Fallacy, has proved to be insufficient, as many
contemporary stylisticians like Fish, Leech, Nash, Carter, Fowler, Short and several others
have confirmed. Unfortunately, this fallacy has so far been given a short shrift in non-native
students' classes. I, therefore, would urge teachers of literary stylistics overseas to give it
more attention than they are doing now. Its potential peril is the widening of the gap between
the literary and the non-literary by making them rivals, which harms the process of teaching
and response .
The fifth and last, but by no means the least, objective of teaching English literary
material in terms of a stylistic approach is the tightening of links between students and
literature, making reading literary texts their unwavering practice, or, as Brumfit and Carter
(1986: introd. ) put it, making them into serious readers. And that is a very important aim, for
without having serious readers, literary texts will be thrown into the dark. We do not want
them to be transformed into dull textbooks, serving a cheap, commercial academic end of
granting school and university qualifications. So what we must do, as Brumfit declares, is to
try to make students retain a close constant contact with literature, which goes beyond the
academic purposes and school and university days (In Brumfit and Carter, op. cit. 237,260).
1.9 Methodology
The difficulty with all the trends outlined above, as with the traditional approaches to
the study of style, is that they focus on one aspect while neglecting the other. The difficulty
with the theory of style as choice is that it has no method for handling lexical choices and the
symbolic dimension of language. When style becomes a matter of choice, it restricts the
readers from getting maximum pleasure out of the work. The poem becomes a rigid fact
thrown at the readers. Reader’s participation is negligible in case of “style as choice” as there
is a clear demarcation between syntax and semantics. The problem with the “style as
deviation” theory is that it is capable of explaining only one aspect of style. In case of “style
as tension” between meaning and form, an alien world is created beyond the reach of
maximum readers. In short, each theory has its own advantages and disadvantages. However,
the available theoretical apparatus does help one to gain new insights into the study and
interpretation of literary texts. Therefore, in the fluid state of the present day stylistics the
right thing, perhaps, would be to make a pragmatic approach to the stylistic analysis in hand.
Although this introductory chapter offers taxonomic and theoretical information about
stylistics that does not mean that all the categorical features of syntax, lexis and phonetics
with regard to Auden’s poems have to be described. Stylistics is interpretive, not descriptive.
As the title makes it amply clear, style is an interpretive clue, which can be followed at
various levels of language. The task in hand is to interpret Auden’s poems and mediate
between linguistic analysis and literary interpretation. In pursuance of this objective, I have
chosen to take those poems of Auden that are significant both from the critical point of view
as well as stylistic point of view. For example, poems containing significant syntactic
features that seem to contain interpretive clues have been chosen for syntactic analysis.
Similarly, the poems for lexical analysis and phonetic analysis have been chosen because
these have relatively important lexical and phonetic features.
For analysis care has also been taken to choose poems that represent different phases
of Auden’s poetry, given the fact that his career spanned a little less than half a century
(1927-1973)
Since the objective of the dissertation is to interpret and also evaluate Auden’s
poetry, it becomes imperative that the poems that are stylistically significant ought to be
representatives of his literary themes, stanza forms, meter etc. However, much is missed in
the process. Out of 400 poems, which Auden wrote, not to mention his operas and plays, I
have only taken 20, which is a very small sample of a huge corpus. And yet, sampling is all
about choosing a few objects as data out of so many for analysis, and it is a standard principle
of the process of knowledge production. I have been thoughtfully selective about my data,
adopting the criteria I mentioned just now.
In order to keep in diachronic perspective the rich poetic output of Auden I have
sequenced the poems for analysis in chronological order. Such ordering helps one understand
the broad patterns of change in the poetic forms and themes of Auden. Thus, the analysis that
follows has been based on a close reading of the text, without any reference to extraneous
factors such as the poet’s biography or background.
1.10. Plan for the Chapters
The prominent linguistic items of the poems have been examined under the heads of
Lexis, Syntax and Sound Pattern (Phonetics). The poems that have been chosen for stylistic
analysis under the heads of Lexis, Syntax and Sound pattern are well thought out.
In this work of mine, I have divided the whole thesis into five chapters. Chapter I is
an introduction to style and stylistics. It has been entitled “Style and Meaning in Stylistic
Analysis”.
Chapter II bears the title “Major Aspects of Auden’s Poetry”. Here, with a brief
introduction to Auden and review of related literature, I shall move on to highlight the major
themes of Auden’s poetry.
In Chapter III, “Lexis as Style”, I shall analyze the lexis of six poems of Auden. Here
I shall show how lexis structures poetic meaning.
Chapter IV, under the title “Sound Pattern as Style”, is based on sound patterns and
how different supra- segmental sound features of metrical arrangements, line formations, and
rhythm inform the structural meaning.
Bearing the title “Syntax as Style”, Chapter V focuses on the phrasal and clausal aspects of
Auden’s poetry and analyses features of syntactic inversion, parallelism and deviation in so
far as these contribute to and explicate meaning of the poems.
***
Major Aspects of Auden’s Poetry
2.1 A Brief Introduction of W. H. Auden
Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) is one of the important poets in the 20th century.
He was the third son born on the 21st February, 1907, in York, the north of England. His
father was a physician and his mother a nurse. Both his parents were High Church Anglicans,
which had a great impact on Auden's beliefs in his later years. It can be said that Auden was
more like his father in his early stages, while he became more permanently like his mother.
Influenced and encouraged by his parents, Auden began his widely reading, which further
enhanced his interest in music - music with words. He referred science to poetry in his
childhood. However, when entering Oxford, he became zestful with the Anglo-Saxon poetry
and medieval poetry, so he felt that he should devote himself to poetry creation. After
graduation he went to Berlin to study the German literature. Back to Britain in 1930, he
began to teach at a middle school for five years. Though he was engaged in political and
social activities in the later 1930s, poetic creation never gets away from him. In 1937, he
visited Spain to support the antifascists where he wrote his famous poem “Spain”. During
1938, he travelled in China with Christopher Isherwood and witnessed the cruelty of the war,
which urged him to create a sonnet sequence “In Time of War”. They returned via the United
States where Auden made decision to live in after this experience. In 1939, he immigrated to
the United States. In 1940, he reconverted to Christianity and joined the Anglican
Communion. He became a naturalized American in 1946. During his stay in America, he had
taught in many universities and was even elected Professor of poetry at Oxford for five years
(1956-1960). He died in Vienna on September 29th, 1973 and buried in the churchyard in
Kirchstetten, a small village in Austria. There was a plaque in the Poet's corner of
Westminster Abbey which also commemorated his life.
As an important Anglo-American poet, Auden has a high reputation and great
influence on English poetry. Edward Mendelson describes him as "the most inclusive poet of
the twentieth century, its most technically skilled, and its most truthful" (1981: xxiii). Along
with his marvelous poetic creation, Auden finally turns himself as another excellent poet
following the generation of W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot. He is a prolific writer who publishes
in succession more than 10 volumes during his lifetime, which includes 12 collections of
short poems, ballads and songs, and 6 of long poems. His works involve many subjects such
as popular culture, current event and vernacular speech. Besides, he was also a great
playwright, librettist, editor, translator and essayist. The Times declared in 1973:
W. H. Auden, for long the enfant terrible of English poetry ... emerges finally as its
undisputed master. .. it was Auden above all who showed how the full range of
traditional forms could be received in the service of the kind of moral and social
realism that a world in crisis demanded, in this way he was in the vanguard of a
versatile and publicly accessible art (Carpenter, 1981: 454).
2.2 Literature Review of Auden's Poems
Auden is regarded as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. As a versatile and
creative poet, Auden always arouses interests of critics. Therefore, many scholars and critics
in western countries have studied him from different aspects. At the beginning of Auden's
poetry career he was given a lot of praise which was not relevant to the true nature of his
poetry; and he was "hailed as chief of peers of a group with a political plan, as a poetic
redeemer who could find and lead the way out of the 'Waste Land'" (Spears, 1964: 1). When
The Orators was published in 1932, many critics thought highly of it. However, when they
found that Auden was not what they wanted him to be, they began to criticize him harshly,
and they did more harshly when he immigrated to the United States and started to write
religious poetry. Critics often accused Auden of betraying his origins and regarded him as a
"Lost Leader" during the late Thirties and the Forties. His later work was also criticized
bitterly.
During the 1930s, critics evaluated his work and the intention conveyed by his work.
For the aesthetical-orientated critics, they discussed the techniques, the forms and the attitude
of his works. They discussed whether Auden's new poem could represent a new spirit that
could lead them out of the "Waste Land". For the political-orientated critics, they thought his
poems were revolutionary which represented the communism. For example, after Auden
published Poems in 1930, his detachment, clinical attitude and arbitrary qualities of his
poems aroused interests and then gained favorable criticism from the reviewers. They saluted
Auden as the forerunner of a long-awaited poetry which might surpass the unsatisfying views
of T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence, and the forerunner of a new psychological and political
mood. In spite of this, instead of commenting Auden and his works individually, critics
evaluated the Auden group as a whole which included Christopher Isherwood, Stephen
Spender, C. D. Lewis and so on. In 1932, the publication of The Orators consolidated
Auden's position as the new voice of that age. Radical, fiercely satirical, The Orators
represented whatever the political colour of the reviews. The Times commended that it "will
repay study as well for its original treatment of language as for its courageous - though often
bitter and cynical indictment of contemporary conditions" (Haffenden, 1983: 7). Left-wing
critics and propagandists had reasons to cast their hopes in Auden.
The year of 1939 was a turning point for Auden who decided to immigrate to the
United States and close his English chapter, which caused a great repercussion in Britain.
People did not comment him and his work of this period objectively due to the patriotism.
Therefore, critics not only regarded that Auden's new work were not as good as the old ones,
but criticized his personality and his beliefs. For instance, when the book Another Time came
out in 1939, it was criticized harshly. John Lehmann believes that Auden has removed
himself from "the possibility of writing the poetry of this war we are waiting for; as it is,
there seems to me a danger that a certain vagueness of phrase and a kind of beneficent
aloofness that is disturbing in much of Auden's recent work may increase" (Haffenden, 1983:
35), and Julian Symons felt pity that Auden had lost his gift with his disinvolvement.
Moreover, after Auden's immigration, his spiritual belief also changed, so critics began to
study his development and his ideologies. They considered that Auden shifted his beliefs
rapidly, irresponsibly and regarded his career as an inverted development. In 1941, Randall
Jarrell "revealed" the truth that Auden's ideologies was "more than a series of rationalization
of his own psychological peculiarities" (Spears, 1964:3), and through his analysis, the texture
of Auden's later verse was a constant degeneration of the earliest. Consequently, with Jarrel's
impact, there were more substantial indictments charged Auden untrustworthily. This trend
accumulated and reached the highest point in Joseph Warren Beach's The Making of the
Auden s Canon, a book in which he explained Auden's revisions of his early poems in terms
of changes of his ideas and beliefs.
However, as time went on, people gradually realized that Auden's later work actually
was worthy of reading. Some critics started to estimate the value of Auden again. In 1951,
Richard Hoggart, a famous British critic, wrote Auden: An introductory Essay, a book of the
first full-length study of Auden's work. Although his view of Auden's career was affected by
the hostile critics, he was the first person to give a neutral comment on Auden's immigration
and his later works. Later on, the books that claimed the right comments of Auden appeared
more. The critics tried to establish the central importance of Auden's poetry after his
immigration. Francois Duchene, in his book The Case of the Helmeted Airman, concluded by
praising "the powerful relevance of the comic vision and the scope of Auden's achievement in
re-rooting it in a new environment" (Haffenden, 1983: 54). Till recent years, more and more
monographs have appeared. For example, in 1981, Humphrey Carpenter wrote a book named
W. H. Auden: A Biography, which introduced the life and the creation background of Auden.
In 1998, John Fuller wrote another book W. H. Auden: A Commentary which gave detailed
explanations related to Auden. These books help a lot to understand the life, poetry and other
aspects of W. H. Auden. This is the whole study on W. H. Auden.
Nevertheless, the study of Auden's poetry from the angle of stylistics has been rarely
touched upon. There was no monograph about the style study on Auden's poetry at first.
Many critics introducing Auden and his poetry only mentioned his techniques and rhetoric
devices. Randall Jarrell's early essay on the development of Auden's style from 1930 to 1941,
Changes of Auden 's Attitude and Rhetoric in Auden's poetry was written in 1945. The second
half of this easy traced the shift in style which accompanied the change of Auden's
ideologies. Jarrell's summary of Auden's early style is quite valuable for he lists twenty-six
characteristics of Auden's poetic language, such as frequent omission of articles,
demonstrative adjectives, subjects and so on, which gives an accurate account of some of
Auden's early poems. Hoggart's Auden: An Introduction Essay discussed Auden's styles and
techniques in one chapter which was written in 1951. In that chapter, Hoggart analyzed some
general characteristics and meters of Auden's poetry. In 1979, Ronald Carter wrote his
dissertation-Towards a theory of discourse stylistics, which was a study of some applications
of linguistic theory to the analysis of poetry, with particular reference to W. H. Auden. This is
the first dissertation which studies Auden's poetry from the perspective of discourse stylistics
that the author of this paper could look for. In 2004, Christopher Lawson from Lancaster
University wrote his dissertation-Cognitive Stylistics: the Use of Cognitive Metaphor Theory
within W. H. Auden's As I Walked Out One Evening, which was devoted to the analysis of
Auden's poem “As I Walked Out One Evening” from the aspect of cognitive stylistics. In the
same year, in the book The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden, Peter Porter also
discussed Auden's language and style.
To sum up, due to many scholars' arduous work, the study of Auden in Europe gets
considerable achievements. However, there is still room for further study, such as cognitive
study on Auden's poems and so on. Therefore, this dissertation tries to study Auden's poems
in the stylistic perspective in order to supply a further explanation of his poetry.
2.3 Themes of Auden’s Poetry
W. H. Auden has been responsible for writing poetry that had more of the decade of
the 1930s, and it reflected through his poetry exactly what he saw around him. The poetry of
Auden elaborates on the travails and tribulations of the ordinary man. His poems reflected
people and their responses to the existing political scenario, their helplessness due to the
political conditions that they were ruled by and how it affected them. This totally refutes the
fact that he used poetry to promote his leftist leanings, though he did voice his leftist beliefs
through his poetry to a certain extent to reflect on the thought process of man. In fact, he
never used his poetry to engage in extolling the leftist theories, but it bordered on the
characters in the poems that had leftist inclinations. Nevertheless, his poetry did reflect his
perceptions on the ideologies of communism especially in the poetry written after 1928. It
was on a visit to Germany in 1928 which brought vast changes in his thinking, and his
thought process were more concerned with the psychological aspect of man combined with
the political influences of man. It is also believed that his poetry has also been a platform
from which he questioned the social order, the existing political ideologies and the modernity
in man. In fact he portrayed humanism in his poetry and this was the underlying ethos of the
poetry of his times. Besides humanism, his poetry dealt more with the mind of man,
especially man in that particular period in which social, political, economic and emotional
upheavals the country was passing through. For example in “Petition” he invokes for a
change of heart and also in “Miss Gee” he is satirically introducing to us his convictions on
the psychology of man.In “Petition” he says:
Sir, no man's enemy, forgiving all
But will his negative inversion, be prodigal:
Send to us power and light, a sovereign touch
Curing the intolerable neural itch, (line 1-4)
In “Miss Gee” he elaborates on the condition of man and uses the illness of the
modern era, i.e. cancer, to explain how the mind can become cancerous. What is extremely
endearing in the poem is the way Miss Gee is presented in the early stanzas. The poem begins
on a very charming note when Miss Gee is introduced and which goes on to become satirical
as we find the tragedy of an illness creep into the life of Miss Gee. The poet has used the
symbol of a lady to represent the society and the illness to be the illness that the society is
being afflicted with. Auden’s poetry showed intensity in the thought processes of man than in
the political conditions of the country. His political reflections were more to do with what it
did to the psychological aspect of man and its effect on mankind. Most of Auden’s poetry in
the initial stages reflects the psychological aspect of man, and not the political ideologies or
the general political environment that existed then. But the language that Auden used in the
poems was definitely politically motivated. When his first collection of poems was published
in 1930, it was after much editing, rejections and additions that it did get to see the light of
the day. And the second edition, after even more editing and changes, was published in 1933.
But once it was published, it established Auden to be one of the greatest poets in English
Literature. The beauty of the language and the novelty of design of the poems were unique at
that time and it brought a freshness to the world of literature in general and poetry in
particular.
2.3.1 Theme of War
One of the most popular themes of W. H. Auden’s poetry is war which was very
relevant at that time. Since war was the result of political upheavals around the world, the
poems too reflected on war with political undertones. It is very clear that Auden did not
reflect his own political leanings but he used the theme to reflect the condition of man in a
highly politicized society which was reeling in misery and strife due to war. His role as a
critic who took a very controversial viewpoint of war was evident in most of his poems,
especially in the beginning of his poetic years. His earlier poems spoke of the various wars
like the World Wars I and II, Spanish Civil War, and Communist revolution in Russia and the
tragic outcomes of wars. According to him, war gives birth to ills in the society and
sufferings for mankind, as he has reflected in poems like “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”, “Spain
1937” and “September 1, 1939”. His poems reveal the glory of the past in contrast to the
misery of the contemporary society and make these wars responsible for this deterioration in
society. “September 1, 1939” written on the eve of the World War II is all about the hostility
and the resentment towards war. The poem is an angry condemnation of the war and its
effects. The title itself is a satirical attack on the compromise that so shamefully brought
about harsh conditions of misery for the people. When he says, “Lost in the haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night”, he is voicing his own fears of the impending darkness of the
war. In “The Shield of Achilles” he exposes the desolation and the misery of the modern man
and compares it to the Greek civilization of the glorious past. He laments the disintegration of
moral values and the complete absence of religious beliefs in the society through poems like
“The Shield of Achilles”. Auden found a perfect platform to speak against war and its
repercussions in his poems and his poems reflected on the various wars that were fought then,
especially on the World War II. The dark cloud of the Second World War was hovering over
some of the great nations of Europe and the atmosphere was gearing up to face the great
tragedy that was to strike mankind around the world. Greatly influenced by Homer’s The
Iliad, the poem speaks of the world in which there is more of spirituality than the hatred of
war. It was at this time that he was writing the poem, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” an elegy to
the great poet W. B.Yeats whose influence is felt in almost all of Auden’s poems. Auden
didn’t let go of the opportunity to speak of the prevailing political situations around the
world. The poem itself is a reflection of one of the most famous poems by Yeats, “Easter
1911”. As he speaks of the greatness of Yeats as a poet and person, he also makes his cry
louder about the impending darkness that is to engulf Europe soon:
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate; (part III line 5-8)
His rather critical views on the rising political ideologies like Nazism and Fascism and the
dictatorship of Hitler were expressed in the poem in a rather disturbing way because it speaks
of the death of another contemporary poet. It also hits out at the chaotic political situation that
is the warning for the coming war. The rising insecurities of the impending war, the nation’s
vying with hatred towards each other to gain control and the loss of kinship among the people
brought a lot of pain and anguish to the poet. All this found expression in other war poems
like “Spain 1937”. The poem “Spain 1937”, speaks of the Spanish Civil war as a struggle that
swings between the past and the present and the varying political ideologies. The abundance
of the past and the destruction of that abundance in the present are set in a poem, which
includes the poet too, in all its condemnations of the condition. The poem transcends in time
not only from the beautiful description of Spain and the civilization that existed there to the
ugly and horrific changes brought about by the civil war but how those changes could be
overcome to regain the glory of the past in the future. The three stages of time, past, present
and future are amalgamated in the poem beautifully. The reader is inspired to take lessons
from the past in the present to beautify the future when the poet says:
On that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot
Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe;
On that tableland scored by rivers,
Our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our fever (line 65-68)
All his war poems, or poems written during the period of war, spoke not of the
physical aspect of war but what it did to societies at large and man existing in those societies.
W.H. Auden’s poetry was a reflection of his high intellect, his philosophical vision and his
language that bordered on satire and irony. The element of wit gave his poems a lightness
which otherwise would have been very boring to read, considering that he spoke of very
serious topics like politics, war and his expression of the social order that existed then. The
social awareness was not limited just to America or Europe but all around the world. The fact
that he wrote about the strife that was taking place in Spain and Germany is a proof of this
awareness and expression. The sense of modernity was evident in almost all the poets of the
thirties and their conscious attempt to be modern was significantly seen in their imagery that
was projected in their works. The imagery was almost always from the modern lifestyle
which they saw around them and which included machinery, politics and its effect on life,
drudgery in the society and the strife of man in trying to make life better.
2.3.2 Rejection of Convention
The next theme that Auden’s poems reflect is the rejection of convention in any
form. He gives importance to individuals as personalities and not as a part of society
especially in the thinking process and forming of ideologies. In the poem “In Praise of
Limestone”, the poet comes out very strongly against conforming to society and falling in
line to expectations. A satire on the same issue is also seen in “The Unknown Citizen”, where
he used irony and satire to describe the position of the establishments in relation to the
citizens of a nation. We also see glimpses of the silence in which the societies go about their
lives with no questions asked when they are reduced to mere alpha-numerical identities as in
“The Unknown Citizen”. He analyses the so called ailing society and at times also suggests
ways and means to overcome the challenges caused due to the ailments. His poems were in a
true sense “modern” in nature and reflected the society as it existed at the time writing and
hence this made his poetry very contemporary. The modernism in the poem is evident from
the mood of the poems as it reflected the mood of the time that it was written in, in particular
the mood that existed in the pre-war period. If the pre-war period in Auden’s poetry reflected
the mood of anguish and anxiety, the post- war period was elaborated with a tinge of satire
and irony as the world of the modern man became dependent on consumerism, lack of
spirituality and an alpha –numeric existence.
2.3.3 Human Suffering
Human suffering has always been a common theme found in almost all of Auden’s
poems. There may not be a single work of Auden that does not highlight the various forms of
suffering that man is subjected to. In “As I Walked Out One Evening”, though the underlying
theme is that of love, it is also the futility of life, of the uncertainties of life and the misery
that is a part of life especially in the post-war period, when a radical change came to be
visible in the social order in general and more particularly in the lifestyle. Above all, the
poem is a reminder of the passage of time and what changes occur in life, causing suffering,
as time goes by:
But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time. (line 21-24)
Human suffering has always been a topic of discussion for most creative people
whether they are writers, poets or painters. Various painters have highlighted different
aspects of human suffering and one such painter was Brueghel, an Italian painter, belonging
to the 16th century. Auden was greatly influenced by the painter’s most popular work on
human suffering and was so inspired by it that he based his poem “Musee Des Beaux Art”
which turned out to be one of the most beautiful, and probably, his best poem. Auden
personifies human suffering in the poem and gives it a cycle of birth and death, making it a
part of life.
According to Auden, every form of human suffering had a particular human
position which was very rightly elaborated in the paintings created by the Old Masters.
Auden was of the belief that every human suffering was an experience in life and that these
experiences also included love, joy and fear. That Auden believed in this theory is fairly well
explained in the following lines:
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
(line 2-4 )
The poem speaks of life as it goes on while the people living the life are filled with
misery and suffering. Auden believes human suffering to be a strange phenomenon in which
emotions like sympathy and empathy are evoked. Auden’s poems always had a word or two
for those who were weak and infirm, suffering the vagaries of life. That’s why while he
speaks of the continuous flow of regular life is more secure in America, he also speaks of the
misery and suffering of the people of Haiti. This way he ensures that the misery of the less
fortunate is not forgotten by those living a more comfortable life:
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
Human suffering has also been made to look comic and something in which Auden
found the comic element. Auden’s comic relief was a great reprieve from the tragic refrain
found in his poems on human suffering. Some of the more popular poems of Auden that
reflect on the satirical overtones of human suffering include “Petition” and “The Unknown
Citizen”. In “The Unknown Citizen”, the poet satirically questions in the final closing line:
Was he free? Was he happy?.... (line-27)
Probably Auden felt that the suffering was brought about by man himself and thus
the alleviation of human suffering too would be possible by man himself. Only man with his
intelligence and ability could reform a society ridden with misery. According to Auden, man
can do it only with a deep and unfailing faith in God. It was probably this faith that was given
release in some of the poems that were spiritually inclined like “Petition” in which he
addresses God as ‘Sir’, striking ironic overtones:
Sir, no man’s enemy, forgiving all
But will his negative inversion, be prodigal:
Send to us power and light………….. (line 1-3)
Auden’s poetry is known for the three stages that it can be divided into and in each of
these stages focus was always on man and the various experiences of life that man suffered
throughout life.
Most of his poems have reflected on human misery caused by different factors
including war, hatred and death. In “Funeral Blues”, for example, he cries of the loss of a
special person. The entire poem is a grieving cry of the loss due to death; and the sufferings
man experiences are due the death of a close person. A sense of misery and grief is evoked
using symbols and images to exemplify the human suffering that man experiences and which,
according to Auden, is a significant aspect of life.
2.3.4 Religious Themes
It was around the year 1939-40 that there came other influences in the life of Auden
which reflected in his various works. These influences shaped his religious and humanistic
oulook. It became evident that his inclination towards Christianity was growing and his
poems were a result of this change which was probably caused due to the various upheavals
in his life. According to Richard Hoggart, “The most striking characteristic of the
considerable body of work which Auden has produced in America is that in all of it, whether
in poems, general essays, critical articles reviews of lecture and whatever his ostensible
subject, he discusses religious belief” (1951:23) Though prayers and his invocation to God
have always been a part of his poems, it was more prominent in his works that were written
after his relocation in America. Published around the year 1945 one of his most popular
religious poems, “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio”, reflects his Christian beliefs
quite vividly and strongly. It was written during the World War II, one of the most painful
times in the history of mankind. So, it was a relief for the poet to make a transition to religion
as a support against the hard times. Some of his other poems include “Nones”, published in
1951. The poem calls for people to respect the crucifixion of Christ. It is an appeal to the
people to refrain from the ills that society is ridden with:
…we have lost our public
The faceless many who always
Collect when any world is to be wrecked, (stanza 2 line 1-3)
This disillusionment of life inspired his future themes and his thoughts. It gradually
dragged Auden towards spiritual and religious sentiments which were seen as a very
important aspect of his poems in the later stages. We can see this sentiment flow quite easily
in his popular Christian poem “Song of the Devil". Religious sentiments have also been
voiced in various poems like in “September 1, 1939”, when he prays for benevolence and
blessing in the concluding lines of the poem: “Show an affirming flame”. His acceptance of
the presence of the God was also seen in some poems like “Petition”. The entire poem is like
a prayer that wants “a change of heart”, and prays for “Curing the intolerable neural itch”, an
appeal to God for release from “the exhaustion of weaning”, “the liar’s quinsy”, “and the
distortions of ingrown virginity”. The theme of religion was found in all his later works in all
forms, whether it was poetry, plays and essays reflected his opinions and feelings on religion.
According to Justin Raplogle, “Auden’s poetry of the 1940s shows clearly that he belongs in
the tradition followed by Christians who emphasized accepting life more than transcending
it”(1969:46). His introduction to Kierkegaard in the year 1938 had a profound influence on
his thinking and forming of views and opinions on Christianity. He was extremely positive
and optimistic in what he believed. His belief in Christianity, too, led him to form more
positive and optimistic views and opinions that were always reflected in his works. His poem
“For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio” is a lengthy appeal to the people to have faith
and not falter in times of travails:
Let us therefore be contrite but without anxiety,
For Powers and Times are not gods but mortal gifts from God;
Let us acknowledge our defeats but without despair,
For all societies and epochs are transient details,
Transmitting an everlasting opportunity
That the Kingdom of Heaven may come, not in our present
And not in our future, but in the Fullness of Time.
Let us pray
Auden believed that the loss of faith in God, the loss of religious values and the loss of
Christian beliefs were responsible for the social upheavals that existed then. By turning to
religion, he found an avenue through which he could wean people towards the right path and
towards righteousness. “He”, says Golo Mann, “no longer expected politics to provide any
kind of salvation; disaster rather; and at the very best the avoidance of the worst disaster.
What is known as ‘history’ now seemed to him a fundamentally irrational, cruel, hopelessly
idiotic process. Instead of the spirit of universal love which is characteristic of the Left, there
came something which was close to global pessimism, modified by a deep sympathy for
individual people”(1974:9) . His poems in this period, popularly called “the American
period” of Auden, extolled the values of Christianity but never attempted to promote the
religion and never stressed the benefits of following Christianity. The poems were more a call
to people to follow God and to follow the right path and he connected Christian values to
goodness. His poems were more sympathetic in nature, unlike his earlier poems, in which the
anguish at the misery of mankind was evident. Having said that, it was also true that Auden’s
religious concerns were never to speak of God but of the reasons why man should be
religious. His poetry spoke of religion from a humanistic point of view, which said that by
following the path of god, man can overcome all the challenges in life and the upheavals that
life causes. We see this attitude towards religion in his later poems like “Nones” written
in1951, and in “The Shield of Achilles” and in “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio”.
Auden gained mental strength from his faith in God and expressed that in his poems. One of
his works that highlighted his religious views was Horae Canonicae, a series of religious
poems which also included Nones. The mood of the poems was more an acceptance of the
upheavals in life with the firm belief that the future is bright by accepting God and having
faith in the goodness of God.
A point to be noted here is that Auden’s religious faith was rekindled in the later
years as an adult; this prompted him to find solace from all the misery and strife that he saw
around him. It was rekindled because he had no religious views as a child and did not believe
in the existence of god. In fact, the various experiences in life probably brought about a
religious reconciliation in the poet and geared him towards religious sentiments. For Auden,
religions meant togetherness as all become one with God. This thought is eulogized in the
poem “New Year Letter” in which he says:
we need to love all since we are
Each a unique particular
Edward Mendelson views that “Auden took seriously his membership in the
Anglican Church and derived many of his moral and aesthetic ideas from Christian doctrines
developed over two millennia, but he valued his church and its doctrines only to the degree
that they helped to make it possible to love one’s neighbor as oneself”(2007:64)
2.3.5 Auden’s Love for Art
Art has been given due significance in most of W. H. Auden’s works and it has
found a voice in the reflection of Auden’s approach to art and his perception of art. The
implication of art is always questioned as have been the other themes in Auden’s works. The
social relevance of art, the creative aspect, and its philosophical connotations are all
questioned by Auden in his poems. For Auden, understanding art as a part of his
development as a poet and journalistic journeys was more important than using art to
eulogize the significance or beauty of nature, romance, and people. He found art to be a form
of creativity in which an artist had the freedom of expression and was able to be critical of the
happening events and the people around. His habit of questioning was found in the poem
“The New Year Letter”. According to the poet, it is the duty of the artists to question
anything that causes misery or anguish to man, and every artist should be ready to use the
vehicle of his or her art to question the social order, the social and moral values, and the
political order. Passive acceptance should not be the norm for any artist in any field of art- be
it literature, painting, or any other performing arts. Though Auden was greatly influence by
Freud, he was not fully favorable to the Freudian theory that art was always beneficial or
harmless:
To me Art’s subject is the human clay,
And landscape but a background to a torso. (Letter To Lord Byron)
Auden felt that art was related to religion as both respected righteousness and
followed the right path. Moreover, Auden was of the view that art was inborn and a gift of
god. So it was a path through which divinity can be attained. Auden’s views on art can be
explained by the fact that he did not view art as an end of a means, but a means by which a
configuring of an intense and profound psychological and emotional order can be attained.
Besides writing poetry and essays, Auden made foray into the world of art extended to
musical theatres and operas which were highly contemporary and modern. His artistic
explorations also include writing film scripts.
“Musee Des Beaux Arts” is one of Auden's celebrated short poems. Auden visited the
Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels in 1938 and wrote this poem in 1939. He was impressed to
see the paintings of Brueghal. The poet states at the outset of the poem that the old masters
were sensitively responsive to the suffering of human being. But at the same time they could
also understand the indifference shown to the suffering people. In another picture Christ was
crucified in some secluded untidy part of the world while the dogs continued their doggy life.
The poet wants to tell that the men who crucified Christ and the onlookers of the scene were
no better than animals, rather worse than animals. In fact, the paintings and the poet are
telling the same thing i.e. human indifference to individual suffering. The ploughman, the
sun, the sailors are all telling about the selfishness of human being.In other words, the people
show a stoical attitude to individual suffering. Each of Auden’s poems can be called a world
of art which he paints using the colors and images that he sees around him. The words used
by him are his tool or the brush with which he paints the images.
2.3.6 Significance of Love
In Auden's poetry the real subject is man engaged in human activity. Auden believes
that to love other human beings selflessly is a right social action and that it would create a
social life full of love leading to co-operation. But considering the kind of life that Auden had
in his childhood and adolescence, the social set-up, the war and the lack of proper family
bonding, it was natural that Auden had a highly skeptical view of love and its significance.
Love had different meanings at each stage of his life. Even though there is a
recurring reference to the emotion, the reference has had a different allusion each time to a
theme in his poems. The initial confusion and vagueness in the first few poems attains clarity
and becomes more concrete in his later works. But even in this concreteness there is
skepticism and a non- acceptance of romantic love. According to Stephen Spender,
“[Throughout] the whole development of his poetry (if one makes exception of the
undergraduate work) his theme had been love: not Romantic love but love as interpreter of
the world, love as individual need, and love as redeeming power in the life of society and of
the individual. At first there was the Lawrentian idea of unrepressed sexual fulfillment
through love; then that of the social revolution which would accomplish the change of heart
that would change society; then, finally, Christianity which looked more deeply into the heart
than any of these, offered man the chance of redeeming himself and the society, but also
without illusions showed him to himself as he really was with all the limitations of his
nature”(1973:4). His views were greatly influenced by Freud and in particular, Freud’s theory
on Sex.
Auden used the concept of love to spread the word about being socially compatible
and environmentally friendly. Moreover, Auden reflected on love that was impersonal and
impassive. Hence the rapture, ecstasy and emotional states of joy or sorrow are not so deeply
rooted in his works.
Auden’s poems do not reveal love in the formal meaning of the word as, romance,
but it means differently in each theme of the poems that he wrote. His different perceptions of
love is seen on the basis of the varying influences in his life, and one of the first influences
was that of Freud whose concept of love influenced his first few poems like “Miss Gee”. He
considered love and sex to be interconnected and believed that suppression of either could
prove catastrophic for the person:
Miss Gee knelt down in the side-aisle,
She knelt down on her knees;
“Lead me not into temptation
But make me a good girl, please.” (line 49-52)
This theory is well explained and exemplified in this little prayer in his poem “Miss
Gee” who becomes afflicted with cancer and, according to Auden, the affliction is a result of
her denial of sexual gratification. He compares unsatisfied love to be like that of childless
woman who is susceptible to cancer:
“Childless women get it.
And men when they retire;
It's as if there had to be some outlet
For their foiled creative fire.”(line 73-76)
Other references to libido or free expression of love are found in many poems of Auden.
Some of them are in “Petition”:
Send to us power and light, a sovereign touch
Curing the intolerable neural itch,
The exhaustion of weaning, the liar’s quinsy,
And the distortions of ingrown virginity. (line 3-6)
Auden’s “The Prologue” personifies the feeling of love as the sole force of life,
when he says:
O Love, the interest itself in thoughtless Heaven,
Make simpler daily and beating of man’s heart; within,
If his first phase was more a psychological influence, in the second stage it was the
philosophical. The Marxist philosophy greatly influenced his thinking and this influence also
reflected on his concept of love. He laid emphasis on the observation of the world and nature
around home, knowledge and environment and professed love through them. For him, Man
should love those around him and the nature to attain the perfection that man is capable of.
Most of these poems in this stage exhibited tendencies of Marxism but was not totally devoid
of the influence of Freud from the earlier stage. His philosophical viewpoint of love found it
to be selfless and a submission of the self and in words of Auden:
Yours is the choice to whom the gods awarded
The language of learning and the language of love
Croaked to move as a moneybag or a cancer
Or straight as a dove.
Auden considered love to be a highly philosophical emotion that needed to be viewed with
intelligence and learning.
The third stage of Auden’s poetry can be attributed to a totally different kind of
influence, and it is the religious influence. The Christian Doctrine had a great effect on the
poet and he propagated the concept of universal love and brotherhood. For him, love was
divine and was designed by God. Referring to the universal love as ‘agape’, he has made the
references in a number of his poems of later stage like “A Summer Night” and “Friday’s
Child”. Greatly influenced by the existentialism theory of Kierkegaard, Auden in the third
stage wrote about the belief in the Almighty God and submission to God. His magnum opus
“Religious drama” is a perfect example of this religious thoughts and beliefs besides “The
Age of Anxiety”. His rekindling of his faith in Christianity was ushered in by poems like
“For the Time Being; A Christmas Oratorio” and “The Sea and the Mirror”. Through these
poems Auden arouses the religious sentiment in the reader successfully.
Thus Auden makes a transit from the Freudian or the Eros theory of love to the
Agape or the universal concept of love through the mind or intelligence of man while passing
through the philosophical concept of love.
2.3.7 Loss of Human Values
Poets and writers have always been responsible in holding a mirror to reflect on the
existing ill of society. Some of them have also been responsible for changes and reformation
to be affected. Thus, it’s the moral responsibility of these great literary men and women to
sue their literary talents in the best possible way to enhance the quality of life around them
and also bring changes in society. Auden, too, was extremely aware of the social conditions
both good and bad. As a contentious observer he tried to overcome the problems that existed
in the society then and voiced those conditions in his works. The evolution of a new society
that had modern outlooks and a materialistic preference was looked upon with disdain by the
poet. The loss of human values and the lack of love and brotherhood irked him to a great
extent. His “Lullaby” confronts the distrust and faithlessness that existed in the lovers of the
modern times. “Lullaby” is perhaps one of the most persuasive and highly relevant to the
times it was written in:
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm; (line 1-2)
2.3.8 Theme of Death
Along with the ill of society and the consequent loss of human values and emotional
concerns, Auden was greatly perturbed by the thought of death and this is very evident in a
number of poems. One of the most prominent poems of the entire collection of Auden’s
works is “A Thought on Death”, a poem dedicated to the loss and grief caused by the death of
a loved one. The poem talks of the pain thus:
When life as opening buds is sweet,
And golden hopes the fancy greet,
And Youth prepares his joys to meet,
Alas! how hard it is to die! ( line 1-4)
The poem gives an insight into the mind of Auden and his thoughts on the ideas of death and
how death can affect the people left behind. It also tells you the thought of the person who is
dying and has not fulfilled his desires in life. At the same time Auden accepts that death is the
end of life and the most vital truth of life:
When trembling limbs refuse their weight,
And films, slow gathering, dim the sight,
And clouds obscure the mental light,
'Tis nature's precious boon to die. (line 17-20)
In his tribute “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” in which he grieves the death of the great
poet and dear friend W. B. Yeats, who died in the year 1939 in France. He was 74yrs old at
the time. Auden’s tribute to honor this great poet and mourn the death resulted in the poem
“In Memory of W.B. Yeats” In the poem, the poet laments that both man and nature do not
condole the death of this great poet and that life remains unaffected by the poet’s death. The
poem is written in the form of an elegy to help bring out the theme of death and glorify it.
Though death is glorified, the poet is not, and Auden leaves it to the imagination of the reader
to assume the capabilities and the greatness of the poet through his poem. Auden says that the
poet will continue to live on in his poetry that he has left behind. Even if the poet is forgotten,
which he will be in due course, his words and thoughts left behind in his poetry will continue
to remain immortal. So according to Auden, no death can deprive a person of fame, love and
recognition:
Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique, Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives; (part III, line 5-10)
Another elegy written by Auden, which deals with the theme of death, is “In Memory
of Sigmund Freud”. The poem is an expression of a person who had been a source of deep
inspiration and motivation in the life of the poet. Freud’s theory on human sexuality and the
profound influence that Freud had on the society in general is elucidated with great clarity in
the poem. It is important to note that Auden was not so greatly influenced to be over taken
completely but was quite balanced in influence as the poem shows. The reference to the dead
friend is more prominent than the references made to the kind of influence Freud had on
Auden:
He wasn't clever at all: he merely told
the unhappy Present to recite the Past
like a poetry lesson till sooner
or later it faltered at the line where
long ago the accusations had begun,
and suddenly knew by whom it had been judged,
how rich life had been and how silly,
and was life-forgiven and more humble, (line 33-40)
Auden, by mourning the death of his contemporaries as well as his mentors, reveals his own
thoughts on the concept of death.
Though Auden has glorified death in poets who have lived a glorious life and have
died due to various reasons of which illnesses was a major reason, his own view of death was
not that of a glorified one. In fact Auden denounced war and hatred as it led to death and was
a cause of death which was the greatest tragedy of life.
One of the most significant poems in which he has used death as a theme and referred
to it very categorically is “Funeral Blues” in which the poet refers to the sense of loss that one
suffers when a loved one is claimed by death. The poet is almost shocked to learn of the
death of a loved one and says:
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong (stanza 3 line 4)
Even though Auden had accepted the reality of death and had resigned to the fact that the
tragedy is bound to happen multiple times in one’s life, each time he lost a dear one or a
friend, he has mourned the death and found it hard to bear the loss:
When, one by one, those ties are torn,
And friend from friend is snatched forlorn,
And man is left alone to mourn,
Ah then, how easy 'tis to die! ( stanza 3 line 1-4) (A Thought on Death)
W.H. Auden was widely acclaimed for a wide variety of styles and techniques he used
in his writing. Each style and technique had a uniqueness which was appropriate to the kind
of poetry he wrote. This diversity was probably due to the various influences that marked his
themes and his thoughts. . One of the basic features of his works was that he was not averse
to experimenting with his writing. Hence modern as well as traditional forms of styles and
techniques can be found in his poems with innovations and creative makeovers.
2.4 The Style of Auden
Auden’s style can be categorized as belonging to three distinctive phases. They can be
categorized as:
a) The Early phase
b) The Middle phase
c) The Mature phase
In the earlier phase, Auden exhibited an unabashed style that was ambiguous and
indistinct, mainly because of his experimenting with styles. His experimentations as regards
the choice of genres included ballads, parodies, operas and even nursery rhymes.
His style in the earlier years basically was verse forms. Once he was sure of the form
he allowed his creativity to conform to that form. For example in “Canzone”, the poem is a 5lined verse form, into which he adds words and vocabulary that allow him to be more explicit
about his theme. His early period is characterized by unrhymed epigrams and meters of the
conversational mode. As is seen in his short poem “Dover” in which this form of
fragmentation of sentences was evident and which he improved on in his later poems:
Steep roads, a tunnel through the downs, are the approaches;
A ruined pharos overlooks the constructed bay;
The sea-front is almost elegant; all this show
Has, somewhere inland, a vague and dirty root:
Nothing is made in this town. (line 1-5)
His style in the middle period was not very significant and it was the period in which
he was under the influence of Marxism but was not greatly inspired by it. This led him to
move away from the Marxist ideologies and to a more humanistic outlook leading him to
create poems in the later period that had more human values attached to it. It was during this
middle period that he wrote poems like “Another Time” and “Look Stranger”.
His poems and other works were of more significance in the later period after his
relocation to American. Light verse, meditative poetry, and modern trends were incorporated
into his poetry that Auden is known for. His poems of this later period were highly
characterized by the accomplished use of imagery, tone, diction and the lexical / syntactical
specifications were highly modern.
2.4.1 Components of Auden’s Style
2.4.1.1 Diction
Auden’s poetry moved away from the beaten track that was prevalent in the romantic
period of 19th and 20 th century poetry. People who were more used to the simple and easy
flow of words and language were not inclined to welcome the intellectual and highbrow tone
found in Auden’s poetry. His diction was found to be rather verbose and high sounding,
much like his themes which were more politically, psychologically, socially and
philosophically relevant to his times. His use of diction in his works was more thought
provoking for the reader than emotionally charged and affective.
His diction being
conceptual, the reader was forced to use the intellect in trying to comprehend the meaning
that lay between the lines. Some of his unusual diction used includes ‘average disgrace’ in
“The Questioner Who Sits So Sly” (line 49) and ‘ingrown virginity’(line 6) and ‘negative
inversion’(line 2) in “Petition” to quote a few. Auden made thought provoking sentences out
of such diction and used them in his poems to create poetry of direct statements that was
calculatingly flat and less lilting and emotive. Some of his poems that reflect on the unusual
diction that he used include, “Petition”. In the poem the diction does not generate a feeling of
religious fervor in the reader but makes it very down to earth by using the word ‘spotted’ in
place of ‘located’, which is more appropriate for a poem of this level. Another poem that has
the unusual diction is Auden’s “The Diaspora” in which the message is compressed into a
sonnet - a message that is serious as well as satirical in essence. A perfect example of how
Auden uses the comic verse is “Mundus Et Infans”. His verbosity is taken to a very elevated
level when he says:
A pantheist not a solipsist, he co-operates
With a universe of large and noisy feeling–states
Without troubling to place
Them anywhere special, for, to his eyes, Funny face
Or Elephant as yet ( Mundus Et Infans, 17-21 )
His diction is particularly elevated in this poem because of his usage of words that
vary contextually. For example, words like ‘supply’, ‘delivery’, ‘raw materials’, ‘shortage’,
all are terms that can be used in a variety of other subjects making the diction in the poem
rich with jargon.
2.4.1.2 Imagery
The use of imagery in poetry has been very commonly seen and is used quite
significantly by Auden in his works. Generally poets make extensive use of imagery to
suggest the meaning of the message they want to convey directly through their poems.
Auden has made use of imagery in a number of his poems, and in each poem it evokes and
suggests feelings and emotions of the poet completely. According to Timothy Foote, “Ezra
Pound changed English poetry by badgering it to speak in sharp images, in direct familiar
tones. T. S. Eliot challenged it by showing that verse might use myth and nightmare to say
something complex about 20th century society. Auden was a brilliant colonizer of lands they
discovered; less remote but also less magical than Eliot; wiser and clearer-sighted than
Pound; younger and metrically more inventive, with more humor too….” (1973:113). Auden
has used imagery in a variety of ways and he has employed imagery as a tool to reflect his
thoughts on the enormity of disintegration of human society in the modern world as is seen
in:
Hearing of harvests rotting in the valleys,
Seeing at end of street the barren mountains,
Round corners coming suddenly on water,
Knowing them shipwrecked who were launched for islands, (Paysage Moralize 1-4)
For example, in an attempt to explain his feelings on the modern era and the age of spiritual
numbness he says, in his poem “Family Ghosts” written in 1929:
And all emotion to expression came
Recovering the archaic imagery: (stanza 6 line 1-2)
Auden also used imagery to express his opinion on the deadness of spirituality in the
modern age which he calls “spiritual Ice-age”. Commenting on this view point of Auden,
Cleanth Brooks writes “Auden’s surest triumph is the recovery of the Archaic imagery- fells,
scraps overhung by kestrels, the becks with their pot holes left by the receding glaciers of the
age of ice. His dominant contrast is the contract between the scene and the modern age of ice:
foundries with their fires cold, flooded coal mines, silted harbours – the debris of the new ice
age”(1970:64).
In the poem “1929”, Auden makes use of imagery to draw a picture of Easter and his
feelings of the scene that he sees around him:
It was Easter as I walked in the public gardens
Hearing the frogs exhaling from the pond,
Watching traffic of magnificent cloud
Moving without anxiety on open sky— ( Poem 1929, 1-4 )
The poem is a pointer to the changing society. It combines the modern development
with the traditional ambience of Easter, and Auden expresses this with a hint of ridicule when
he says “Hearing the frogs exhaling from the pond”. In the same poem, Auden says:
But thinking so I came at once
Where solitary man sat weeping on a bench,
Hanging his head down, with his mouth distorted
Helpless and ugly as an embryo chicken. (Poem 1929, 9-12)
The missing indefinite article “the” before the words ‘solitary man’ recognizes the
man in the universal sense and refers to the loneliness of mankind. The final line portrays
despair as well as an unpromising, pathetic beginning at the same time. The ‘embryo’
together with the adjectives ’ugly and helpless’ is an image of an unpromising, pathetic
beginning.
A number of psychological imagery is found in many of Auden’s poems as is seen in
the phrase ‘the liar’s quinsy’ (line 5) from his poem “Petition”.
One can also find Auden’s poetry filled with imagery that has a panoramic view, with
symbols of social relevance:
Here on he cropped grass of the narrow ridge I stand,
A fathom of earth, alive in air,
Aloof as an admiral on the old rocks,
England below me…
The use of particular simile ‘admiral’ in the above poem “Look Stranger” written in
1936 is to ensure that the focus of the poem is not moved away from the idea to the
description of the scene. By using phrases like ‘A fathom of earth,’ also makes sure that the
imagery remains earthly and down to earth with no emotional arousals.
The imagery in the poem has been characterized by the various sounds of nature that
is reflected in the different lines of the poem:
May wander like a river
The swaying sound of the sea (Look Stranger 6-7)
Auden’s great gift of using imagery for expression of ideas that is his general perception is
further revealed in the lines from the poem written in the English period, “In Time of War:
XXV”:
…the hospitals alone remind us
Of the equality of man (stanza 2 line 3)
The following lines from the poem, written during the period he lived in America combines
his political ideologies with that of his love for nature and his regard for mankind:
Earth’s mishaps are not fatal,
Fire is not quenched by the dark,
No one can bottle a Breeze,
No friction wears out Water.
The above lines use the four elements of nature to explain the fact that the ideologies of
Auden had been transformed and that he began considering the presence of the elements as
vital to life. Besides using dream imagery, panoramic imagery Auden also made extensive
use of imagery that was archetypal as well as functional.
Archetypal imagery is a recurring image of a type of character, a symbol, a plot and
even theme which has universal significance. Examples of archetypal imagery include the sea
as a source of life, the prophetic figure, a mystical journey etc.
A perfect example of archetypal imagery is seen in “As I Walked out One Evening” in which
the lines represent imagery that is at once allegorical as well as symbolic as a pun:
Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow
(As I walked out One Evening, 32-36)
The lines are archetypal because they speak of the power that Time has over nature and how
nature is likely to be withered away by time.
Auden’s use of functional imagery is more significant when the poet wants to show a
contrast between two ideas or values. One of the greatest benefits that literature has gained
from Auden is that a whole new world of expressions, words, and images have been
introduced and this was probably possible because of the different influences that Auden had
both in his personal life and his professional work. The following lines are an example of
Auden’s use of functional imagery:
We envy streams and houses that are sure:
But we are articled to error; we
Were never nude and calm like a great door,
And never will be perfect like the fountains; (In Time of War XXVII )
2.4.1.3 Symbols:
Symbols have been used by all poets old and new to explain their themes and to
enhance the richness of their poetry. Symbols in poetry have always aroused the reader’s
interest and with the use of symbols the poet is able to convey to the reader in an in-depth and
more explicit manner.
Auden has made extensive use of symbols in his poetry to get across his themes and
has been very successful in helping the reader understand his poetry. Nature and landscapes
have been used symbolically for the exploration of his themes. Stephen Spender views that
“He found symptoms everywhere. Symptomatic was his key word. But in his very strange
poetry he transmogrified these symptoms into figures in a landscape of mountains, passes,
streams, heroes, horses, eagles, feuds and runes of Norse sagas. He was a poet of an
unanticipated kind—a different race from ourselves—and also a diagnostician of literary,
social, and individual psychosomatic situations, who mixed this Iceland imagery with
Freudian dream symbolism”(1973:3). Auden has used symbols in his poetry to dramatize a
situation and to enhance the element of satire in his poems. Moreover, abstract concepts are
given concrete embodiment by the help of these symbols. Poems like ‘Paysage Moralize’,
“In Praise of Limestone” and “The Shield of Achilles” are just a few that have a number of
symbols that highlight the themes in the poem. In all the three poems, landscape has been
symbolized to show human struggle in life.
In "Paysage Moralize”, for example, natural geographical features of land have been
used to symbolize the hard and difficult struggle that man undergoes during the process of his
life:
So many, doubtful, perished in the mountains,
……………………………………………………
So many, wretched, would not leave their valleys. ( Paysage Moralize, 31-36.)
The Quest symbol is common in most of Auden’s poetry. In “The New Year Letter”,
he symbolizes the quest of life. Modern day lifestyle has led man to loneliness due to the
emerging power of machines. And in the process of that quest, he uses places as symbols as
is seen in “Dover”.
The city is also another symbol which is used by Auden very commonly. Some of the
poems in which the city has been symbolized are “For the Time Being”, in which the city of
Rome is symbolized. Another poem “Memorial for the City” which is again a poem in which
the city is symbolized through comparisons made in the difference of attitudes of people.
According to M. K. Spears, ‘Auden uses the city as a symbol quite explicitly and
extensively (1970:82). He cites two poems of Auden’s as examples which are “Memorial for
the city” (Ibid: 83) and “Nones” (Ibid: 84). Auden’s use of the city was a medium to reflect
his opinions and thoughts on the growing urbanism. Auden has also used the city in the poem
“ September 1, 1939” as a symbol of ‘conservative’ in the dark of the subway and that of
‘ethical’ in the street above which is lighted. The symbolic use of city to show two of its
aspects has been used by Auden in the poem.
Auden had always expressed abhorrence towards war, and quite naturally war is a
symbol used by Auden in some of his poems. In the poem “Spain- 1937’, war is used as a
symbol of the struggle and strife that man undergoes within him. Similarly, the poem
“September 1, 1939”, speaks of the tragedies of war and the how humans are affected by it.
Auden has used symbols like the “hawk” to convey harshness and to convey liberation.
Symbols like the “airman” has been used in the poem “The Orators” and “The Sea and The
Mirror”. In both these poems, the sea, the marine animals like the shark, the whirlwind
symbolize the agony that the poet is going through at the time of writing.
Symbolic allusions in Auden’s poetry seem to be very personal and a lot depends on
the mood of the poet at the time of writing. Thus we see that the symbolic references are
quite dynamic and the ready is kept engaged in the poem. “His great originality”, says
Stephen Spender, “lay in his endlessly fertile invention of symbols, which did not float in the
poetry unrelated to anything except by association, as in the work of the symbolist poets, but
which, in the manner of Freudian dream symbolism, bodied forth psychological situations,
private or social. On one level Auden replaced the 'symbol' in poetry by the 'symptom'. Yet
the symbol-symptoms are not equivalents which represent situations outside the poetry. They
have an independent, purely poetic existence within it as part of a completely imagined
world”(1973:479).
2.4.1.4 Rhetorical Devices:
A number of rhetorical devices have been put into use by Auden in his works and
some of them include the use of simile and personifications. The use of simile is so common
in Auden’s work that it is impossible to talk of similes in poetry without making a reference
to Auden. Some of his more popular similes include “Here war is simple like a monument”
and “Museums stored his learning like a box” from the poems “Here War is Simple “and
“From In Time of War” respectively. In most cases, the use of adjectives was discarded to
help include similes and Auden enriched his works by adding similes that were slightly
beyond imagination too.
Personification is another rhetorical device in which Auden excelled, and he did that
by merely avoiding the use of the article. As is seen in “Like A Vocation”:
Not as that dream Napoleon, rumour’s dread and center, (stanza 1 line1)
In this line by removing the indefinite article ‘the’, Auden has personified ‘rumour’. Further
examples of personifications include “spacious day”, “intransient nature”, “betraying
smile”,etc.
Such changes in sentence constructions make Auden stand out as a poet of high caliber and
ability to use words and language to attract the reader. These are one of the distinctive
features of his poetry.
2.4.1.5 Traditional Verse Form- Meters/ Subjects, People and Places
Auden has successfully combined the use of traditional as well as modern form of verse. It is
quite evident in the way he makes use of the meters and sounds. In her book, Auden, Barbara
Everett says, “In his verse, Auden can argue, reflect, joke, gossip, sing, analyze, lecture,
hector, and simply talk; he can sound, at will, like a psychologist on a political platform, like
a theologian at a party, or like a geologist in love; he can give dignity and authority to
nonsensical theories, and make newspaper headlines sound both true and
melodious”(1964:87).
Though basically he used traditional forms of verse, he brought in innovations to make the
poetry modern and contemporary. His themes being conventional and contemporary to the time of
writing it, he was able to arouse the emotional impact he wanted from the readers. Themes that were
relevant enough to make an emotional impact in the reader were explored by Auden and his
verse forms were in accordance to these themes like, war, love, death and the modern way of
life which hindered togetherness and the feeling of unity. Being traditional in his verse forms
his works are usually found to be in sonnets, ballads, elegies, sestinas and songs.
His free verses are characterized by syllabic and non-syllabic meters with a highly
traditional rhythmic verse, but accompanied by a somewhat non-rhythmic sound effect, as is
seen in the lines, “how everything turns away”: “for this and for all enclosures like it the
archetype in Breughel’s Icarus”. A lot of incompatibility can be seen in his use of traditional
metrical patterns and speech rhythm as he tries to make it real for the modern reader.
Similarly people, places and events have always had been a theme for Auden and the
perfect example is the death of his two very dear people , W. B. Yeats and Sigmund Freud,
for whom he wrote a memorial. By using people who are known he is able to influence the
reader with the impact of their personality.
The details of verse form and sound pattern will be discussed in Chapter IV.
2.4.1.6 Allegorical Devices
Auden’s poetry is filled with allegorical devices that has enriched his poetry to a great
extent and has given it the popularity it enjoys. Allegorical devices have been found used
generously in his poems such as “Petition”, “The Unknown Citizen”, “The Shield of
Achilles” and many others. His allegorical devices animate the humblest and the most modest
of lines and words to make it exemplary and impactful:
Looking and loving our behaviors pass
The stones, the steel and the polished glass;(stanza 2 line 1-2) (A Bride in the 30’s)
“In Praise of Limestone” is a perfect example of how the allegorical device has been used by
Auden to heighten the effect of the poem and make it more impressive.
2.4.1.7 Use of Adjectives
Auden’s use of adjectives has made his poems highly dynamic and animated. The adjective
he uses does not only decorate his works but also helps to animate his ideas and themes to
generate the interest of the reader and to retain it. His use of adjectives in “Poem XXX” in his
Collection of Poems is an evidence of how cleverly he used the adjectives he uses in phrases
like ‘negative inversion’ and ‘ingrown virginity’ in the poem “Petition” to modify the
abstract nouns used in the lines. To explain the peculiar traits exhibited by the mentally
disturbed, instead of using adjectives that would directly hint at psychological problems,
Auden uses words to conjure up images that explain the condition quite aptly as in, ‘an
average disgrace’, ‘A neutralizing peace’(“The Questioner Who Sits So Sly”, line 49-50).
Auden’s use of adjectives enhanced the power of the language he used in his writing and
thereby had a greater impact on the reader who was able to take the subject or theme
seriously.
Auden’s style and technique varied according to the various influences he was
subjected to during his life and each of these styles and techniques were adopted by him
whenever they seemed compatible enough to the theme of his poetry
2.5 Conclusion
Auden was known for his representation of the times of the 1930s and from the
written works it can be seen that Auden was anti- romantic. His treatment of both nature and
love was anti-romantic. He was very people-centric and was concerned with the well-being of
the public in general. It is this factor that sets Auden apart from other poets as he did not have
the traditional treatment of nature. Auden’s poetry is also characterized by the intellect that
Auden is characterized by and there is an intellectual outlook in the poems of the entire
genres of poems he wrote, whether it is a love poem or a nature poem. One of the first to
create poems that had a psychological outlook and a Freudian concept present in the poems,
Auden was very intelligent enough to be able to perceive what was not seen, especially in
human nature, thought and character. And being highly frustrated with what he saw around
him, he advocated changes that would be according to him remove misery from the life of the
people. He created the character of a hero who was in quest for peace in the world. Auden’s
earlier poems like “The Door”, “The City” and “The Quest” all are an exploration into the
minds of people urging them to act in order to make their lives better.
Auden in his effort to be highly innovative and true to his theme and subject introduced a
variety of stylistic devices and coined an array of words in his poetry. His introduction
includes adjectives that were transformed into nouns by preceding them with the indefinite
article “the”. The art of personification was done differently by Auden as he gave life to
Abstract nouns. This was a completely new and unique method that was introduced at the
time. The introduction of what came to be called “Auden Simile” made his work stand out of
the ordinary. This made him one of the most revered and recognized poet of the modern era.
Moreover being influenced by great men like psychologists of the caliber of Sigmund Freud,
politically by leaders like Marx, and literally by T. S. Elliot, his poetry has a great range and
depth.
Continuous experimentations beginning with conventional meters of the 19th century bringing
variations into his verse forms till the very end. These variations were a result of the various
influences that affected Auden during the period of his literary work. Though this may have
seemed somewhat eccentric initially to the readers who were used to a more regular method
of poetry, there is no denying that Auden has left an indelible mark in the history of English
Literature especially in the world of poetry.
***
Lexis As Style
3.1 Introduction
Language is usually described or studied at different levels viz: phonology (sound),
morphology (internal structure of words), lexis (words), syntax (internal structure of
sentences) and discourse( inter-sentential structures, cohesion and coherence). Description of
structure at all these levels eventually leads to their signifying functions and effects, Thus
semantics (meaning) continues to be the goal of linguistics, notwithstanding the professed
objectives of the structuralists to divorce structure from meaning while analyzing it. In
stylistics, semantics becomes the focus and the term of reference for the description of
structure, for the Hallidayan model of linguistic description of structure for its own sake
becomes gratuitous unless it throws light on semantic structure. Although we are aware that
semantics and grammar are two mutually independent levels linguistic organization, there can
be interesting correlation between them, and each can account for the other to a large extent.
In semantic analysis and description being the focus of stylistic analysis, lexis
becomes the preferred level of study other than syntax and phonology. The term originated
from Greek and came into prominence in linguistic circles in the 1960’s. It has been used
particularly by British linguists for the vocabulary of a language or sub-language, especially
of its stock of lexemes. The term became popular because it is unambiguous, unlike its
synonym “lexicon”. Alo (1995:18) defined lexis as “…the level of linguistic analysis and
description concerned with the way in which the vocabulary of a language is organized”. In
linguistics, lexis describes the storage of language in our mental lexicon as prefabricated
patterns that can be recalled and sorted into meaningful speech and writing. Thus, lexis, as a
concept, has a distinct identity from other traditional levels of linguistic study or
interpretation, as it refers specifically to the word-stock of a language from which writers and
speakers make choices for self-expression according to their purpose or intended meaning.
The areas lexis covers include synonyms and antonyms, collocations, common idioms, and
figurative language, proverbs and phrasal verbs, registers, homonyms and homophones,
prefix and suffix, general knowledge of words, special loan words, neologism, adjectives and
prepositions, etc. The point is that the rationale for studying the nature and functioning of the
vocabulary of a text is to decode the meaning of the text (i.e. lexis as semantic markers or
signifiers). This notion is echoed by McCarthy and Carter (1988) when they averred that
most scholarly works on lexis over the years have discussed the term within semantics. For,
as Socrates put it, “words have the power to reveal…, conceal and signify all things; they…
also turn things this way and that” (See Eyoh, 1997:90). Alo (1998) shares a similar
viewpoint viz: “As a level of language study, lexis seeks to elucidate how words mean and
how they interact with one another meaningfully…”
Fundamentally, a writer taps from and exploits the vast resources of language for his
imaginative relations. Lexical items help the writer to crystallize his thoughts, express certain
emotions and create images all of which give literature its peculiar expressive beauty. In this
regard, writers depend on lexical items and their connotative implications, to convey their
intended meanings. Therefore, the writer must choose the appropriate words to effectively
convey the intended meaning and also achieve aesthetic beauty. This is inevitable because a
writer must use linguistic resources imaginatively to have the desired effect on the reader or
audience. This explains why writers, particularly poets, make lexical choices with great care
to achieve the delicate target of conveying meaning in the best way possible. In fact, an
artistic effort must achieve a fusion of meaning and imaginativeness in language use.
Language is a product of man’s need for self-expression and communication, as a
social animal. Basically, therefore, language is a social and functional phenomenon; a tool of
social engineering in our day-to-day existence as human beings. Fundamentally, human
beings function in myriads of social situations and language serves as the instrument of
expression in all of these situations. Hence various scholars have defined the term in terms of
its social function. Language function refers to the purpose or goal of language use in any
given context. The functions of language cover six basic communicative and social areas viz:
informational, expressive, phatic, directive, ideational and performative (Ndimele, 2005).
According to Alo (1998:5), the term function has two meanings:
Firstly, it refers to the specific uses to which the writer or speaker puts the language
(e.g. description, explanation, argument, persuasion, humour, etc). The term ‘function’ is also
used in the context of stylistic description to refer to the communicative value or role of
specific language categories (sentence, clause, word group, collocation, word and
morpheme).
Language function, therefore, implies varieties of language that are defined according
to use. This means that the context of use determines the meaning of the word or phrase.
Thus, a word or phrase could have a particular meaning in one context, and another in
another context. This view tallies with Halliday’s view of language and grammar in
particular, as a whole system of choice or option with complex relations between them.
Hence the definition of language according to function focuses on language use in contexts of
situation and postulates that meaning is multi-layered and can be interpreted at various levels.
Stylistic function is an aspect of language function. The critical point is that the
specific communicative or social function that a speaker or writer deploys language to
perform has the potentials to shape its use. Halliday (1978) labeled language as a ‘social
semiotic’ in the sense that it evolves in a context and the environment in which people deploy
language to serve communicative needs can shape its form and meaning. According to
Ogunsiji (2000:53), the “social circumstances” of language use are pertinent in determining
stylistic meaning because, “… language is not a monolithic entity – it varies according to
some factors like geographical location, subject matter, medium (spoken or written), sex, age,
role relations etc.”
3.2 An Overview on the Lexis as Style in Poems by W.H. Auden
The words that are used to refer to a particular object or thought and to help the
writer express the same are referred to as the lexis of the sentence. The use of appropriate
lexis makes the poem relevant and comprehensible to the reader. The lexis needs to be used
in various forms to help the grammatical functions of the sentence become obvious.
Generally poets make use of lexis that provides clarity of thought, subject, and theme to the
reader and the vocabulary thus used enriches the quality of the poem. This further helps in
highlighting the psychological, emotional, spiritual and political aspects of the poem. The
level of understanding the reader has been able to gain about any written form of work
depends upon its lexical quality.
One fact that is highly prominent is that there is no particular form that can be called
“Audenesque” as he has been known to innovate and experiment with a variety of lexical as
well as syntactical deviations. One of the reasons for this vast range of words used might
have been the various influences that Auden was subjected to in his life time that included the
influence of Sigmund Freud, Christian influence, Marxism, and then again with the political
upheavals in the world then, he was also politically motivated. His form of narration is very
varied which include the libretto, verse, play, epigram and oratorical. The hallmark of
Auden’s poetry has been his endeavor to use words, phrases and sentences that may not
have been previously used by any other poet. The vocabulary, the phrases and the rhyme
scheme with its unusual musical rhythms makes Auden’s poetry distinctively different.
Though Auden was known to use lexis that included unfamiliar words, archaic words and
even commonly used slangs, his poetry did create a benchmark because of such lexical
adventures. Some of his very unusual yet prominent traits in poetry include:
3.2.1 The Use of Adjectives
Auden’s use of adjectives has made his poems highly dynamic and animated. The
adjectives he used do not only decorate his works but also helps to animate his ideas and
themes to generate the interest of the reader and to retain it. His use of adjectives in “Poem
XXX” in his collection of Poems, is evidence of how cleverly he used the adjectives in
phrases like “negative inversion” and “ingrown virginity” to modify the abstract nouns used
in the lines. To explain the peculiar traits exhibited by the mentally disturbed, instead of
using adjectives that would directly hint at psychological problems, Auden uses words to
conjure up images that explain the condition quite aptly as in, “An average disgrace”, “A
neutralizing peace”. Auden’s use of adjectives enhanced the power of the language he used in
his writing and thereby had a greater impact on the reader who was able to take the subject or
theme seriously. Themes that were relevant enough to make an emotional impact in the
reader were explored by Auden and his verse forms were in accordance to these themes like,
war, love, death and the modern way of life which hindered togetherness and the feeling of
unity. Being traditional in his verse forms, his works are usually found to be in sonnets,
ballads, elegies, sestinas and songs which were made more colorful with the use of the right
adjectives and adjectival phrases. Auden’s use of adjectives in his poems allowed the reader
to conjure up the exact image that the poet had intended to do.
3.2.2 Use of Archaic words
Auden was well known for his poetry that had words straight out of the dictionary.
Highly verbose and unfamiliar, the reader at times is lost to find the meaning behind those
lexical expressions. The use of archaic words, for example, was one such trait that was seen
in most of the poems of Auden especially in the poetry of the early period. A perfect
example is the use of such archaic words by the poet in “O Where Are You Going?”:
Yonder’s the midden where odours will madden, (line 3)
“Yonder” and “midden” are old fashioned words meaning “there” and “dung hill”. Such
jargon might have been confusing for the reader though it was also very apt and hence
matched the theme and the situation in the poem. It also helped to enhance the readers’
interest level in the poem and retain it. Auden never backed out of using words that were
obsolete and unfamiliar if it helped in enhancing the quality of his poetry, hence we see even
biblical words used in his works. His poem “Victor” is a perfect example of biblical
allusions that is used throughout the poem:
His father took a Bible from his pocket and read;
Blessed are the pure in heart.' (Stanza 3, Lines 3-4)
And the blood ran down the stairs and sang,
I'm the Resurrection and the Life'. (Stanza 33, Lines 3-4)
Saying; 'I am Alpha and Omega, I shall come
To judge the earth some day.' (Stanza 35, Lines 3-4)
3.2.3 Use of Rhetorical Devices
Some of the rhetorical devices used by Auden in his works include the use of
metaphors, similes and personification and he used lexis to suit these rhetorical devices. The
different rhetorical devices used by Auden in his poems were usually the result of his
various influences that determined his thought processes. Hence his early poetry has
references to the language and style of the Anglo-Saxons and had terms used in
psychological analysis. This reference at times made his poems clinical and filled with
jargon and verbosity. They were difficult to comprehend for the common reader as had the
quality of a riddle. The use of Free Verse was his forte and he was considered master in its
use as can be seen in “Musee des Beaux Arts”.
Having made these preliminary remarks about the stylistic implication of Auden’s
lexis in general I shall attempt lexical analysis of some of his poems. The texts shall be cited
in the full, followed by lexical analysis in each case.
3.3 Lexical Analysis of Auden’s poems
3.3.1 Analysis-1
O Where Are You Going?
"O where are you going?" said reader to rider,
"That valley is fatal when furnaces burn,
Yonder's the midden whose odours will madden,
That gap is the grave where the tall return."
"O do you imagine," said fearer to farer,
"That dusk will delay on your path to the pass,
Your diligent looking discover the lacking
Your footsteps feel from granite to grass?"
"O what was that bird," said horror to hearer,
"Did you see that shape in the twisted trees?
Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly,
The spot on your skin is a shocking disease."
"Out of this house," said rider to reader,
"Yours never will," said farer to fearer,
"They're looking for you," said hearer to horror,
As he left them there, as he left them there.
Originally the poem “O where are you going?” was the epilogue poem in The Orators
published in May 1932. Written in the form of a ballad, the poem was first titled “Three
Companions” and was included as individual poems in the Collected Shorter Poems publish
in 1950. The poem is written in the form of a dialogue and the conversational manner is very
informal and easy. The ballad is made up of the conventional four-lined format of the stanza
and the language is simple. There have been various interpretations to this poem and they
include the political, social and psychological because of the different influences that Auden
was exposed to. The poem is a reflection on the times that Auden lived in and the nature of
those times were perceived rather negatively by the poet and interpreted in the same manner.
His acknowledgement and stoic acceptance of death as an integral part of life and the
tranquility that the poet exerts in his acceptance of death is evident in this poem. The
perception of death is rather witty and the acquiescence of death is calm and composed.
According to the poet the darkness lies in the lives lived rather than in death. It is in the
minds of the people who live life and in their thoughts that make living so difficult in the
society that Auden lived when writing this poem. The poem “O where are you going?”
examines this darkness that Auden thinks is in the thoughts and deeds of man living in a
society that was full of trials and tribulations. This fact seems to be authenticatedby the use of
the form in which the poem is written which is a dialectic form. Hence this poetic form gives
a lot of scope for the poet to express the opinions of the public and make it more
argumentative. The lexis used in the poem is true to form as it echoes the voice of the
millions of Americans who were suppressed under the influence of the Great Depression of
the period, the political upheaval caused by the emergence of Fascism, and the suffering of
the people that left them defenseless and vulnerable and who according to Auden belonged to
“a low, dishonest decade”.
In this poem “O Where Are You Going?” Auden has confronted two sets of people.
One set is the courageous which constitutes the “rider”, “farer” and the “hearer”. The other
set is that of weaklings, the “reader”, “fearer”, and the “horror”. The courageous prepares him
for the adventure in order to explore new lands and wants to start his journey soon.
In the first stanza the “reader” who is a mere “theoretician” and hardly does anything
adventurous causes hindrance in the mission of the rider. The reader draws before the rider a
picture of “death” and “destruction” in “that valley”. The images of burning “furnaces”,
odour of “midden” and “graveyards” created by the reader poses hindrance in the path of the
rider.
In the second stanza, the “fearer” describes the obstacles in the path to the “new
valley” a new order of civilization. The fearer tries to inject the element of “fear” into the
“farer” who wants to bid farewell to others and start his journey. The “fearer” says that the
“dusk” or the night will cause problems to move to the new places: the path is full of
obstacles as it is not a smooth passage but a path of “rocks” and “grass” which will be tiring
and difficult for the “farer” to sail through the journey easily. Gerunds such as “looking” and
“lacking’ are used to create an uneasy feel in the poem, like something isn’t quite right.
Gerunds are verbs which are used as nouns. They emphasise the fear which the fearer feels
about going out of the house and exploring the world. It makes him uneasy, and thus he
attempts to make the reader feel uneasy too.
In the third stanza the “horror” dissuades the “hearer” from going to “that valley” by
drawing his attention to the bird of ill-omen and describing ghosts and strange figures behind
him. He tries to stop the hearer by talking of “shocking diseases” and “scars on his skin”. In
order to convince the adventurous side of the brain that they are right, the voices of the horror
etc use rather disturbing and scary imagery. They play on the fact that sometimes humans see
things differently to what they are. For example “did you see that shape in the twisted trees”
is a good example of how the horror in all of us tries to scare us by misconstruing objects and
deforming them to scare us. The use of alliteration “twisted trees” here also sounds rather
menacing, as the “t” sound is sharp and bitter. Sibilance is used to give the poem a sinister
feel- “the spot on your skin is a shocking disease”. It emphasises the subterfuge used by our
subconscious to protect us but also prevent us from doing things. Another example of this is
the verbs “swiftly” and “softly”, indicating a sense of secrecy. The horror argues that we
cannot always see what may hurt us, it isn’t always obvious, and thus we should be careful. It
is possible that the sinister nature of the voice could be related back to the Garden of Eden
and the snake which encouraged Eve to eat from the tree. The Snake is, in many ways,
representative of the part of our mind which tells us to go out and do things. Thus, by using
snake-like language and sibilance it is possible that the horror is trying to prevent us from
“picking the fruit” and making a dreadful mistake.
But in the fourth and last stanza the “cowards” and “timid” have been silenced by
the “rider”, “farer” and “hearer” who have strongly enough taken determination to set out on
their mission. These two sets of people are in fact the two antithetical aspects of an
individual. These are the two phases of the same face.
The first three stanzas begin with imperative constructions:
‘O where are you going’
‘O do you imagine’
‘O what was that bird’
These can also be shocking exclamations. This would also indicate that the addressee has
already begun his journey and it is a distant call made to him. The difference or the distance
is shown by the difference in nature of the two sets of opposite natured characters. One set
“fearer, reader and horror” and the victorious set of characters “the farer, rider and hearer”.
The “reader-rider”, “fearer-farer” and “horror-hearer”, though have difference in
nature and have antithetical characteristics still there is an attempt on the part of the poet to
draw some similarities by using similar consonants in the beginning of the terms- “r”, “h” and
“f”. This shows that these two opposite characters are two aspects of the human will.
The alternating feminine and masculine-end rhymes show the wavering attitude of
the individual. It shows the two attitudes: “weakness” and “strength” of human will.
Contrasts are very important in the poem. The juxtaposition of the passive and active
sides of the human psyche emphasise the inner turmoil which Auden (and by extension, all
humans) feel about making decisions. The active part of the brain (the rider, farer etc) and the
passive part (reader, fearer) are always competing against one another. They could also
represent the introverted intellect and the extrovert lover. “Midden” and “Gap” be seen to
allude to sexual images and Auden’s continued sexual confusion and frustration. The contrast
made between the “granite” and “grass” emphasize one’s fear to take risks and be exciting.
Auden worries that being adventurous and different (much like his poetry) will lead to
terrible disasters, as warned by the “reader”. His literary mind tells him to stay to what he
knows and follow a safe path, whereas his adventurous mind tells him to go out of the
“house”, a safe place, and into the “valley” (which may again have sexual connotations)
We find phonemes like /r/, /s/, /f/ etc. in each and every line, which are alliterated.
These alliterations indicate the individual having different aspects and phases in his
personality.
The poem being in a dialogue mode allows the passivity of one of the participants to
be overcome by the active participation of the other. Thus, if there is a note of pessimism in
the first three stanzas the final one is more optimistic and extremely encouraging, especially
with the repetition of the last line for an impact. In the last line “As he left them there” shows
it is not the determination of three brave men but an individual. The poet could have written
“they” in stead of “he” and the sentence would have been “As they left them there”. So we
can say the poem is about the victorious triumph of the “courageous,”whose strong will
overpowers ,and he arouses “horror” and “fear” in the “reader”. The strong determination
has been emphasized by the repetition of the sentence twice.
3.3.2 Analysis-2
Who’s Who
A shilling life will give you all the facts:
How Father beat him, how he ran away,
What were the struggles of his youth, what acts
Made him the greatest figure of his day;
Of how he fought, fished, hunted, worked all night,
Though giddy, climbed new mountains; named a sea;
Some of the last researchers even write
Love made him weep his pints like you and me.
With all his honours on, he sighed for one
Who, say astonished critics, lived at home;
Did little jobs about the house with skill
And nothing else; could whistle; would sit still
Or potter round the garden; answered some
Of his long marvellous letters but kept none.
The poem “Who’s Who” was written in 1934 and was published in 1936 in Look
Stranger!. “Who’s Who”, by W.H. Auden, is an endearing sonnet that explores the heroic
qualities of man that helps him overcome the different struggles he faces in life. The poem
lays open the contrasts that lie between what is assumed to be about a person and what the
real person is. Auden ridicules the art of writing biographies and the biographers who write
on what they presume to be the truth. According to Auden, they do not really have a clear
knowledge of the person and the emotions that the person endures. His tongue-in-cheek
comments on the importance that the famous people are given by the society in general and
the biographers in particular give this sonnet its humor and wit.
The poem is a brief psychological and sentimental biography of an imaginary and
representative famous man. High ranks and positions, achievements and glory do not make
an individual joyous and complete. Peace and self-sufficiency are most important in man’s
life. Name and fame can impart a feeling of pride and temporary satisfaction, but not
happiness and solace in one’s life. “One shilling” is enough to get detailed information about
this famous man. Each and every minute tit bit of this great man is known to each and every
insignificant individual of that time. He struggled, fought, fished, hunted, and worked all
nights till he was successful man in his life. He discovered mountains, explored sea and
pursued his goal till he achieved it. But in spite of all these, he ‘sighed for one’. This
insufficiency in his life subdued his achievements and glories, counter to his lover who lived
a satisfied life though nondescript and insignificant. This nondescript evolves as a “hero” in
this poem slowly and silently.
The phrase “A shilling life” (stanza 1 line 1) is a startlingly new coinage that sounds
ironical. In the ironical context, it provides the events which in the great man’s life are
enumerated in a matter-of –fact way, just as in a cheap biographical index.
Father beat him
How
he ran away
he fought
were the struggles of his youth
What
acts/made him the greatest figure of his day
Auden portrays a life of a man who has lived a very hard life and the lexical usage all
point to this concept of hard life. Words like “ought”( stanza 1 line 5 ), “struggles”( stanza 1
line 3) and “hunted” ( stanza 1 line 5) all lead to the thought that life is full of adversities that
needs to be overcome by man and he also “worked all night” (stanza 1 line 5) to fulfill his
needs. The phrases “climbed new mountains” and “named a sea” suggest that he was far
above the normal human beings. That this mechanical thing composed of mere activities,
should beneath his social mask be actually human is emphasized by the debunking colloquial
language:
Some of the last researchers even write
Love made him weep his pints like you and me.
The slangy phrase, “weep his pints”, is not a concession to popular taste, but a deliberate
device to reduce the mythical celebrity to normality. It has also an undertone of mockery of
the person who acts as a sentimental fool.
The famous man “sighed for one” (stanza 2 line1) indicates his lack of emotional and
sexual fulfillment or unsatisfactory life. If we take “sighed for” to mean “was in love with”,
rather than “envied”, then this “one” must be a woman, to whom he writes long, marvelous
letters. But in the light our knowledge of Auden’s homosexuality the one in question is a
man. It is interesting that Auden never uses feminine pronouns like “she” or “her” to qualify
the gender of the other person. The nonentity is deliberately made to seem socially useless,
untalented, and uncreative. Auden’s frequent awareness of clashing public and private
aspects of life is clearly shown in the contrast between the ‘greatest figures of the day’ and
the one who lived insignificantly and trivially at home, pottering about the home and
whistling. What is still more interesting is that while Auden brings out the contrast between
the public and private life, he seems to be playing around this line of demarcation which is
heavily gendered, i.e., men inhabit public sphere and lead an eventful, heroic public life,
while women live a nondescript private life.
It is interesting to take into account words like “struggles”, “fought’, ‘fished”,
“hunted” “worked all night”, ‘climbed new mountains”. “named a sea” are indicative of
masculine acts. Of these, the fist five are the acts of a boy who is growing up, and the later
two are acts of an adult man, who explores and conquers the vast world. The “he” performs
these various acts, acquires the distinctive masculine identity, and faces a glorious destiny
that is appropriate to his gender. The overbearing presence of “Father” (with an apt capital
“F”), and his punishments build up an oppressive patriarchy to which a boy must submit for
his own good to become “the greatest figure of his day”.
In contrast, the acts enumerated in the second stanza are “lived at home”, “did little
jobs about the house with skill”, “sit still”, “potter round the garden” are associated with
quiet, passive, domestic, private world, which has by and large been – or at least surely was
in the 1930s England – assigned to women. But cleverly Auden does not feminize them. He
deliberately refrains from specifying the “little jobs about the house with skills” as household
chores such as cooking and sewing that have been culturally assigned to women. These acts
seem to be largely ungendered, but definitely unmasculine. Further, the act of whistling
which the unspecified person at home does is a somewhat masculine act. The person is also
not a committed lover of the “greatest figure of the day”, nor a wife, since this person “kept”
none of his letters. So, the words are vague in the second stanza as far as their gender
implications are concerned, even as the domestic space is clearly feminine. This vagueness of
gender and the nature of relationship between the great man and the person at home seem to
be deliberate, as it questions the gender binaries of masculine vs. feminine. The person
concerned is a homosexual man, who chooses to live incognito, away from public life, but
seems to be self-sufficient and happier than the man who lives in a patriarchally regimented
world, with its masculinist values. The domestic gay man is relatively free from patriarchal
coercion, whereas the other, more distinguished man of public life, who is also gay, has to
suffer the masculinist coercion of public life and act suitably to maintain his manly identity.
Although the latter cracks up and “weeps”, violating the gender rule that big boys are not
supposed to weep.
“Who’s Who”, the title of the poem becomes supremely ironical, because Auden is
adopting the strategy of camouflaging the gender of the person in the second stanza, and
cleverly dismantling the gender binarism as well as the heterosexual norms of patriarchy. All
said and done, the who in Who’s Who model of information directory is ambiguous. Like the
unknown citizen, the private self of a man remains hidden, with predilections, desires and
sentiments shockingly different from what is expected of him. This is one poem, among
others, that deals with Auden’s difficult negotiations between the private homosexual
compulsions and desires on the one hand and the prescribed performatives of public life.
The two persons described in the two stanzas may as well be the two personae of a
deeply tortured man with his problematic sexuality.
3.3.3 Analysis-3
Funeral Blues
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with the juicy bone.
Silence the pianos and, with muffled drum,
Bring out the coffin. Let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling in the sky the message: “He is dead!”
Put crepe bows around the white necks of the public doves.
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my north, my south, my east and west,
My working week and Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song.
I thought that love would last forever; I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one.
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun.
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can come to any good.
The poem “Funeral Blues” by W.H. Auden has an interesting textual and cultural
history that informs the subtle ironical import of the poem. A close reading or simple
linguistic analysis of the poem unsupported by knowledge of its cultural history misses the
ironic import of the poem and the fact that being a commemorative piece, it undercuts the
cultural act and ideology of commemoration in the times bedeviled by the fear of the second
World War. Its intent and effect are part of its meaning, which are manifested in the choice of
words and figuratives. Since diction and metaphors are components of lexis, and the stylistic
choice and execution of them is germane to the semantics of the poem.
The poem first appeared as part of Ascent of F6, a satirical play that Auden and
Christopher Isherwood wrote in 1936 as a piece of funeral oration made jointly by Lord
Stagmantle, a corrupt, power-broking newspaper baron, and Lady Isabel Welwyn, daughter
of the former colonial governor of the fictitious African colony of Sudoland, on the death of
Sir James Ransome, the Colonial Secretary in the Tory government. The oration is in fact a
strategy to whip up Britain’s imperialist zeal against its rival Ostnia (a fictitious European
empire), which also made claims upon British territory in Africa. The poem was given a
setting for chorus and instrumental group by Benjamin Britten as part of his incidental music
for the first production of The Ascent of F6 in 1937. In 1938, it was re-written by Auden in 4
stanzas to be sung by Anderson Hedii, a noted soprano, and published in the anthology The
Year’s Poetry( 1938). It was also included in his book Another Time (1940). While in all
these versions, and the ones variously titled in Collected Poetry (1945), Collected Shorter
Poems: 1927-1957 (1966) , and his posthumous Collected Poems (1976, 1991, 2007), the
political meaning remains distinctly, in which, however, a homosexual meaning embedded to
be more manifest after Kallman betrayed Auden in 1942. In the film Four Weddings and a
Funeral (1994), the poem was read by Matthew (John Hannah) at the funeral of his partner
Gareth (Simon Callow). Although a lament, it seems in the first two stanzas a flamboyant
public performance of funeral and a calculated parody of the genre of Old Boy’s speech, a
species of camp commemoration. It assumes not so much the expressive function in good
earnest as the directive or conative function, as Roman Jakobson (1960) would have it,
although in an ironic vein. It is ironically directive in its function in the sense that it directs
the listener to act or behave in ceremonially solemn ways as desired by the speaker in certain
funerary settings of the State. The third stanza assumes an expressive speech function in that
the speaker expresses his feelings of loss and sorrow. The fourth stanza is directive, but
hyperbolical and richly ironical.
In stanza 1, words like “clock”, “telephone”, “the dog”, “pianos” collocate as
objects of the ordinary, quotidian, domestic world, producing sound bytes that are ordered
temporarily. These types of sounds variously serve as indices (in the sense Charles Sanders
Pierce uses ‘index’) of sounds of the passage of time, tele-conversation, feeding of dog,
musical entertainment within the setting of home. The muffled drum and coffin disrupt the
sonorous ordinariness of domestic world, and the sounds are now silenced, marking the
suspension of quotidian time.
There is a transition from stanza I to stanza 2, with the arrival of the “mourners”, who
are joined by “aeroplanes”, “public doves” and “the traffic police” to publicly proclaim and
mourn the death of the important man, presumably a statesman, a politician, a dictator,
observing the solemn ceremonials. Here the setting is public, and the grand scale on which
the funerary ceremonials of aeroplanes planned to write “He is dead” with the smoke emitted
by them, doves seen in public places like a city piazza or cemetery or park be made to wear
crepe bows, or policemen ordered to wear black cotton gloves makes the entire exercise
ludicrous.
Stanza 3 becomes deeply personal, and backward gazing, with the focus shifting
from the domestic and public space outside the subjective self to the space inside, which is
laden with memories and feelings of loss. Here the He is a lover, and the speaker is clearly
hyperbolic while declaring that “He” was “my north, my south, my east and west”
metaphorizing the entire world. The metaphors “working week” (stanza 3 line 2) and
“Sunday rest” (stanza 3 line 2 ) show that the friend was with him during work and pleasure.
Similarly, “noon, my midnight, my talk, my song” are metaphorical markers of leisure time –
not the quotidian time to be shared with others and observed in public, but personal time,
privately defined and savoured in intimate, private space, accompanied by subjective states
of feelings of bliss in the company of the lover talked about. The repetitive use of “my” is too
glaring to miss, and it intensifies the effect of a deeply private voice. What is most
significantly different from the preceding stanzas is the theme of betrayal in love in this
stanza. What the lover mourns now is not the ephemeralness of life but that of love. In the
light of our knowledge of the fact that Auden’s poetry in the late 1930s began to express his
intense experience of isolation in intimate homosexual relationship and his mortifying
realization that erotic impulse and political activity are both expression of vanity and desire
for power (Summers 2002), this stanza, we notice, convincingly marks the transition from the
figure of politician to that of lover. The poem juxtaposes funerary occasion of public
mourning and that of rueful private reminiscence of lost love, underscoring vanity of the
politician in one case and the betrayal of the lover in the other. The hyperbolical metaphoric
expressions in this stanza ironically suggest the enormity of the betrayal and pains.
Stanza 4 becomes even bolder hyperbolically with cosmic imagery. Here “the stars”,
“the sun”, “the moon” and “the ocean” now collocate as cosmic objects of eternity and
contrast themselves sharply with the quotidian object that mark time in Stanza 1. These
objects are vehemently dismissed together with the emphasis on “now”, which is repeated
twice. Within the quotidian time of the present thus the markers of cosmic time and eternity
are negated in anger and disillusionment. But this is curiously an inversion of what the
speaker does in Stanza 1: that he orders that the quotidian markers of sound and time be
dismissed for a while to effect the enormity of the eternity of death.
3.3.4 Analysis-4
Mundus et Infans
(For Albert and Angelyn Stevens)
Let him praise our creator with the top of his voice,
Then, and the motions of his bowels; let us rejoice
That he lets us hope, for
He may never become a fashionable or
Important personage:
However bad he may be, he has not yet gone mad;
Whoever we are now, we were no worse at his age;
So of course we ought to be glad
When he bawls the house down. Has he not a perfect right
To remind us at every moment how we quite
Rightly expect each other
To go upstairs or for a walk, if we must cry over
Spilt milk, such as our wish
That, since, apparently, we shall never be above
Eeither or both, we had never learned to distinguish
Between hunger and love?
The poem “Mundus Et Infants” was first published in Common-wealth, 1940 and later
re-published in all the editions of Collected Shorter Poems. Auden celebrates the birth of his
friends’ child as some kind of a god father. The poem is a vivid description of of the child’s
biological activities, antics and emotional and psychic states from a highly benignly jocular,
ironic and reflective adult point of view, which is more a collective point of view rather than
a personal one, as evidenced by the collective pronoun “We” from the 4th stanza till the end.
With its lexical richness and wonderful tonal variations, the poem offers complex
perspectives on different relationships that exist in the war-time adult world. The title,
“Mundus Et Infants” meaning “the world and the child” in Latin is by itself an exploration of
the relationship that exists ecologically. Hence the oikos of the child, his world, is traced back
to the mother’s womb. One is reminded of the anonymous English morality play from source
is a late 14th-century or 15th-century poem under the same title. It served to mirror of the
periods of man's life in an age that was anchored upon strong moral values and religious faith
in the late medieval period. But this resonance, which is struck by Auden’s poem invest irony
in it particularly in a war-torn time.
The attempts made by the child to free itself from the mother’s womb are
symbolically presented as man’s need of freedom, as many critics interpret. But such
interpretation does not exhaust the richness of meaning. The child makes its presence in
terms of an “appetite”, which assumes secondary meaning of an impersonal machine whose
needs for “supply” and “delivery” of raw materials must be met, and in case of “shortage”,
“responsibility” should be fixed on the mother in case the promise made by her is breached.
All this regime of the child’s demand and coercive power in fact begins with a violence of
birth, the brunt of which the mother bears. These are suggested by the phrase: “Kicking his
mother” (stanza 1 line 1). So, all the association of felicity and grace associated with childbirth has been ironically undermined.
The child grows from a demanding presence to a bellicose posture of “clenched fist”
(stanza 2 line 1) as we come to the second stanza, and takes the shape of a little ogre,
resolved to fight tyranny, although being a tyrannical and anarchical figure himself in a
jocular way. Thereafter the baby is presented as a “pantheist”, wise as saints despite his “loud
iniquity” and someone who cannot lie, and be judgmental in a subjective way, without being
embarrassed like the adults. The child also makes the adults learn to distinguish between
“hunger” and “love”.
The ironic effects of the poem are heightened by the use of language that describes
the activities of a child, although it should best represent the adults. This basic contradiction
in the usage of imagery and the diction gives rise to the ironic effects of the poem. Through
this poem the poet hopes to get across the message that the child like quality and innocence
of the child must remain even when the child has grown into a full-fledged adult. The
“hypocrisy” and “lying” that grown-ups tend to adopt once they become adults are however
characteristically absent in the child.
Auden’s use of a wide range of expressions in the form of figures of speech and
idiomatic expressions make “Mundus Et Infans" a great poem. Moreover, the language of the
poem being paradoxical to the subject of the poem, gives it a unique quality of being serious
and playful at the same time. Its exalted and affected rhetoric combined with the colloquial
humor that is ironical in nature makes the poem an amalgamation of different styles. Though
the poem speaks of a child, its grandiloquent verbosity gives it tonal and semantic
complexity. By using lexis that is supposed to suit a child, the poet makes references to
serious issues of moral confusion and emotional muddle, political injustice, war, violence and
economic crisis that the adults live through. We also find a number of different registers
being employed by Auden in this poem. They include, each of which consists of its
vocabulary that is suitable to the register:
a)Theological and Philosophical Register as in -‘soul, pantheist, solipsist’
b) Political register- ‘New Order, Dictated peace’
c)Economic Register-‘Supply, raw materials, delivery, Shortage’
d)Social Register -‘Cocky little ogre’
There is a marked incongruity in the use the lexis to describe the child on the one
hand and the expected vocabulary lexis that is more appropriate for the description of the
adult. The poet achieves this paradox by using words that describe the child in its face value,
but the underlying meaning warrants a more serious usage.
One remarkable aspect of the poem is the use of enjambment in the entire
poem enriches the poem, making it a perfect example of the use of a wide range of poetic
devices in a single poem. The enjambments in the poem have been well balanced by the use
of Caesuras that are placed at regular intervals in the poem:
Though, to take on the rest
Of the world at the drop of a hat or the mildest
Nudge of the impossible. (Stanza 2 lines 3-5)
The use of idiomatic expressions like “cry over spilt milk” and “at the drop of a hat”
enhances the poetic quality in the poem.
Auden has made extensive use of various poetic devices in this poem to reflect and
highlight his ideas and concept of the birth of a child and its life on earth. No regularity in
verse is found in the poem and hence it is a poem completely made up of free verse.
Similarly, no regular rhythmic beat is found in the poem even though there are instances of
an obvious rhyme scheme.
Some of the full rhymes found in the poem include:
1.
Soul / role
(stanza 1 lines 1- 2)
2.
Be / free(stanza 1 lines 3- 4)
3.
Rest / mildest (Stanza 2 lines 3-4)
4.
Co-operates / states (stanza 3 line 1-2)
5.
Place / face (stanza 3 lines 3-4)
In some stanzas the rhyme scheme has been constructed as aabb as is seen in the
above examples and in some it is abab. In stanza 5 both the rhyme schemes have been
combined into one stanza:
So / no (lines 1-2)
should / good (lines 3-4)
least / beast (lines 5 & 7)
blame / shame (lines 6 & 8)
In the collection of unusual rhyme schemes, some rhyme only partly, as in “into / through”
(stanza 3 lines 5 & 7) and some rhymes are muted and do not rhyme at all as in “promises” /
“peace” (stanza 1 lines 6 & 8 )and “impossible” / “all” (Stanza 2 lines 6 & 8 )
Both stressed and unstressed syllables are found in the lines of the poem. Since the
poem has long and extended lines, there are more than 10-12 syllables in each long line and
about 6 in each short line.
Use of metaphors is also found in the poem that is politically motivated. References to
Hitler and political motives are found in “dictated peace” (stanza 1 line 8), “raw materials”
(stanza 1 line 4), and “new order”(stanza 1 line 3), These metaphors may seem out of place in
comparison to a small defenseless child, but it is the humorous aspect of the poet to compare
a child as being completely apolitical as against the mighty rulers referred to here.
The poem is garnished with spicy humor with references to the child as “cocky little
ogre” (stanza 2 line 2), who has been given “supreme powers”(stanza 2 line 6), in its own
limited world to “resist tyranny” (stanza 2 line 7), and with all “forces at command”(stanza 2
line 8),
Auden in the middle stanzas shows the ability of the child to be peaceful even though
it does not have the ability to think. The lexical quality of the second stanza highlights this
thought:
...for, to his eyes, Funny face
Or elephant as yet
Mean nothing.
“He thinks as his mouth does (stanza 3 lines 4-8)
So though the idea in the poem is a satire towards the thought processes of the grownups or adults, it also provides hope in the form of a future adult who may not follow the same
thinking.
3.3.5 Analysis-5
As I Walked Out One Evening
As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.
And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
“Love has no ending.
“I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
Till China and Africa meet
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street.
“I’ll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.
“The years shall run like rabbits
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages
And the first love of the world.”
But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
“O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.
“In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.
“In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.
“Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver’s brilliant bow.
“O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in upto the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you’ve missed.
“The glacier knocking the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the cracks in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.
“Where the beggars raffle the bank notes
And the Giant is enchanting the Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer
And Jill goes down on her back.
“O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress;
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.
“O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.”
It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming
And the deep river ran on.
The poem, in the mode of a conversation between the narrator, the the lovers, and
the clocks (which represents time) shows the helplessness of the lovers racing against time.
The poem ‘As I Walked Out One Evening’ was first published in 1940 in the collection of
Auden’s poems Another Time. The poem is in the old poetic form of ballad, consisting of
fifteen quatrains of a straight-forward rhyme scheme ‘abcb’. Because of this generic quality
the poem exhibits a stark resemblance to the folk songs of yester years, especially with
respect to its rhyme and rhythm. The lexical use of words and images in the poem highlight
the quality of old ballads of England f time against love, as discussed by the people involved
in the conversation.
Two themes of love and time as mutually opposed have been explored in the poem
with respect to each other and individually. The poem is a perfect example of how imagery
is utilized by the poet to highlight the concept of the passage of time and the lover’s inability
to impede that pa ssage of time in order to be able to continue their love.
The poem is basically divided into four parts that are distinct in its division. The first five
quatrains is positive in nature and is a proclamation of love, though there is a distinct force of time
and the impersonal force of death ready to scuttle all plans and ruin all dreams of the lover even
though his rhetoric is full of hyperboles of continent drift, apocalypse, and the eternity and pristine
form of love:
I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
Till China and Africa meet
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street.
I’ll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.
“The years shall run like rabbits
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages
And the first love of the world”.
But Time shall have its writ over the lovers and human beings in general. These ideas have been
conveyed in the next four quatrains. So, what is needed an enlightened acceptance of life in its
imperfections, failings, absurdities etc. in the five quatrains that follow the line: “O plunge your
hands in water”…
The lexis of the poem highlights collocation of signifiers of similar ideas and
metaphoric as well as metonymic links between signifiers. Words such as “walked” ,
“Walking”, “pavement”, “railway”, “run like rabbits” do collocate as signifiers of movement
and progress. This idea is metaphorically linked with the idea of the flow of time and,
therefore, with “river”. For its part, the river as an elemental force of nature collocates with
snow and desert that are inflected with meanings of death, a consequence of the fleeting of
time.
Again, the snow that destroys the green valley is an anti-life force at the level of nature
and a metonymic equivalent of the desert that sighs in the bed, and the glacier knocking the
cupboard. Since the bed is a very intimate space of lovemaking and procreation and the
cupboard is a personalized space of possession within home, the desert and the glacier are
cosmic forces that are disruptive of life in vegetative and corporeal terms.
But the paradoxical truth is that whatever appears to be fleeting, or being destroyed in
fact reaches a state of maturity and fulfillment, and whatever appears to be disruptive of life is
in fact life-sustaining, on the other hand, .Hence perhaps the image of “crowds upon the
pavements are wheat” in the first stanza. The wheat is shown as fully grown and ready to be
harvested which means it has reached the fulfillment and also the end of its life. As for the
“river” in the second stanza, it continues to flow unending, providing sustenance to life. So it is
not the ending of time but the unending quality of love that is portrayed in the stanzas to prove
that time does conquer the love of true lovers.
Extremely familiar imagery with simple language makes this poem easy to
comprehend. The familiar imagery of the everyday domestic world “basin”, “cupboard”, “bed”
and cracked “tea-cup’ create a banal order of reality, which, however, signifies elemental
experiences of death and destruction in cosmic magnitude. This simple and ordinary lexical
terminology is juxtaposed by the more complex and intricate terminology to describe nature
around us and the supernatural element that is intriguing and unknown. The poem highlights
the archetypal imagery with the lexical usage that is used for time as against the lexis to
represent love and hence we find a highly contrasting language emerging in each stanza:
Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow (Lines 32-36)
The use of unconventional capitalization on the part of the poet serves to personify Time and
its Justice against which humans have to struggle in life and love. The lines: “And Time will
have his fancy” (line 31).and “Where Justice naked is” (line 26) seem sinister in their intent and
effect, for:
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss
and
The desert sighs in the bed
There are some more examples of personification of time and clock, the index of time, in the
following lines:
But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
“O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.
The clock is used to symbolize the quotidian, chronic time, whereas the river that flows on
brings us the intimations of eternity, which is time in its infinite form:
It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming
And the deep river ran on.
As the poem draws to a close we begin to realize that there is a suggestion of hope
and optimism in the lexis of the narrator, and hence the poem “As I walked out one
evening” is a reflection of Auden’s own hope and optimism towards life.
3.3.6 Analysis -6
CANZONE
We are created from and with the world
To suffer with and from it day by day;
Whether we meet in a majestic world
Of solid measurements or a dream world
Of swans and gold, we are required to love
All homeless objects that require a world.
Out claim to own our bodies and our world
Is our catastrophe. What can we know
But panic and caprice until we know
Our dreadful appetite demands a world
Whose order, origin, and purpose will
Be fluent satisfaction of our will?
Drift, Autumn, drift; fall, colours, where you will;
Bald melancholia minces through the world.
Regret, cold oceans, the lymphatic will
Caught in reflection on the right to will;
While violent dogs excite their dying day
To bacchic fury; snarl, though, as they will,
Their teeth are not a triumph for the will
But utter hesitation. What we love
Ourselves for is our power not to love,
To shrink to nothing or explode at will,
To ruin and remember that we know
What ruins and hyaenas cannot know.
If in this dark now I less often know
That spiral staircase where the haunted will
Hunts for its stolen luggage, who should know
Better than you, beloved, how I know
What gives security to any world,
Or in whose mirror I begin to know
The chaos of the heart as merchants know
Their coins and cities, genius its own day?
For through our lively traffic all the day,
In my own person I am forced to know
How much must be forgotten out of love,
How much must be forgotten even love,
Dear flesh, dear mind, dear spirit, o dear love,
In the depths of myself blind monsters know
Your presence and are angry, dreading Love
That asks its images for more than love;
The hot rampageous horses of my will,
Catching the scent of Heaven, whinny: Love
Gives no excuse to evil done for love,
Neither in you, nor me, nor armies, nor the world
Of words and wheels, nor any other world.
Dear fellow-creature, praise our God of Love
That we are so admonished, that no day
Of conscious trial be a wasted day.
Or else we make a scarecrow of the day,
Loose ends and jumble of our common world.
And stuff and nonsense of our own free will;
Or else our changing flesh may never know
There must be sorrow if there can be love.
A poem written in the early forties (1942), W.H. Auden’s ‘Canzone’ is a later addition
to his collection of poems titled Collected Shorter Poems (1950). It is a deeply personal lyric
with profound ethical implications in relation to the destructive socio-political forces of the
war. The poem gestures towards ‘agape’ or “universal love” as a way of life and the freedom
of both love and ‘the will’ from desire.
As the title shows, the poem is a canzone, an early form of sonnet consisting of 10- to
12-syllable lines without a refrain. Originating in Italy during the period of Italian
Renaissance, this form of poetry became popular all over Europe. Many English poets have
tried their hands at canzone, adaopting particularly the formal features of Petrarchan canzone.
Auden chooses a particularly difficult form rime petrose of Dante’s “Amor, tu vedi ben che
questa Donna” (c.1296). Dante’s poem consists of five twelve-line stan- zas, with a commiato
of six lines, in which each line ends with one of only five rhyme words- “donna”, “petra”,
“freddo”, “luce”, and “tempo” (lady, stone, cold, light, and time). It is all about the lover
being spurned by the cold lady-love, and the expectation that she will warm up return the
love only at the end of time. What the poem shows is the possibility of: “return” of love,
which is free from desire and time. It underscores the trope of”‘return” in a mythical time
scheme. Like Dante, as Susannah Young-Ah Gottileb( 2001) argues, Auden suffered from a
rejection of his homosexual love for Chester Kallman, who turned out to be unfaithful. Still,
Auden pined for Kallman’s love. But unlike Dante, Auden does not gesture towards the end
of quotidian time and possibility of a cosmic time in which “return” of the love denied will be
possible. Dante’s anticipations of cyclic retrun have been made possible through his canzonic
form,a complex lexical and phonological pattern of repetition. “The cyclical pattern of
Dante's poem mirrors the transmutations it describes and the transformations for which it
pleads” (Gottileb 135). On the contrary, the cyclical pattern Auden's poem continually
interrogates the cyclical character of its form.
For example, the idea of seasonal cycle signifying cyclical time is suggested to be
disrupted. "Drift, Autumn, drift; fall, colours, where you will." -this line reproduces in
miniature the problematic character of the poem's form. As Gottileb observes:
“Instead of the repetition of the seasons, prepared by the repetition of drift, what
is repeated is a word, fall, that, in the dimension of cyclical, seasonal time, would
be a synonym for Autumn, but is here instead an imperative: not a recurrence of a
natural phenomenon, but an expression of the will. Thus, cyclical time is
overtaken by the will, and this word dominates the stanza. For the word will not
only marks the future (as a verb tense); as a faculty, the will demands an
unforeseeable future, one determined not by a past that returns in ever-repeating
cycles, but by the will itself. (136)
Auden’s linguistic virtuosity lies in teasing out of the lexical items like ‘fall’ and
‘will’ multiple meanings. Fall is another name of Autumn, and it suggests an interruption in
the movement. As for will, it is a modal which also signifies volition or choice.
In Auden's canzonic form there are five stanzas of twelve ten-syllable lines (with only
one line differing in syllable count) and a five-line envoy. The end of each of the envoy's
lines is one of the five rhyme words:day’ , “world’ , ‘will’ , ‘know’ , ‘love'-in a sequence
(aedcb) determined by taking the first rhyme word in each of the five main stanzas and
maintaining the same order of rhyme words in each of the successive lines. While in Dante,
the poetic form corresponds to cosmic time (in the sense of both seasonal transformation and
the eternal return of the same as it is outlined in Platonic-Aristotelian cosmology), in Auden,
however, there is no such intimations of “cosmic time”. In his poem the five rhyme words do
return in a regular fashion to close all the sixty-five lines of the poem. The sequence they
form seems to be a cryptic statement: “(the) day (the) world will know love”, pointing, as it
were, towards a future when the world will attain the understanding of a great philosophical
truth: “there must be a sorrow if there can be love”.
In absence of any cyclical scheme of time, the self, desire, will and love is caught
corporeally in a linear time. That is why “will” and “melancholia”, which are a mental
impulse and mental state respectively, get inflected in terms of bodily attributes to become
“bald melancholia” and “lymphatic will”.
In the line “Bald melancholia minces through the world”, the verb “minces” has been
used deliberately by Auden in intransitive form. It means that melancholia does not affect the
world, it is affected in itself. It maintains an elegant and decorous air, and therefore it is
decadent. These become symptoms of effete and passive body and mind of the modern man.
Elsewhere the will becomes “haunted will”, which hunts for its “stolen luggage”. For will to
be “caught in the reflection of the right to will”, or to be hunting for its “stolen luggage”are
images of self-obsession, which impedes positive action. The aggressiveness accompanying
such will is that of dogs at their dying day’ just as self-love is as much subhuman as hyaenas
“that do not know the cause of their ‘ruin”. Here the “dogs” and “hyaenas” signify animality
of self-love and obsessive will that lack grace. Overweening pride and ambition can make
“rampageous horses of will” “whinny”, as they catch the scent of Heaven. On the other hand,
Love that “does not give excuse to love” becomes divine love. Hence the appeal to praise
“God of Love”. The poem is a call to humanity to come away from the idea and embrace
“agape”, for Auden asks people to move away from violence and accept the Christian way of
life to save the world:
The line “Dear flesh, dear mind, dear spirit, dearest love” extols Auden’s loved
person (object of one’s desire) as body, mind and soul, which Love embodies. Therefore,
Love is larger than the objects or persons one desires and “asks it images for more than love”.
The poet realizes that much out of “love” needs to be “forgotten” and “forgiven”, and these
are quite certainly desire, greed and ambition that inhere in self-love and obsessive will. Here
the Christian resonance of “forgiven” and “forgotten” is unmistakable. The poem thus reflects
Christian influence on Auden. Abstract and highly metaphysical, the poem is a call to man to move
away from materialistic desires and adopt spirituality as a way of life as is the will of God. What is
emphasizes in the last lie of the poem (“There must be sorrow if there can be love.”) Is sorrow as a
form of suffering – once again a profoundly religious experience in the Christian sense – that is
different from the affected and decadent “melancholia”.
This analysis reveals how Auden builds his thematics around key lexical elements
that are meaningful at multiple levels. One picks different strand and threads of meaning
from the poem while concentrating on its lexis. Polyvalence, metaphorical extension of
primary meaning, collocation, Christian resonance of words and above all generic novelty of
Canzone are feature of Auden’s lexical style.
As this chapter shows, Auden extensively uses synonyms and antonyms,
homophones, collocations, adjectives, registers, archaic words, prepositions, etc. as semantic
markers for self expression according to his purpose or intended meaning. Through lexical
analysis of a few poems we saw how words mean and how they interact with one another
meaningfully. In the next chapter we shall see how sound components of Auden’s poems
serve as features of his style and structure meaning.
***
Sound Pattern as Style
4.1 Introduction
In the first lecture out of six on the subject of sound and meaning which Roman
Jakobson gave at MIT in 1937, he talked about their relationship by way of pushing the
frontiers of linguistics beyond describing sound as mere acoustic phenomena, and going
beyond the level of the phonetic signifiers towards the domain of the signified, the domain of
meaning. In fact he is one of the early linguists to have looked into the relationship between
sound and meaning in the formalist poetics which he developed. In the fourth lecture he
emphasized the importance of morphology as the bridge sound and structure thus:
The systematic investigation of the way in which phonological resources are put to
use in the construction of grammatical forms, which was initiated by Baudouin’s
school and by the Prague circle under the name of ‘morphology,’ promises to
construct an indispensable bridge between the study of sound and that of meaning,
as long as one takes into account the range of linguistic levels and what is
specifically fundamental to each of them.
(http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ru/jakobson.htm).
Truly enough, words and the patterns of their formations, which we call
morphological structures, provide the focus on the discussion of sound patterns and also link
these to the larger syntactic structures. Indeed, if language is a system that relates sound with
sense through structure, then the structure has to be primarily morphological and secondarily
syntactic. This chapter thus anchors its discussion of the relationship between sound and
sense or meaning.
Formalists like Jakobson (1960) and Jan Mukarovsky (1970) tried to differentiate the
language of literature – more of the language of poetry than that of the novel, which is
bewilderingly varied and indeterminate – linguistically. They provided the theoretical ground
to scholars of formalist persuasion and stylisticians of the later times to define literariness
linguistically, although not very convincingly; for understanding what exactly makes a poem
a poem can seem almost impossible to pinpoint. Yet, combinations of features distinguish
poetry from prose. Although both poetry and prose comprise the basic structural elements of
language, poetry boasts of a more creative twist on those elements since it strives for more of
a concentrated beauty in language. Therefore, in order to create poetry of a high artistic level,
poets not only deliberate word choice, but exercise care in the structuring of these words and
combine them in ways that help convey the theme or emotion of the poem. The subject
matter evident in the verbal content is significant in establishing meaning; however, because
poetry is a highly artistic form of language, the structure and sound of the poetry ought to
support or add to what is communicated through the verbal content. Peter Levi attempts to
define poetry as “a particular and beautiful behaviour of language: it is less like the notation
of music than like a particular performance of certain particular notes on a particular
instrument” (1977:40). When the poet understands and utilizes the multi-dimensional
qualities poetry comprises, a poem becomes a superior “performance” of words, form, and
sound working together to achieve a unified work of art.
Poetry, because it is an art form, is compared to other arts such as painting and even
architecture, but because of its elements evincing musical qualities, the comparison between
poetry and music merits a greater degree of attention. Leonard Bernstein asserts that
“language leads a double life; it has a communicative function and an aesthetic function,” and
he calls poetry the “true parallel with music” (1976:79). Although music and poetry are
distinct genres, the qualities of poetry strongly resemble those of music; therefore, methods
involved in the analysis of music can be applied to the analysis of poetry. This allows the
critic to understand the nature of poetry to a greater degree, enabling him or her to approach
poetry with a greater understanding of its strengths. Schlauch confirms, “People study poetry
as a discipline, just as they study harmonic analysis of music, in order to heighten their
appreciation and to deepen their understanding of the classics” (1956:22). While analyzing
the musical elements of poetry is a fascinating study on its own, the purpose of analyzing the
two art forms is to develop a greater understanding of each work as a whole. This includes
understanding not only the sum of the parts but also what is achieved beyond the sum.
Bernstein explains that in music, “the combination of two different chords automatically
creates a third one, a new phonological identity” just as in poetry, “rhythm (sound) and
content produces something new” (1976:341).
Understanding what the poem achieves as its own work is the goal, but beginning
with individual elements and moving steadily toward the sum of those elements and then to
the work as a whole can simplify complex issues of meaning. Although some of the elements
of poems are parallel to elements of music, the poems themselves should not be termed
“musical” unless all of their parts work together to promote the unity of the poem. Schlauch
remarks, “All of the physical aspects of language sounds—intensity, duration, pitch,
harmonic relations—contribute to a total effect of greater or less acoustic prominence. It is
this complex of factors which produces the quasi-music of verse” (1956:173). Just as one
expects the melody, harmony, and rhythm of a musical piece to all work together to achieve a
sense of oneness, a poem, with its elements—some musical and some not-ought to evince a
sense of unity. If a poet is successful in combining its “factors,” producing a coherent whole,
only then can a poem be termed “musical” in the sense that all of its parts fit together as a
unified whole.
One layer of poetry that can help the work achieve “musicality” is sound—many
times, the layer first noticed by a listener. According to Amy Gross, “It is sound that we first
experience as pleasure in the reading of poetry” (23). Even if the words of a poem
communicate a highly artistic idea, if the sounds accompanying them do not echo the same
artistic level, the poem does not achieve its artistic potential. Blackmur points out that “the
music of words alone may lift common sentiment to great import” (1957:238). Analysis of
this layer of poetry is essential since even if a person does not understand the verbal content
of a poem, he or she can still enjoy the artistic aspects of the sounds produced and perhaps
even gain knowledge of the poem’s content without fully comprehending the text. Poetry,
even if the verbal content is not clear to a listener, can still communicate and thereby affect
the reader. T.S. Eliot explains, “We can be deeply stirred by hearing the recitation of a poem
in a language of which we understand no word” (1942:15). The sound of a poem, an entity
that can be separated from verbal content and structure, is essential to the poem’s aesthetic
value. Besides the verbal content and the form of the poem, the sound can also help
communicate the message of a poem, whether by acting as a backdrop, supporting the
meaning communicated by other layers, or creating additional meanings that embellish the
main idea of the poem. For instance, assonance of low-frequency vowels, when used
frequently, can create an atmosphere of dread that serves as a backdrop to the verbal content.
In addition, a faster tempo can give the poem a more energetic sound, perhaps establishing an
emotion in addition to what is already being communicated. Aspects of sound can be used in
an almost endless number of ways to help the poem communicate artistically.
Since sounds are physical elements that can be measured scientifically, pure sound is
a layer of poetry that at times can objectively reveal characteristics that relate to the meaning
of poetry. Because some consonants and vowels emit certain pitches or continue a set length
of time when in combination with other letters, sounds can communicate what some would
term a “melodic line” that is capable of communicating an attitude or emotion, or affecting
the lyrical flow of the passage. In music, a melody is quite obvious to a listener, while in a
poem, what one would consider the element most closely related to a melody requires much
attention on the part of the listener. Pitch fluctuations can be difficult to hear, especially since
many times, the pitches do not greatly contrast one another. Analysis of this layer must be
done with caution since, as Geoffrey Leech relates, “All too often imaginative reactions to the
meanings of words are projected on to the sounds of which they are composed. We must be
careful, therefore, to distinguish between the generally agreed symbolic range of a sound and
its associative value as apprehended by a particular reader in a particular linguistic context”
(1969:100). Although a poem may use onomatopoeic language, one cannot allow the
definition of the word to colour the sound of a word if that sound, in fact, is not illustrating
the meaning of the word. There is room for variations in interpretations of poetry, but in some
passages, the range of sounds and fluctuations between sounds is limited, even in
combination with absences of sound. Levi stresses the significance of not only pitches, but
also “certain silences and certain fulfilled expectations of the ear, with the subconscious
expectations of the language itself and with what is particularly expected in given forms of
speech” (1977:23). The sound of poetry can, therefore, be analyzed in relation to the natural
expectations of its listeners.
Because silences play an integral role in poetry just as rests play an integral role in
music, the sounds produced by poetry are even more similar to those in a true melody. Aaron
Copland clarifies the listener’s expectations when he explains that “a beautiful melody, like a
piece of music in its entirety, should be of satisfying proportions. It must give us a sense of
completion and of inevitability. . . .the melodic line will generally be long and flowing, with
low and high points of interest and a climactic moment usually near the end. Obviously, such
a melody would tend to move about among a variety of notes, avoiding unnecessary
repetition”(1957:50). Poetry, in the same way, should demonstrate beauty in its sound. This
does not mean that the sound patterns will necessarily sound smooth to the ear. Sounds that
communicate tensions through dissonance can help communicate the nature of a passage that
is meant to sound abrupt in comparison to surrounding passages. Whether the sounds
produced by the poem are melodious or dissonant, they should further the theme
communicated by the words and structure to give the listener an aesthetically pleasing
experience. Because poetry includes the aspects of language and sound, it can be analyzed in
a way that helps listeners understand what they are hearing and why they are hearing what
they are hearing. Analysis of the sound in poetry is essential in the overall analysis; however,
it must be done accurately, separated from the other elements until an overall analysis is
derived.
Closely connected to the sound a poem makes is a second layer—form—which
comprises all the structures in which words appear. Looking at individual words can be
deceiving if words are not analyzed in relation to their surroundings, a process giving the
listener the context necessary for full understanding of the poem. Levi remarks, “A word is
much affected by the context of other words, and a phrase by the context of other phrases as a
particular colour in one corner of a picture is affected by and affects all the other colours in
it” (1977:36). Analyzing smaller structures such as parts of speech, phrases, clauses, and
other structures inherent in lines and stanzas clarifies the implications of the verbal content.
These structures also determine which words are emphasized since the grammar of the
structures, especially the more meaningful parts of speech and emphatic positions, can give
particular words considerable weight. Verbs and nouns are considered the more significant
parts of speech since they reveal more information in comparison to other parts of speech;
therefore, where verbs and nouns are placed within the structure of a line or stanza can help
to emphasize or de-emphasize them in relation to the surrounding words. The placement of
words on accented syllables within the metric pattern or stressed beats within the rhythmic
structure of the poem can draw the listener’s attention to particular words. Even more
significant are structures that illustrate a detour from what is expected since unexpected
patterns can emphasize a particular idea. Sometimes grammatical structures and peculiar
word combinations can produce ambiguity rather than clarity, making them a source of
tension, but even in this case, if structures are used to further the whole poem, they add
dimensions to what is communicated verbally, supporting the ideas communicated in the
verbal context of the poem while strengthening the listener’s experience and overall
conception of the poem’s message. For instance, a grammatical structure, in relation to the
preceding and following structures, can promote ambiguity of meaning; however, if the
poem’s content is relating a struggle, the poet may purposefully use a grammatical structure
that mirrors the idea of a struggle, producing tension in the poem. The ambiguous
grammatical structure, therefore, strengthens the poem since it is used to produce tension that
is also communicated by other aspects of the poem. Although understanding words in the
context of phrases, clauses, lines, and stanzas is significant in analysis, how these smaller
structures relate to each other and to the larger structures and finally to the overall poem
should not be ignored, especially since how the poem reads as a unified whole determines its
ability to “sing.” If only smaller structures are analyzed, the significance of the poem can be
lost since a poem is more than the sum of its parts. Therefore, step-by-step analyses moving
from smaller structures to the structure of the poem as a whole should be completed and then
related to what has already been established from analysis of the verbal content.
One way in which elements of music and poetry specifically coincide in the realm of
form is through rhythm. Although poets’ ideas for content sometimes originate initially just
as some composers first create a musical idea, other poets begin with a set rhythm in mind
before they write the words of a poem just as composers at times begin with some kind of
rhythm as a basis for a musical work. In both art forms, rhythm plays a significant role not
only because it can represent the foundation of both poetry and music, but because it
comprises patterns that function in meaningful ways within the context of the poem. Eliot
explains that “the properties in
which music concerns the poet most nearly, are the sense of rhythm and the sense of
structure” (1942:28). The rhythm of a poem not only helps to emphasize words, but also
showcases the continuous flow of the ideas and expressions conveyed in the poem, aiding in
the delivery of the verbal content. Gross emphasizes the significance of rhythm since
“rhythmic sound has the ability to imitate the forms of physical behavior as well as express
the highly complex, continually shifting nature of human emotion” (1965:11). Although
rhythm can be an onomatopoeic device, even more importantly, because the rhythm moves
the poem along, it causes the content of the poem to become more vivid to the listener. Gross
explains that “rhythmic structure offers the means by which a work of literature achieves its
peculiar reality, the illusion that what we are reading is quickened with a life of its own”
(1965:13). This quality heightens the listener’s awareness of the poem because it is alive as it
is read.
Since the rhythm of poetry and the rhythm of music are so intertwined, one can
approach the rhythm of a poem in the same way that he or she approaches the rhythm in
music. According to Leech, “The rhythm of English is based on a roughly equal lapse of time
between one stressed syllable and another” (1969:106). Therefore, in a poem applying
traditional structural methods, the reader can expect the steady pulse produced by the rhythm
in the first line of poetry to continue without drastic variation throughout the poem. Being
aware of the rhythm and analyzing it helps the reader understand not only which words or
syllables are stressed but also what exactly is affecting the flow of the poem. Although the
pulse may remain steady, Leech notes “that syllables vary in intrinsic length, as well as in the
length imposed on them by the rhythmic beat” (1969:109); therefore, the characteristics of
the words themselves are still retained even within the rhythm of the poem’s meter. The
meter, however, in connection to the rhythm, can also affect the speed of the poem’s flow.
Leech asserts that “the impression of speed increases with the number of syllables per
measure” (1969:112). By analyzing the rhythm of poetry, one can analyze the movement of
the poem in conjunction with what is being communicated through the verbal content,
therefore, illustrating the specific, meaningful connections between the verbal content and its
rhythm—connections imperative to understanding the work as a whole.
Another element pertinent to structure in both poetry and music is parallelism or
repetition with variation. Bernstein claims that “it is repetition, modified in one way or
another, that gives poetry its musical qualities, because repetition is so essential to music
itself” (1976:149). In many musical forms, the melody is introduced within the first section,
and later in the work, variations on the melody appear. These variations may be very similar
to the melody perhaps with a few different notes or in a different octave, or even employing a
different rhythmic pattern, but still maintaining a close connection to the melody. In other
cases, the music may move from the first section which introduces the melody to a second
section which introduces a new idea subservient to the first. Although the theme in the second
section seems to contrast that in the first, eventually the connection between the two sections
will be seen, and the music will once again return to its first melody. This process shows that
although the music has one central theme, other melodies can add to or support the central
theme yet still create variety within the work. Poetry as well usually presents one main idea
or theme developed throughout the poem, yet other supporting ideas can vary and add to the
theme but still preserve the continuity of the poem. Eliot argues that “in a poem of any
length, there must be transitions between passages of greater and less intensity, to give a
rhythm of fluctuating emotion essential to the musical structure of the whole” (1942:18).
Although music may seem different from poetry in that its musicality is obviously present,
because poetry employs and depends on rhythm, the sound of the voice, and a theme with
variations, it too employs musical elements. Leech furthers the comparison, stressing “that
parallelism is the aspect of poetic language which most obviously relates it to music”
(1969:93). Leech’s definition of parallelism includes alliteration, consonance, assonance, and
types of rhyme, focusing on how the syllables relate to each other (1969:89). Essential to an
understanding of the sounds involved in alliteration, consonance, and assonance are
definitions of the various sonorants and obstruents. Sonorants are ounds that are song-like in
nature because the air flow is more unrestricted while the sounds of obstruents reveal an
obstruction of air flow.
Understanding the significance of individual sounds is essential to analyzing poetry, a
genre that utilizes sound to express meaning. David Mason and John Frederick Nims explain
that “we can think of words as having not only a mind (their meanings) but also a body—the
structure of sound in which their meanings live” (2006:145). Therefore, those who study
poetry have learned to connect particular sounds to particular emotions or tones. This
approach is impressionistic to a certain extent, but because many poets have used particular
sounds in a particular way, authors such as Mason and Nims confidently present connections
between sound and meaning.
Although the study of how particular sonorants and obstruents connect to the text of
poetry may seem insignificant, individual sounds impact the meaning of words, even more so
when sounds are repeated in passages with alliteration, consonance, and assonance. Mason
and Nims assert that alliteration “can create a bond of identity between words, hinting that if
they have sound in common, perhaps they have something more” (2006:162), a principle that
can be applied to examples of consonance and assonance as well. Observing individual
sounds and steadily moving to patterns of sounds and, ultimately, to the overall sound of the
poem reveals significant relationships between sound and text that would otherwise go
unnoticed. Levi agrees “that so many characteristics of the whole spectrum of poetry from the
greatest to the least are determined by such tiny and obvious factors as a repeated noise”
(1977:15). Therefore, repetition and parallelism can be seen in several ways in both poetry
and music.
Finally, requiring more attention is the verbal content—the layer that can
communicate the main ideas or feelings of the poem. Words comprising a poem are, of
course, extremely important in the art form of poetry since creativity in word choice is an
expected occurrence in poetry. Ideally, the idea is expressed in the most fitting words so that
its creativity in language draws in and entices the listener. Blackmur asserts, “The typical
great poet is profoundly rational, integrating, and, excepting minor accidents of incapacity, a
master of ultimate verbal clarity” (1957:269). The clarity of the verbal content is extremely
significant since while sound and structure imply meaning, language is a system of
representations in which words represent specific meanings; therefore, the verbal content has
an advantage in its ability to communicate.
Calvin S. Brown explains that “language consists of sounds endowed with
associations and meanings, and even in deliberate nonsense it is impossible to escape the
external associations which are always present in the sounds of speech” (1948:14). The
verbal content is certainly an important layer because of its ability to communicate, but it is
not necessarily the most important layer. It is, at times, the core of the idea or feeling of the
poem, but without the artistic nature of the other layers, the verbal content would lose much
of its nuanced flavor.
Ideally, each layer of a poem—verbal content, form, and sound—works together to
produce a unified work of art. The poem that excels in every aspect evincing a sense of unity
because each aspect works towards the overall theme, can rightly be termed “musical”—not
because the poem is pleasing to the ear, but because, like a piece of music, the poem “sings”
as a result of its oneness.
The sounds created by the poems support and add to the form and verbal content,
emphasizing their similarity to musical works where every part works together to form a
coherent whole. While the selected poems by no means represent the gamut of poetry that can
be deemed “musical,” they illustrate a method of analysis that can be used on any poem to
determine its value as a unified, “musical” work of art. Since many struggle with
understanding how the nuances of poetry work and how they heighten the effect of poetry,
this system of analysis, promoting a deeper understanding of poetry, should enable them to
identify not only each aspect of a poem, but also the function of each aspect as it relates to the
whole. Fully understanding poetry’s capabilities, although it involves an orderly process, is
essential not only for a true analysis of poetry but also for the pleasure from listening to
poetry read.
4.2 An Overview on the Sound Pattern as Style in Poems by W.H. Auden
W H Auden’s work is famous for its variety in style. In his formative years young
Auden was searching for an idiom and distinctive style of his own. He emulated his favourite
poets until he found his own distinctively individual style. So, while writing his juvenilia he
passed through a Georgian phase, owing his craft to Edward Thomas, Walter de la Mare, and
then he started imitating Hardy and early 20th century poets, namely Edith Sitwell, TS Eliot,
Hopkins etc. For example, the sprung rhythm of Hopkins is so clearly in the lines of the early
poem “Aware”, which is a metrical homage to the great poet:
Bones wrenched, weak whimper, lids wrinkled, first dazzle known,
World-wonder hardens as bigness, years; brings knowledge, you…
But soon enough he developed a style of his own, and showed virtuosity in developing the
meters to match his themes. He developed the poetics of “light verse” in his Oxford Book of
Light Verse (1938). It was based on the belief that the cultural context of modern poetry is
very different from what it was in the Elizabethan period. There was consensus of beliefs and
opinions, attitudes and interests among majority of people in Elizabethan England. At this
time the poet was not "conscious of himself as an unusual person, and his language [was]
straightforward and close to ordinary speech". But in the modern age, due to spread of
education, rise of academic elite, and a lack of homogeneous, general audience for poetry, the
poet was beset with the crisis of catering to the academic intelligentsia, who have their own
"areas" and want him to cater to their elitism. On the other hand, he was to face the
philistines, who admittedly read little poetry, although they were exposed to verses of sundry
inferior kinds like those in advertising, in church, in folk doggerels, dirty songs, and pop
music. That is why Auden developed, according to Chistopher Pollintz (1977), a low as well
as high style. The low style includes many songs and ballads he wrote, sometimes composing
them to the tunes of popular ballads. The poem “Victor”, for example, which has been sung
to “Franky and Johnny”, is a case in point. At times he also wrote ribald university songs like
“Miss Gee”, which could be sung to the tune of “St James Infirmary”. He also produced
parody of conventions of ballads, folk-songs and nursery rhymes, writing poems like “As I
Walked Out One Evening”, “The Witnesses” etc. In “Roman Wall Blues” and “Calypso” he
imitated the style of jazz and West Indian music. However, the second style of "light verse"
which Auden developed was serious in tone and on topics of wide public concern. Some of
the best examples of poems of high style were “September 1, 1939”, “In Memory of W. B.
Yeats”, “In Memory of Sigmund Freud”, “At the Grave of Henry James” etc.
In keeping with the changing notion of poetry, Auden made variations upon the stanza
forms, rhyme schemes and rhythmic patterns. Auden’s concept of what a poem ought to be
never remained constant, at least after 1965. Although the notion of poetry as a “memorable
speech” remained even in the 1960, there had taken place certain transformations in the
poetic diction of Auden, and by the late 1960s it had gravitated towards the language of
prose.
In 1932 in the essay “On Writing” he had said that the patterned movement of words,
which constitute meter, is a “group excitement of words”. Poetry, with strong rhythm,
emphatic rhymes and definite stanza forms, casts a hypnotic effect on the readers, and
profoundly affects them. In The Poet’s Tongue ( 1934) , an anthology of poetry which Auden
compiled with John Garrett, he said that it was a memorable speech and something that
“must move our emotions, or excite our intellect, for only that which is moving or exciting is
memorable, and the stimulus is the audible or spoken word or the cadence”( 327). It is in his
early poetic career that his poems were invested with the moral power of parable-like orality.
But parable-like quality does not seek to offer any moral advice or propagate a dogma. Rather
ironically it challenges dogmas and conventional opinions and religious beliefs. Lucy
McDiarmid observes” “Auden voices the tentative hope that poetry can be like loving spoken
words, transforming and redeeming, themselves carriers of value” (8). That is why we find
him at times using unrhymed epigrams as in one of the early poems “Dover” (1937):
Steep roads, a tunnel through the downs are the approaches;
A ruined pharos overlooks a constructed bay;
The sea-front is almost elegant; all this show
Has, somewhere inland, a vague and dirty root:
Nothing is made in this town.
In the 1940s, his views showed changes. In a review of Roethke’s “Open House”, he
said that good poetry should be able to show “tense awareness of both chaos and order,
the arbitrary and the necessary, the fact and the pattern” (qtd in Arana 60). But he still
retained the earlier view of “memorable speech” and refined upon it by saying that the
versification of poetry should be such that order must be created where there is chaos.
However, towards the 1960s he said that he preferred a “drab” poetic style to a “theatrical”
one. By drab poetry he meant a poetry that is unpretentious and natural, not tawdry and
artificial. It must offer itself to the reader in the form of parables in a bid to make them
conscious of the reality around them. Indeed, in the sixties, one comes across many of
Auden’s poems that sound plain and matter of fact. A case in point is “A Change of Air”,
a poem in iambic pentameter, without any exciting rhythm.
In much of Auden’s poetry, one notices use of both traditional metrical patterns and
natural speech rhythm of ordinary language. Auden is known for using skillfully a wide
repertoire of meters that are possible in the English language, and effecting variations of
beats upon the feet. For example, Auden uses as in “Refugee Blues”, which we shall discuss,
the four- beat rhythm of poetry (the most common rhythm in nursery rhymes, street genres,
popular ballads, advertising jingles, sports chants). However, as Derek Attridge ( 2005: 156)
shows, he resists this rhythm by using three-beat lines (trimeters) that prove effective and
sound playful in allowing occasionally a fourth virtual beat on lines of run-on syntax and
varied rhyme-schemes as in his humorous poem “Five Senses”:
Be patient, solemn nose,
Serve in a world of prose
The present moment well,
Nor surlily contrast
Its brash ill-mannered smell
With grand scents of the past.
Also, Auden has used some of the most challenging stanzaic forms like the Sestina,
villanelle, canzone, and a sonnet form that is dissimilar from both Shakespeare’s and
Petrarch’s. Auden experimented with new forms, using new techniques. Some of the
important components of the sound of Auden’s poetry include different rhythmic patterns,
stressed and unstressed syllables, alliterative verse and, onomatopoeia. He incorporated all
these, adopting modes as different as musical folk ballads, nursery rhymes, jazz, ordinary
conversation etc. Whether it was light verse, serious, satirical or doggerel, his styles always
had a unique quality which matched the theme and ambience of the poem. His technical
brilliance in versification can be seen in “Canzone”, in which he used a highly technical form
known as the “continental form”, repeating a specific number of words in the entire poem at
the end of each line. Different tones highlight his poems, thereby producing voices that are
very wide ranged to suit the characters of the poem.
Part of Auden’s experimentation with rhythm was the adaptation of strong-stress
verse, which originates from Old English, and rather uncommon in modern English poetry.
He imitated the Old English (also known as Anglo-Saxon) verse, dating from the seventh to
the eleventh centuries. An example is “The Seafarer”, with the stresses underlined, and the
vowels indicated in bold, according to the conventions of this verse, any vowel may alliterate
with any other:
The thriving of the treeland, the town's briskness,
a lightness over the leas, life gathering,
everything urges the eagerly mooded
man to venture on the voyage he thinks of,
the faring over flood, the far bourn.
Interestingly, also, he made experiments with syllabic stanza forms at many points in
his entire career, experimenting with Horatian, Asclepiadean and Sapphic quatrains. As far as
the Sapphic form is concerned a brilliant case in point, which will be discussed at the end of
this chapter, is Auden’s “River Profile”.
Auden’s novelty of sounds depends crucially on his diction, especially on the use of
rare words and dialects in the poems of the later period. Sometimes words like "oddling
angler” and "Dotterels and dunlins on its dark shores" as in “The Age of Anxiety” (1947) are
highly unusual and presumably his own coinage. And yet, at other times he uses familiar
words in the most extraordinary manner to make an ordinary line sound good. Again in ‘The
Age of Anxiety’ he uses the phrase "tacit tarn” which looks quite strange as it is used to
describe a mountain lake which is not generally quiet. This was basically to make the line
more alliterative.
Another special feature of his poetry is the use of conversational meter in order to
simulate the racy, conversational language of everyday contexts, which we will be discussing
with reference to the poem “Musee the Beaux Arts”.
The phenomenon of sound imitating and producing sense is felt when Auden employs
the poetic device of onomatopoeia, which is a representation of sound in the poem. His wellknown poem “Night Mail” (1937), meant for young readers, has a rhythm that imitates and
reproduces the movement of a train, especially with words that sound like the movement of a
train: “Shoveling white steam” (stanza 1, lines 8), “Snorting noisily”(stanza 1, lines 9), “tugs
yelping”(stanza 3, lines 3). Its regular dactylic meter and perfect rhyme imitate the rhythmic
sound of the train in motion. When the train moves fast, the rhythm of the poem quickens;
when it slows down, the rhythm also becomes slow. The poem can be read with a beat and
rhythm that resembles the music of the wheels of a moving train. The train begins with a slow
chugging of its wheels and as they rotate on the track clattering, they slowly but steadily pick
up speed and finally reach a crescendo as the narration gets breathless with pace and speed in
the penultimate stanza. But in the final stanza there is a slowing down of the pace to indicate
the nearing of the destination, in this case, Scotland and the versification is seen to be more
sedate and sluggish.
Indeed, Auden is an accomplished poet as far as his control over literary forms and
sounds are concerned. It is, perhaps, for this reason that today most of his poems are cited to
illustrate standard poetic devices.
From here onwards, we shall see a few specific poems of Auden, if not in their
entirety always, at least in fragments. We will take some poetic stanzas for analysis to
understand what specific rhyming patterns, meter, and stanza forms the poet uses, and for
what intent as well as effect. We will be a position to understand how sound contributes to
meaning in the poetry of Auden. Considering the fact that Auden used a wide range of styles
in his early and later poetry, we will choose poems representing different phase of his poetic
career. We may begin with the following poem ‘O Where Are You Going?’ An early poem
written in 1931, it is based on a folk ballad, which was popular in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Structurally, it seems to be an imitation of “Cutty Wren” folk songs comprising two voices
engaged in a dialogue of call and response, which are believed by some to be associated with
human sacrifice.
4.3 Analysis of Sound Pattern
4.3.1 Analysis-1
O Where Are You Going?
"O where are you going?" said reader to rider,
"That valley is fatal when furnaces burn,
Yonder's the midden whose odors will madden,
That gap is the grave where the tall return."
"O do you imagine," said fearer to farer,
"That dusk will delay on your path to the pass,
Your diligent looking discover the lacking
Your footsteps feel from granite to grass?"
"O what was that bird," said horror to hearer,
"Did you see that shape in the twisted trees?
Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly,
The spot on your skin is a shocking disease?"
"Out of this house" ‚ said rider to reader,
"Yours never will" ‚ said farer to fearer,
"They're looking for you" ‚ said hearer to horror,
As he left them there, as he left them there.
Auden structures it as four quatrains with amphibrach feet, the first one of which is thus:
O where are you going? " said reader to rider,
"That valley is fatal when furnaces burn,
Yonder's the midden whose odors will madden,
That gap is the grave where the tall return."
The poem produces the calculated effect of archaism because the metrical foot of
amphibrach was used in Greek and Latin prosody, and in various popular poetic narratives
like ballads and limericks in the 19th century. It consists of a stressed syllable surrounded by
two unstressed syllables. In the above scansion the stressed syllables have been underlined,
and the metrical feet have been marked off by vertical lines.
The alliterative sound pairing of /ˈriːdər/- /ˈraɪdər/, /fɪərər/- /fɑːrər/, /ˈhɒr.ər/-/hɪərər/ is
very folksy in tone and pronouncedly oral. Similarly, /mɪdən/ -ˈmæd.ən/ is an instance of
internal rhyme and assonance, together with other words like “gap” – grace”, and “granite”“grass”, to accentuate the effect of oral narrative. There obtains, on the one hand, conceptual
similarity between gap and grave (conceptually, the grave is a gap), and midden and madden
(a midden’s stench is maddening), while, on the other hand, antithesis builds up between the
reader( being static and staying indoors) and the rider ( who is outdoorsy and mobile). The
word granite, which is hard and without life also contrasts with grass which is soft and
animate. Within such semantic order of similarity and antithesis, exchanges take place
between the speaker, who is variously the “reader”,“fearer” and “hearer”, while the “rider” is
“farer” and even “horror”. Auden’s “reader” warns the “rider” of the dangers he will face on
his journey through the “fatal” valley, presumably of life, which may be inevitably towards
death ( also “dusk”). But the dauntless rider does venture “out of the house”, tauntingly
replying to the pleadings of the ‘reader”. In W. H. Auden: Contexts for Poetry ( 2002), Peter
Edgerly Firchow argues that the “rider” stands for the writer and that the poem serves as a
warning to those who are too timid to follow. However, the “writerly” abilities of the
“reader” figure show that the “rider” and the “reader” are not opposing characters: instead,
together they serve as a model for the kind of socially engaged, persuasive writer that Auden
imagines would be able to lead a community( 26). The exchanges work out the engagement
that Firchow talks about.
Undoubtedly, Auden foregrounds the sound patterns of alliteration and assonance as
pointed above. This stylistic choice determines his use of the unusual morphology of “fearer”
and “farer”. “Midden” ( a heap of dung) is again chosen for reason of sound, although being
old and obsolete, this word gives an archaic touch to the poem. The poem has remarkable
dramatic quality.
We shall move on to another poem ‘On this Island’ now, which is as much dramatic
as the foregoing one, but strikingly different in stanza form, rhyme and rhythm. “On this
Island”, one of the early poems first published in 1936 under the title Look Stanger, and later
in 1937 eponymously in the collection On this Island. It is deeply romantic in temper like
Wordsworth’s, with lilting musical effect of high Victorian poetry of Tennyson.
4.3.2 Analysis 2
On This Island
Look, stranger, on this island now
The leaping light for your delight discovers,
Stand stable here
And silent be,
That through the channels of the ear
May wander like a river
The swaying sound of the sea.
Here at a small field's ending pause
Where the chalk wall falls to the foam and its tall ledges
Oppose the pluck
And knock of the tide,
And the shingle scrambles after the suck—
ing surf, and a gull lodges
A moment on its sheer side.
Far off like floating seeds the ships
Diverge on urgent voluntary errands,
And this full view
Indeed may enter
And move in memory as now these clouds do,
That pass the harbour mirror
And all the summer through the water saunter.
The poem has a variable number of accents that can be 2, 3, 4 or 5 in the lines of varying
length. And yet it is rhythmic largely because it employs iambic feet of an unaccented
syllable followed by an accented one, except for line 7. It has no regular rhyme-scheme. One
comes across instances of para-rhyme in the words “ ledges”/”lodges” and also one notices
internal rhyme of “light”/ “delight”. For an early poem of Auden, it is quite complex in the
pattern of meter and has a rhyme scheme that is highly irregular. .It is like--a b c d c e d f g h
i g i j k l m l m m. As one can easily see, certain sounds do not get rhymed--a b / e f h / j k.
However, it is richly musical because of devices of alliteration and assonance:
leaping/ light; delight/discovers....line 2
stand/stable............................line 3
swaying/sound.........................line 7
falls/foam (mediated )................line 9
scrambles, sucking/surf..............line 12
far/off/floating..........................line 14
move/memory...........................line 18
The nearness of the speaking voice is keenly felt when it addresses the hearer. It feels as
if we are gazing upon an island in the sea with a voiceover. It is a voice that is measured and
slow, and it directs the sensory attention of the hearer to the “swaying sound of the sea”. Let
us scan the lines of the first stanza, pointing out the accents by underlining them and marking
the pauses by vertical lines:
Look, stranger, on this island now
The leaping light for your delight discovers,
Stand stable here
And silent be,
That through the channels of the ear
May wander like a river
The swaying sound of the sea.
These are end-stopped lines, with powerful periodic pauses. They have no pauses or
caesura in between them, excepting the first one with three pauses, which calls the attention
of the viewer to the island. The pace of the poem is slow in the first stanza because of the
preponderance of diphthongs in the following words:
/ˈstreɪn.dʒər/ , /ˈaɪ.lənd/ , /naʊ/ , /laɪt/ , /dɪˈlaɪt/ , /ˈsteɪ.bl̩ / , /ˈsaɪ.lənt/ /ɪər/, /sweɪŋ /, /saʊnd/
However, in the second stanza as we begin to notice the “chalk walls” or waves
breaking into the foam, we find the movement quickens. Except for the words “oppose” and
“moment” (/əˈpəʊz/ and/ˈməʊ.mənt/), the other words have no diphthongs. Therefore the
movement is faster. The monosyllabic words “pluck” and “knock” (/plʌk/ and /nɒk/)
make
the movement of the tide quick and snappy. It is quite ingenious of Auden to break the
“sucking” word into two parts and take the second part over to the next line thus:
And the shingle scrambles after the suck—
ing surf, and a gull lodges
A moment on its sheer side.
This is deliberate on the part of Auden. First of all, it creates the effect of a run-on line and
creates the effect of uninterrupted movement of the shingles scrambling after the surf, and
secondly it maintains the iambic measure, which could have been disrupted had “sucking”
been kept intact at the end of line 12. Further, it also gives the impression of a precarious and
fleeting moment for the gull.
Again in the first line of the last stanza the two pauses halter the movement:
Far off like floating seeds the ships
The diphthongs in the words in the last stanza like “diverge”, “voluntary” and
“clouds” also slacken the movement. Thus what we see in this poem is how sound controls
sensory perceptions of a landscape. This poem is descriptive in a plain and simple way,
without complex ideas and irony, which we find in the later poems. However, it is deeply
powerful in its visual qualities. The sound patterns reproduce them ably.
4.3.3 Analysis -3 Musée des Beaux Arts
A wide range of tones are used by Auden in a dramatic way when he ascribes these
to various characters or to the personae that he himself represents. What is created is a music
of voices, as it were, accentuated by the use of vowel and consonant sounds that are either
use repetitively or by rhyming them in different ways. These voices, which can be as varied
as oratorical voices, elegiac voices, nostalgic voices, call forth a variety of the readers’
emotions. The oratorical voice is distinctively present in one of the most popular poems,
“Musée the Beaux Arts” (1938).
The first stanza is an apt example of it:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
The poem describes the old masters whom a museum-goer will see at Musée des
Beaux Arts – not just Breughel’s “Fall of Icarus”, that represents the human position of
suffering, but also “The Numbering [Census] at Bethlehem” and “The Massacre of the
Innocents”. But the focus of the poem is not on the subjects of the painting, but on human
suffering in the midst of the ordinariness of everyday life, and even the ordinariness of the
experience of strolling among paintings, which the rhythm of the poem imitates by means of
its heavy pauses.
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters:
Its human position:
how well they understood
how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
The opening three lines resemble blank verse. These are decasyllabic each, and do
not seem to rhyme – until we come to the end of the fourth line, which is more than twice the
length of any of the first three lines. Further, the first two lines are end-stopped, with medial
and terminal pauses as indicated above. The pauses in the lines create a rhythm that simulates
the leisurely walk and pause of a visitor in the art museum. Whereas the run-on lines, with
internal rhyme pattern of “eating” , “opening” and “walking” ( /ˈiː.tɪŋ/, /ˈəʊ.pən.ɪŋ/,
/ˈwɔː.kɪŋ/) of syllables of similar stress bring about a smoother and swifter flow of sounds,
suggesting how one moves inexorably towards the tragic “human position” through ordinary
activities. And yet the rhyming words that sound trite and reflect the banalities of the
everyday world only ironically qualify the abstract “human position”, which is profoundly
tragic in its implications. This is in keeping with the central idea of merging the great poetic
events and mundane, prosaic affairs of the everyday world, which old masters like Brueghel
painted amidst the prosaic banalities. The semantics of the human condition of suffering is
built around four archetypal dramatic scenes like suffering, miraculous birth, martyrdom and
the fall of Icarus, but each of them forms itself amidst the trivia of eating, opening the
window or dully walking, or children skating on the pond, the dogs living their doggy life and
the torturer’s horse rubbing its back. What is brought to the fore is the randomness and the
contingencies of everyday life that do not lend themselves to a definite scheme and purpose,
which the great masters in their classical art have reckoned with even as they have artistically
imagined scenes of archetypal human suffering.
The haphazard commingling of the visuals contingencies and banalities together with
symbolic scenes of archetypal events with epochal dimension characterize the human
conditions of suffering. Such haphazardness has been represented through the sound patterns
of the poem.
As P.V LePage (1973) observes, the poem is irregular in its syllabic
structure and rhyme scheme. In the first stanza which has been quoted, the first three lines
have ten syllables and four regular stresses or accents, while the fourth one has 22 syllables
and eight accents. Thereafter the rest of the poem is irregular in its syllabic feet and accents.
It only smacks vaguely of iambic and anapestic rhythms, but it does not lend itself to any
order. Excepting 7 end-stopped lines the rest are run-on lines that make the rhythm irregular.
As for the rhyme, it appears at first reading as though the poem has no rhyme.
LePage observes:
One perhaps sees “waiting” and “skating” are rhymes. One perhaps hears “wrong”
in the first line chime with “along” in the fourth, perhaps forgot with spot in the
ninth and eleventh lines, “ away” and “may’ in lines fourteen and fifteen seem to
make more sound than any pair of word before – though the lines are enjambed,
both words are accented; “green” and “seen” make the fact of rhyme visual, if not
audible. The scheme never rises above seeming haphazardness in any reading of
the poem, and the haphazardness again helps to give the work the same feeling that
the other comminglings of the poem convey: the merging of great poetic events
with prosaic everyday events. (257)
Let us look at the last lines of the poem:
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
As David Perkins aptly observes, there is a distinct feel of conversational tone
because of the use of colloquial phrasings: ‘must have seen something amazing” and
“somewhere to get to”, and empty phrases such as “for instance” and “quiet leisurely”( 1987:
164). These linguistic elements and their stylistic overtones of colloquialism and
conversational idiom are reinforced by irregular prosody and irregular rhyme that we have
already discussed. The overall effect of such stylistic execution is a rhythm of prose and the
feel of the everyday banal life.
4.3.4 Analysis- 4
The Crossroads
Now we shall move on to Auden’s formal treatment of the sonnet form, and the
phonic qualities of a unique sonnet form he developed. Our example is ‘The Crossroads’, the
third sonnet in a sequence of 20 sonnets under the collective title ‘The Quest” (1940). The
year of the publication of ‘The Quest’ coincided with Auden’s return to Anglo-Catholic
Christianity, from which he had strayed away in youth. In fact the quest motif is recurrent in
many of his poems, of which we have already discussed ‘O Where are You Going?”. It is a
search for order out of chaos and a larger meaning of life the individual must seek to
overcome the condition of alienation he is beset with on account of absence of universal
system of beliefs. Paradoxically, the order he is in search for can be obtained through the
breaking away from the conventional sonnet form.
The Crossroads
Two friends who met here and embraced are gone,
Each to his own mistake; one flashes on
To fame and ruin in a rowdy lie,
A village torpor holds the other one,
Some local wrong where it takes time to die:
This empty junction glitters in the sun.
So at all quays and crossroads: who can tell
These places of decision and farewell
To what dishonour all adventure leads,
What parting gift could give that friend protection,
So orientated his vocation needs
The Bad Lands and the sinister direction?
All landscapes and all weathers freeze with fear,
But none have ever thought, the legends say,
The time allowed made it impossible;
For even the most pessimistic set
The limit of their errors at a year.
What friends could there be left then to betray,
What joy take longer to atone for; yet
Who could complete without the extra day
The journey that should take no time at all?
This poem is a radical experiment with sonnet form. It has 21 lines and three stanzas,
of which the first two have 6 lines each, and the third one has 9 lines. The six-line stanzas are
expansion of quatrains, and the nine-line stanza is an expansion of a standard sestet. Actually,
odd as it may seem as a sonnet, it still maintains its bipartite ratio of the Italian sonnet, as one
can find that a normal octave and sestet have been expanded by half, as it were ( from eight
lines to twelve and six lines to nine) . The six-line stanzas have identical rhyme scheme:
aabcbc in the first being paralleled by ddefef. Lines 1and2, 3 and 5, and 4 and 6 are rhymed.
In fact “formal continuities” of rhymes in the first two stanzas “are matched by
corresponding development of theme”, for the catastrophes met by the two friends have been
seen in larges perspectives through the question raised by the speaker in the send stanza, and
that the crossroads are turning points for journey into an unknown and possibly a “perilous
future”
The first stanza has stress patterns as follows:
(Adames 574).
Two friends who met here and embraced are gone,
Each to his own mistake; one flashes on
To fame and ruin in a rowdy lie,
A village
torpor holds the other one,
Some local wrong where it takes time to die:
This empty junction glitters in the sun.
The first line is a trimester of 3 anapest feet, consisting of two uaccented syllables
followed by an accented syllable of heavy pauses. The stress on ‘gone’ is well-pronounced to
signify a sense of finality. But rhythm changes abruptly in the next line to dactyl (one
stressed syllable followed by two unstressed. Usually, a dactyl has faster movement than
anapest, given the phonetic quality of these feet. Hence, what is suggested here is an
uninterrupted flow of events such as each of them drifting quickly to his own mistake. The
second line ends with unaccented ‘”on”, and therefore runs on to the third one. Again there
is another sharp change in the rhythm of the third line, with most irregular feet, combining
amphibrach, dactyl and cretic.
To fame and( amphibrach)
ruin in a (dactyl)
rowdy lie,( cretic).
Of these, cretic consisting of two stressed syllables enclosing an unstressed syllable is
rather rare in the prosodic scheme of serious English poetry. However, in proverbs and folksongs it is commonly used, as in: “After a while crocodile…” This is, indeed, typically
Audensque. Very rarely have poets shown such skill to compose lines with varying feet and
changing rhythm. Auden gives his reader no scope to anticipate what rhythm his next line
will take. Even in the same line, the metrical measure changes after caesura. For its part the
fourth line is also irregular:
A village (amphibrach)
torpor holds (cretic)
the other one ( four feet amphibrach)
Now this deployment of irregular rhythm is however mitigated by the rhyme scheme
mentioned earlier. While the rhythmic irregularity intensifies the sense of uncertainty as to
the path one will take at the crossroads, the rhymes give a sense of structure, and continuity
of the theme. Further, interesting as it may seem, the second line, which runs on to the third,
marks the continuity of the thought that one of the friends had a meteoric rise and fall.
Similarly, the fourth line runs on to the fifth one producing the effect of the continuity of
thought. Both friends, who are referred to by ‘ones’, follow different paths and meet opposite
fates (one flashed while the other remained in torpor). That is why “one” in the first case is
accented, while in the second case it is unaccented.
Thus, while the rhyming words achieve some order, the irregular stanzaic form of
sonnet and irregular meters counter it with disorder. The central proposition which the
conventional sonnet offers at the end is the speaker’s rhetorical question: “Who could
complete without the extra day/The journey that should take no time at all?” The answer is in
the negative, and, for that reason, the sense of uncertainty persists. As for the extra day that
could have accomplish one’s end and ‘complete’ the journey is an extension, which the
stanzas of this poem have been given in order to be expanded versions of quatrains and
sestets. But such extension intensifies uncertainty and disorderliness rather than reduces
them.
4.3.5 Analysis- 5
Refugee Blues
One can well argue that Auden’s poetics of realism is predicated upon the sense of
uncertainty disorderliness that life signifies. However, it does not amount to mystification.
On the contrary, it makes poetry evocative and suggestive rather than directly denotative.
While writing his poems on war – many of which are very famous – he maintained a critical
perspective on war, a subject which literature had treated in a high style, according to him,
until the outbreak of the World War I. It is against the grand treatment of war accompanied
by the self-assuredness of the literary artist and his high-falutin eloquence on the soldierly
courage, honour and heroism that Auden brought in a low-key and calculatedly unsure
conversational voice, a contemporary idiom. Ballad as well as various folk verse forms and
the “low style” were the elements of style he adopted to give the piquancy of irony to his
poems on the subject of war. In this manner he expressed his sense of doubt about any noble
purpose ever could be served by war. Though the poem “Refugee Blues” that I am going to
discuss is not on the subject of war, it is nevertheless regarded as a war poem, since it is
about the persecution of the Jews in the Nazi ruled Germany during the time of the World
War II.
In March 1939 Auden wrote this poignant poem in which he dealt with the plight of
persecuted German Jews during Hitler’s dictatorship and oppressive regime. The Jews were
rendered homeless in the home country and denied asylum by indifferent democracies.
Though the horror of the Holocaust genocide was yet to be revealed in 1939, Auden could
foresee it clearly.
Refugee Blues
Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's no place for us.
Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you'll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.
In the village churchyard there grows an old yew,
Every spring it blossoms anew:
Old passports can't do that, my dear, old passports can't do that.
The consul banged the table and said,
"If you've got no passport you're officially dead":
But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.
Went to a committee; they offered me a chair;
Asked me politely to return next year:
But where shall we go to-day, my dear, but where shall we go to-day?
Came to a public meeting; the speaker got up and said;
"If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread":
He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me.
Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky;
It was Hitler over Europe, saying, "They must die":
O we were in his mind, my dear, O we were in his mind.
Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin,
Saw a door opened and a cat let in:
But they weren't German Jews, my dear, but they weren't German Jews.
Went down the harbour and stood upon the quay,
Saw the fish swimming as if they were free:
Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.
Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;
They had no politicians and sang at their ease:
They weren't the human race, my dear, they weren't the human race.
Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,
A thousand windows and a thousand doors:
Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.
Stood on a great plain in the falling snow;
Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro:
Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.
Characteristically low in style, “Refugee Blues” employs the features of the ‘blues
songs’, the tradition of which began by the African American slaves who sang in melancholic
tunes and in a specific rhythm their stories of suffering in the plantations, displacement from
home, separation from the family, and deaths of their near and dear ones. Writing his ballad
in adopting the blues rhythm Auden relates the predicament of the refugee German Jews to
the universal theme of human suffering.
The poem consists of 12 stanzas. Each stanza has a simple structure of a rhyming
couplet and a single line refrain, which are repetitive. Thus the overall rhyme scheme is aab.
The repetitive nature of the refrain and the rhyming lines make the poem sound like a ballad.
There is a complete rhyming in all the stanzas of the poem except in stanza 5 in which the
words “chair” and “year” rhyme only partly:
Went to a committee; they offered me a chair;
Asked me politely to return next year: (lines 1&2 Stanza 5)
The stanza form, with its three lines, is also similar to a jazz stanza, the first two lines
of which have a syncopated, dancing beat, while the third line, with its repetition, is the
typical ‘blues’ line. In semantic terms, while the two rhyming lines tell the story, the third
line, the refrain, develops the theme of the poem. To facilitate the development of theme, the
refrain has been variously realized through changing in sound, structure and vocabulary.
Some of these are:
Yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's no place for us (Stanza 1).
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now, my dear,. (Stanza 2)
Old passports can't do that, my dear, old passports can't do that, my dear (Stanza 3)
Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours. (Stanza 11)
Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me. (Stanza 12)
The most interesting thing about the refrains is that these do not sound formulaic as
they do usually in folk songs, or blues. On the contrary, these sound dramatically
conversational and profoundly grief-stricken like someone repeating his words and phrases in
a sad and dejected mood. The repetition of the use of “dear” in the middle of each one of
them, which is an address of endearment, slows down the pace of lines and enhances the
sense of grief. As indicated by the accented syllables that have been underlined in some of
the refrains above, there is no uniformity in rhythm and no regularity in metrical feet;
therefore, the lines do not have easy sing-song effect, but acquire the poignancy of a live
voice that develops stanza by stanza the tragic implication of the homeless Jews.
Even when there are rhymed lines like the following, with regular dactylic feet of one
stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable, the regularity is broken by a pyrrhic
foot in each line such as “in a” and “and a”:
Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin,
Saw a door opened and a cat let in…
Such irregularity caused by pyrrhic feet is a metrical device to produce ludicrous
effect, as evidently what is described is comic irony of poodles and cats being considered by
the Nazis and Hitler as superior to the Jews, and the comedy is black comedy.
When the freedom of the fish is imagined, the unrestrained movement
Went down the harbour and stood upon the quay,
Saw the fish swimming as if they were free:
The rhythm becomes smooth, with metrical regularity of iambic feet in the first line, with a
variation of trochaic feet, with another pyrrhic “as if”
4.3.6 Analysis -6
If I Could Tell You
We have said earlier in this chapter that Auden ceaselessly experimented with stanza
form, meter and rhyme schemes. We shall now see through our analysis of the poem “If I
could Tell You” what treatment Auden makes of the villanelle stanza form, and what
semantic effects his experimentation produces. The poem was published in 1940 and found
place in the anthologies such as Selected Poems (1958) and Collected Shorter Poems 192757(1966).
Villanelle is a French verse form with 19 lines of five three-line stanzas and a
quatrain. It has a rhyme scheme of aba aba aba aba aba abaa, of which the 1st and 3rd lines
from the first stanza are alternately repeated such that the 1st line becomes the last line in the
second stanza, and the 3rd line becomes the last line in the third stanza. Repeated four times
these two lines in fact constitute the subject of the poem. The last two lines of the poem are
lines 1 and 3 respectively, making a rhymed couplet. Further, although villanelle needs no
regularity of metrical feet, nor regular line length, we still find iambic pentameter as the
preferred mode by some poets.
Well known poems like Dowson’s “Villanelle of Acheron”( 1899), Dylan Thoms’s
“Do not Go Gentle into that Night”, or Sylvia Plath’s “Mad Girl’s Love Song” are perfect
examples of villanelle, and each of these poems seems to be obsessed with a basic idea.
Dowson’s poem insists that Acheron, the river of the netherworld, is beyond the pale of the
sun, its light and life. As for the other two poems by Thomas and Plath, the first one
emphasizes the raging passion against the “dying light’ and acceptance of the inevitable end,
i.e., death; the second one, for its part, seems to be obsessed with the longing for an absent
lover and makes neurotic objectification of the speaker’s desire through the other. All poems
of villanelle stanza forms tend to be dramatic monologues. Interesting as it might appear, the
themes in both poems are brought out very well with the help of villanelle stanza form and
rhyme scheme. An almost sledgehammer-like effect produced by the obsessive repetition of
two rhyming lines and their echo-like dispersal across the poems give them a brooding
quality and emotional intensity. Ezra Pound aptly speaks of villanelle as an emotional vortex
from which through its gyrations intellect tries to escape, although fruitlessly. In the
following poem, the repeated lines have been given in bold and italic forms.
If I Could Tell You
Time will say nothing but I told you so,
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.
If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time will say nothing but I told you so.
There are no fortunes to be told, although,
Because I love you more than I can say,
If I could tell you I would let you know.
The winds must come from somewhere when they blow,
There must be reasons why the leaves decay;
Time will say nothing but I told you so.
Perhaps the roses really want to grow,
The vision seriously intends to stay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.
Suppose the lions all get up and go,
And all the brooks and soldier run away;
Will Time say nothing but I told you so?
If I could tell you I would let you know.
As a love poem it affirms the faith in beauty and life in the face of the uncertainties of
the future. It underscores the importance of time in the life of man and the power it holds
over man. As far as rhyming pattern is concerned the poem is a perfect villanelle, with the
usual aba aba aba aba aba abaa scheme being in place. However, Auden drastically changes
the iambic pattern, which we find in Sylvia Plath’s poem. Let’s look at the opening line. It is
the usual Audensque four-beat line, but with highly irregular rhythm as indicated under each
foot:
Time will say nothing but I told
trochee
dactyl
anapest
you so
trochee
The interesting thing is that such irregularity works out perfect contrapuntal
symmetry, with a trochee and iamb at the beginning and end respectively encasing
symmetrically opposite dactyl and anapest feet. On being repeated, the line largely
determines the rhythm. As for the other repetitive line below, we also find that contrapuntal
dactyl and anapest feet encase two trochee feet in between them:
If I could
dactyl
tell you
trochee
I would
trochee
let you know.
anapest
Taken together, the two repetitive lines make an interesting contrapuntal rhythm
between themselves. As said earlier, in a villanelle these repetitive lines constitute the subject
or theme, which the other lines merely elaborate. Here these spell out the theme in its
elaborate form: that time does not say to us anything in advance; fortunes cannot be told;
winds blow and roses grow because they intend to; lions, brooks and the soldiers may as well
vanish for a reason time will not say. All this is what the speaker tells the hearer in addition to
pleading his inability to foretell anything. So, the entire theme boils down to the central
problematic: all one can tell someone else is that time does not say anything; ergo one could
not possibly let him or her know anything in advance of time.
Now let’s turn attention to the fragments of enunciations in both lines: “… but I told
you so…” and “If I could tell you...”. Semantically, the first one has the illocutionary forces
of “allegation” in a, argument, as opposed to the second one that has “apology” – as if one is
apologetic about not being able to perform the desired action. This semantic opposition,
which largely rest upon but (contrastive and conclusive in semantic function) and if
(conditional and hypothetical in semantic function) builds up tension in the poem, is matched
with the contrapuntal rhythm. In each of these lines of the first stanza, the words that are
semantically most important, i.e., “Time”, “say”, “told”, “you” ( first line) and “If”, “tell”,
“know” ( third line) are stressed and therefore phonetically marked out.
As for the pace of the poem we do find opposing tendencies of fast movement as well
as pauses. In a poem enjambment is a common device to hasten one line to the next not only
because a single though is broken into two lines, and no line is a complete thought unit, but
also because the line ending of a run-on line has weak stress and weak pause.
For semantic reason Auden’s use of enjambments in the lines below show the run-on
quality of a thread of argument or a line of logical progression of ideas, owing to the syntax
linkages of “although”, “Because” and “If”. And yet the flow is arrested by “although”, a
strong qualifier in heavy parenthesis:
There are no fortunes to be told, although,
Because I love you more than I can say,
If I could tell you I would let you know.
From the point of view of rhythm, the line “Time will say nothing but I told you so”
has weak stress on “so”. As a result the second and fourth stanzas seem to run easily and fast
into the third and fifth stanzas respectively. On the contrary, “If I could tell you I would let
you know”, with heavy stress on “know”, arrests movement from the first and third stanzas to
second and fourth stanzas respectively.
The overall semantic effects produced are those of an intellectually over-wrought self,
struggling logically with the ifs and buts without possibilities of release from the anxiety
about the inability to know the future. Thematically it describes a situation of impasse, which
it works out through sound as well. It is very clever of Auden to suitably modify the opening
line as a rhetorical question in the last four-line stanza, so that he creates a new stress pattern,
which is contrapuntal thus:
Will time say nothing but I told you so?
Trochee
amphibrach
cretic
iambic
What is gained here is a heavy stress on “so”. Therefore the last two lines of the poem
with stress falling on the rhyming words so/know arrest the pace of the poem to a grinding
halt, as it were, and pronouncing that it is a situation of impasse:
Will Time say nothing but I told you so?
If I could tell you I would let you know.
Needless to say, alliteration and assonance enrich the euphonic qualities of poetry. To
merely point out cases of alliteration and assonance in stylistic analysis means little or
nothing, for our sole business is to analyse and demonstrate how these contribute to the
meaning of a poem and can serve as an interpretive cue while reading it.
I have already demonstrated that the contrapuntal rhythm and the tension between
the quick and arrested movements of lines in ‘If I could Tell You’ build up a situation of
impasse, which is also thematically supported. In this context the preponderant pattern of
assonance such as the repetition of /aɪ/ in /taɪm/ /praɪs/ and /aɪ/, and /əʊ/ in /nəʊ/ /səʊ/, /ʃəʊ/,
/bləʊ/ /ɡrəʊ/ /ɡəʊ/, /təʊld/, /səˈpəʊz/, /rəʊzɪz/ seem to produce a sense of phonetic enclosure,
as it were from which the speaker struggles to escape.
4.3.7 Analysis-7
The More Loving One
Now I shall move on to the analysis of the sound patterns of the later poetry of
Auden. Many critics believed that the later poetry of Auden is less appealing than his early
poetry. Frederick P. W. McDowell’s observation in this regard is a case in point:
There is reason perhaps to regard the poetry of the later Auden with some of this
indifference. His output has been slight. He has not written nothing as arresting as
New Year Letter (1941), The Sea and the Mirror (1944), or The Age of Anxiety
(1947); nor have his individual collections of shorter poems had the weight of On
This Island (1937), Journey to a War (1939), Another Time (1940), and above all
The Collected Poetry (1945). His earlier work has overshadowed all that he has
done since, and is possibly of greater importance. So many of his poems in The
Collected Poetry have become standard that it may be difficult to envision a poet
adding to a canon so sharply defined and in itself so authoritative. Auden's defects,
moreover, have not been entirely eliminated in his later verse. We find, at least
intermittently, a philosophical glibness, a coyness of style, a lumbering
facetiousness, a recondite vocabulary, and a slackness in phrasing and thought.(29)
However, if we take Auden’s later poetry collections, Homage to Clio (1960), we find
the poems dealing with the problematic nature of companionship, responsibilities,
adaptability of humans to adversely changing circumstances, alienation from nature etc. show
the same intellectual energy and virtuosity of Auden with regard to meter and rhythm. This
volume of poem shows a marked predilection for the four-stress line, even his decasyllables
and free rhythms tending to turn into the Old English strong stress meter. Many of the poems
like “The More Loving One” acquire an uncannily cryptic quality, and in a terse style suggest
the ambivalent nature of humans, at once savage and capable of being attuned to the
intimations of the divine. Its meter lends to the poem” an old air of off-hand naturalness’
(Sandeen 380)
The More Loving One
Looking up 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 think 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.
The poem is composed of four stanzas, each of which is a four-lined quatrain. The
rhyme scheme used by the poet is a simple format of “aabb”, and this format continues
throughout. The poem is set to iambic feet of variable syllables. The number of feet also
varies from three to four. While the regularity of the stanza form and rhyme lend to this
philosophically loaded and overwhelmingly reflective poem an epigrammatic orderliness, but
such order gets broken through the variation of syllabic number serving the purpose of
producing the effect of a speaking voice that enounces various kinds of speech acts to drive
home to the listener a certain ethical position and a philosophical attitude he would develop.
For example, he introduces a philosophical hypothesis by way of the illocution of suggestion
thus:
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.
These lines consist of two propositions combining as one speech act, with the
illocutionary force of making suggestion of a hypothetical case where it becomes impossible
to return passion to someone who showers it on one. Evidently, these clinch the central
argument of the poem that the “more loving one” should be the speaker himself.
Interestingly, the irregularity of the syllables: 9, 11, 9, 8 produce the effect of a live voice,
speaking in iambic measure of stressed and unstressed syllables of English rhythm, and the
natural cadence of spoken language of everyday world has been made possible through the
variable number of feet. Were it not so, such effect would have been lost. Because of the
voice that is conversational, persuasive and argumentative vis-à-vis an implied audience, the
illocutionary force strikes the convincing note for the proposition that the speaker ought to be
the loving one. He should rather be the loving one not for satisfying ego, but for fulfilling the
ethical obligation of loving others, irrespective of their not loving.
Auden’s analysis of relationships and love for humanity is measured on the basis of
emotional proximity and reciprocity of affection. What is brought to fore is the contrast
between the distance of the stars from the speaker and their indifference on the one hand and
his nearness to humans, notwithstanding the cruelty and violence they are capable of. On the
later Auden the influence of Anglican Christianity was profound and filled with creative
possibilities of finding new themes and forms of expressing them. All through his life as a
poet he dealt with the problematic nature of his homosexuality, which was to be kept private
and under guard, and gravitated towards public issues of politics, morality and ethics. In his
later phase of life, as this poem exemplifies, Christianity helped him to develop agape, the
highest form of Christian love, which involves compassion, selfless love for others despite
their indifference. He should learn, as he says, to look at an empty sky, devoid of stars, and
still be overwhelmed by its dark sublimity. It is this supreme moment for which he seems to
be preparing himself.
The patterns of alliteration and assonance, which become conspicuous in the last
stanza, structure the ideas of time, death and transcendence.
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.
The alliterative words: “disappear” and “die” are almost synonymous and do play
upon the ambiguity of non-presence. These are significant in the poetic vocabulary of
Auden’s poetic vocabulary, for they hark us back to the opening line of “In Memory of W.B.
Yeats (1939)’: “He disappeared in the dead of winter…” Similarly, the rhyming pairs such as
die/sky and sublime/time are semantically related. Death and emptiness, particularly of the
sky, seem to be established in Christian eschatological tradition as cosemous ideas. As for
sublimity, the idea of transcendence is strongly suggested, which draws contrast with time,
and this way sublime/time are related. As for the repetition of the vowel sound /aɪ/ in words
like /daɪ/, /skaɪ/, /səˈblaɪm/, /maɪt/ and /taɪm/, the device of assonance only reinforces the
sense relations among the words just discussed.
4.3.8 Analysis- 8 River Profile
As mentioned earlier “River Profile”( 1966) is a later poem by Auden, which is
remarkable for its experimentation with syllabic verses. Published in the anthology entitled
City Without Walls (1969), it consists of 12 rapid stanzas of quatrains. It is grouped among
Sapphic poems, namely “Fairground”, “The Garrison” and “Circe”. It traces the course of
human life from conception to death through an extended metaphor of a river. As the
epigraph makes it evident, Auden owes the metaphor of river to Novalis. There is a flow of
adjectives and nouns that describe the river’s genesis from a mountain storm, its flow through
the hills countries and industrial cities to a delta. The dissolution or death of the river is
suggested through its evaporation and condensation: “image of death/ as a spherical dew-drop
of life”. What is
invoked is the idea of a life cycle, which leads to an allusive reflection on the religious
doctrine of resurrection of the body:
Unlovely
monsters, our tales believe, can be translated
too, even as water, the selfless mother
of all especials.
The Sapphics consist of Sapphic stanzas of 4 lines. Of these the first two are
hendecasyllabic or 11 syllables, and the third line beginning with as many syllables continues
with five additional syllables in a line called Adonic or adonean lines. Although the original
Greek Sapphics were composed of fixed syllables and quantitative meter, English Sapphics in
hands of Ezra pound, John Frederick Nims, Rudyard Kipling, Allen Ginsberg, W,H. Auden
etc. have been composed their Sapphic poems in terms of accentual meters that are
determined by the patterns of stress and unstress. As shown below, the u ( unstressed
syllable),
(stressed syllable) and X( free syllable) work out the original Sapphic.
-u -
x
- u u -
u - -
- u -
x
- u u -
u - -
- u -
x
- u u -
u - -
- u u - u
But in the accentual pentameter in English convert each of the lines into two trochees, one
dactyl and two more trochees.
Auden brings about still many more changes to the number of syllables and
rhythm in various lines, which have been subjected to scansion. But first the full poem:
River Profile
Our body is a moulded river
—Novalis
Out of a bellicose fore-time, thundering
head-on collisions of cloud and rock in an
up-thrust, crevasse-and-avalanche, troll country,
deadly to breathers,
it whelms into our picture below the melt-line,
where tarns lie frore under frowning cirques, goat-bell,
wind-breaker, fishing-rod, miner’s-lamp country,
already at ease with
the mien and gestures that become its kindness,
in streams, still anonymous, still jumpable,
flows as it should through any declining country
in probing spirals.
Soon of a size to be named and the cause of
dirty in-fighting among rival agencies,
down a steep stair, penstock-and-turbine country,
it plunges ram-stam,
to foam through a wriggling gorge incised in softer
strata, hemmed between crags that nauntle heaven,
robber-castle, tow-rope portage-way country,
nightmare of merchants.
Disembogueing from foot-hills, now in hushed meanders,
now in riffling braids, it vaunts across a senile
plain, well-entered, chateau-and-ciderpress country,
its regal progress
gallanted for a while by quibbling poplars,
then by chimneys: led off to cool and launder
retort, steam-hammer, gasometer country,
it changes color.
Polluted, bridged by girders, banked with concrete,
now it bisects a polyglot metropolis,
ticker-tape, taxi, brothel, footlights country,
à-la-mode always.
Broadening or burrowing to the moon’s phases,
turbid with pulverized wastemantle, on through
flatter, duller, hotter, cotton-gin country,
it scours, approaching
the tidal mark where it puts off majesty,
disintegrates, and through swamps of a delta,
punting-pole, fowling-piece, oyster-tongs country,
wearies to its final
act of surrender, effacement, atonement
in a huge amorphous aggregate no cuddled
attractive child ever dreams of, non-country,
image of death as
a spherical dew-drop of life. Unlovely
monsters, our tales believe, can be translated
too, even as water, the selfless mother
of all especials.
In this poem 26 lines are syllabically fixed as Sapphic lines should be. The rest 12
out of the total number of 48 lines have been found to be syllabically irregular. They have
been scanned thus:
Line 5
it whelms into
our pic ture below
The melt –( line
Line 8
alread y at ease (with
Line 11
flows as it should through a ny
12/5
5 or 6/2
Decli ning coun(try
12/5
Line 14
dirty in-fighting among rival agencies
12 ?
Line 17
to foam through a wrig gling gorge incised
in sof(ter
Line 21
Disembo guing from foot hills, now
mean(ders
12/5
in hushed
13/5
Line 22 now in riff ling braids, it vaunts across a se(nile
12/5
Line 23 X plain, well-en tered, chateau – and ci- der- press country
12/5
Line 30
12/5
now it bisects a pol yglot metro( polis
Line 33 Broadening or bur rowing to the moon’s pha(ses
Line 40 wearies to its fi(nal
12/5
5 or 6/2
Line 42 in a huge amor phous ag gregate, no cud( dled
12/5
In the above scansion of the syllabically deviant lines, which Victioria Arana does
( 232-235) , she finds the rhythms are pretty regular as all lines are pentameters or dimeters
except line 14. Lines 21 and 22 begin with unusual cretic feet, with an unaccented syllable
flanked by accented ones. She observes that the accentual syllabic meter prompts one to scan
the first foot of each of these lines as a trisyllable, and reasonably so, for wrongly interpreting
‘Disembo and “now in riff as anapests( unaccented, unaccented and accented). Even scanned
as beginning with amphimacers( a trisyllabic metrical foot having an unaccented or short
syllable between two accented or long syllables), the lines may tally as pentameters.
Line 14 offers greater difficulty. Its disorderly rhythm does not lend it to a
pentameter. However, if we mark the units of rising rhythm, we get:
X dir ty in – fighting among ri val a( gencies
It is not a very satisfactory scansion “because it keeps threatening to break down into a series
of trochees and dactyls, and we cannot stress the syllables in any other way” (Arana 234).
Further, the two-line end, unstressed syllables suggest a sixth foot, even though these may be
understood as extrametrical:
dirty
in-fighting
among
rival agencies
So it is the unorthodox scansion, which is the best, since it suggests through the
turbulent rhythm of “dirty”, “in-fighting” and “agencies” and portrays the reality of
disturbance. The feet in the falling rhythm sabotage the foot meter.
Most of the irregularities in “River profile” are syllabic, but the lines in which they
occur are pretty regular either as foot verse or as stress verse. “The converse rule ( lines
accentual-syllabically irregular must conform to a syllabic, or stress, pattern) is exemplified
by the poem (234).
Line 41 can never be construed as a pentameter, observes Arana: “act of / surren/der,
efface/ment, atone(ment” , since it has 4 feet and 11 syllables. Metrically and lexically as
well, the line communicates a shrinking back from full stature, while it claims prosodic
legitimacy by virtue of its strict adherence to the syllabic requirement, the Sapphic eleven
syllables.
The strict meter of the Sapphic, with effects of starts and pauses created out of
stressed and unstressed syllables do create a sense of forcefulness and urgency. The X
syllable ( the unstressed free syllable) at the centre of the line offers a heavy caesura. The
fourth line, which is shorter in length, seems to be summative or conclusive in effect, at least
in Auden’s case. These closely match the eddy and turbulent flow of the river as well as the
obstructions it faces.
One more interesting stylistic feature of the poem is the phonetic quality of the words.
One notices that in this poem Auden also makes bold experiment with lexis, with passion and
restless energy. The words “frore” transcribed as / frɔː/ as found in line 6, is an archaic form
of “frozen”, having been derived from “froren”, the past participle of the Old English
“frēosan” or “to freeze”. It is a stylistic choice of a lexeme for the purpose of quantitative
syllabic regularity that would be disturbed if the sound would be /frəʊzən/, with an extra
syllable. Similarly, in line 5 of the same stanza the unusual and rather archaic use of
“whelms” (derived from Middle English “whelmen”, to overturn, which is in turn a probable
alteration of the Old English ‘hwelfan’ meaning to cover over) . As has already been
discussed, the line shows 12 syllables of accentual pentameter, which conflicts with the
Sapphic scheme of 11 syllables.
In the last two lines: “the selfless mother/ of all especials”, we find the use of
‘especials” as a deviation, as it is used as a noun in order to avoid the use of “especially’,
which would again have disturbed the syllabic number of the fourth line of the 12th stanza of
the poem.
The preponderance of hyphenated compound nouns such as “fore-time”, “crevasseand- avalanche”, “wind-breaker”, “fishing-rod”, “miner’s-lamp”, “penstock –and- turbine”,
“robber-baron”, ‘tow-rope’, “portage-way”, “well-entered”, “chateau – and – cider – press”,
“steam –hammer”, “ticker-tape”, “foot-lights”, “cotton-gin”, “punting – hole” , “fowlingpiece”, “oyster-tongs”, “non-country”, “dew-drop” is deliberate.
As we have seen, Auden adopts the format of Sapphic syllabic meter on the one hand
and breaks it with his accentual meter on the other. As seen earlier, line 23 has 12 syllables
and five feet with unusual scansion, all because Auden wants to maintain the syllable timed
rhythm of the Sapphic verses, although in practice he follows an accentual format with most
unusual pauses that are compounded by the hyphens and punctuation:
plain, well-en tered, chateau – and ci - der- press country
The effect produced is one of restless, turbulent flow of the river that gets obstructed.
Many of these compound nouns, with their patterns of alliteration and assonance, produce a
ludicrous sing-song effect with a mocking intent on the part of the speaker, who debunks
crass commercialism of cities, shallowness of urban life, exploitation of natural resources
driven by human greed, rise of the factories and the pollution caused by them are the issues
the speaker addresses in subtle mocking humour. This is an important component of
meaning, notwithstanding the philosophical reflection of life as a river.
As this chapter shows, Auden is a ceaseless experimenter of stanza forms, prosody
and rhyme. His stylistic choice of sound components does structure meaning. In the next
chapter, we shall see how the syntactic properties of Auden’s poems serve as features of his
style and inform meaning.
***
Syntax As Style
5.1 Introduction
Syntax is the schema of linguistic structures at the level of phrases, clauses and
sentences. Nowottny (1962) asserts that syntax is one of the most powerful elements which
are necessary to make a sequence of words or utterances meaningful due to its important role
in controlling the order in which impressions are received and conveying the mental
relationship behind sequences of words. Words are like the beads of a rosary. Once they are
arranged in a beautiful order, a beautiful rosary will be obtained. This image represents the
role of the syntax in poetry as that cunning arrangement of words, phrases, clauses etc in a
given piece of poetry. It is considered to be something important for both the poet and the
critic since it operates as a cause of poetical pleasure and produces strong effects, however,
remain explicable as far as the power of syntax is not discovered (10).
Linguistics has syntax as a major area of study, and a huge body of syntax theory has
already emerged over the years. Many of these seek to analyze and describe syntactic
structures – as the Structuralists did – and also theorize generation of syntax in tandem with
meaning, which Chomsky has been doing since Syntactic Structures(1957) till date, while
moving through various TG paradigms to that of Minimalist Programme. Structuralist
theories were rejected by TG theories because the former treated structure as isolated from
meaning. The later theories developed by Chomsky and fellow TG grammarians took a more
inclusive view of Linguistics as a study of the structure of meaning as well as sentences.
Thus, notwithstanding their differences as to how to describe syntax in the most economic
and effective way, the TG theories underline the interface and mutual dependency of the
essentially two independent levels of semantics and syntax at which language is organized.
These theories are structuralist and semanticist in a more nuanced way because of their study
of the Deep Structure and its relations with the Surface Structure. Stylistics has immensely
benefitted from the scholarly studies of scholars like Richard Ohmann (1964, 1966, 1967), J.
P. Thorne (1965, 1970), Samuel R. Levin (1965, 1967), to name only a few. While Thorne
argues that a mentalistic grammar can provide an adequate basis for stylistics, with clear
indebtedness to Chomskyan linguistics, Ohman emphasizes in the seminal essay “Generative
Grammar and the Concept of Litarary Style’ (1964) the centrality of transformational
approach in literary styles, according to which stylistic choices are to be treated as the
exploitation of language structures to fulfill expressive possibilities, and moves on to say:
A generative grammar with a transformational component provides apparatus for
breaking down a sentence in a stretch of discourse into underlying kernel
sentences (or strings, strictly speaking) and for specifying the grammatical
operations that have been performed upon them. It also permits the analyst to
construct, from the same set of kernel sentences. These may reasonably be thought
of as alternatives to the original sentence, in that they are simply different
constructs out of the identical elementary grammatical units. Thus the idea of
alternative phrasings, which is crucial to the notion of style, has a clear analogue
within the framework of a transformational grammar. (430-431).
For his part, Levin talks about deviation from the linguistic norm as stylistic choice
and the generativeness of the stylized poetic form.
Syntax, which represents the structure of words, phrases, clause and sentence, is
operated by a principle of structural combination to embody meaning. But the combination is
not linear, but it is by way of embedding of smaller combination into larger combinations at
successive stages and through transformations that militate against the principle of linear
ordering. As for meaning, it inheres in communally shared information, ideas,
presuppositions, expectations and cultural values, and signified trough the culturally coded
systems, of which language is one. It is inferred from utterances produced according to the
communicative protocols that are collectively agreed upon. Syntax brings to bear upon the
culturally shared information, ideas and sentiments its principles of lexicalization,
compression, linearization, ellipsis, thematization and cohesion, and structures them for
textual representation. Modes of representation can be either non-literary and non-aeasthetic
on the one hand, and literary and aesthetic on the other. The aesthetic and literary
representation can have its principles and methods, according to the form or genre it belongs
to, whether lyric and epic in poetry, or in prose fiction such as short story or the novel, or
drama. Whether the mode of representation is realistic, allegorical, symbolic, imagistic, or
whether it is lyrical, polemical, aphoristic in its rhetoricity are questions of literary taxonomy,
which have a bearing upon the syntactic structure of the text and its cultural context. Poetry
as a genre, with its formal variations, its tropes will inflect the linguistic analysis of syntax
and its stylistic implications. Styntactic structure is to be regarded as a stylistic choice for
representation of poetic meaning, as syntactic choices in poetry are thematized and these
define a poem’s metaphysical, psychological and historical aspects. So what is suggested here
is a comprehensive and holistic critical approach to literary text that involves a close
encounter with the linguistic and formal aspects of the text on one hand, and aesthetic
appreciation of the txt on the other hand. According to Cureton (1980), both literary critics
and linguistic critics seem to fail to connect their knowledge to the text because literary
critics "overly biased towards content, tend to emphasize other aspects of poetic form and
thus avoid discussing these effects altogether" (318). Linguistic critics, on the other hand,
"overly biased towards formal description, tend to produce analyses which have little bearing
on the actual source of the reader's aesthetic response to a text" (318).
Francis (1964) finds that though a linguistic analysis of syntax provides a better
understanding of a literary text, critics, when conducting their analyses, "are likely disregard
syntax almost wholly" (515). Most people, Francis adds, "aren't really aware of how many
syntactic ambiguities there are, especially in written English, where punctuation only
partially makes up for the absence of prosodic features" (517). Such lack of knowledge is the
reason why both the reader and the critic, who view syntax as "a harmless necessary drudge,
… will be at a loss to understand why a passage affects them as it does and a loss to do
critical justice to its art" (Nowttony 10). Thus, the contribution of syntactic means and
patterns to the meaning of a literary text can not be denied. It is taken for granted that the
poet's organization of this language is responsible for creating unusual effects. But, to say that
"something called 'poetic effect' is dependent upon style is one thing; to demonstrate how this
is quite another" (Baker 1967:4).
Though the arrangement of words and phrases in verse writing helps determine style,
few writers have been interested in the significance of syntax. Press, however, expresses his
belief concerning the impact of syntax stating that "the fundamental importance of syntax in
poetry has seldom been understood or even discussed by the majority of critics who have
preferred to meander through the more picturesque by ways of dictions". For him, "the poet's
syntax is almost more important than his vocabulary"(1958:14).
Recently, many scholars try to benefit from methods and techniques of linguistic
studies in the field of understanding and interpreting literary texts. Freeman, for instance,
expresses his attitude concerning the importance of syntax in the analysis of literary texts
stating that the poet's manipulation of syntactic means and patterns "not only reflect cognitive
preferences but fundamental principles of artistic designs by which the poet orders the world
that is the poem" (1975:20). He believes that the discovery of the poetic design begins with
the discovery of the linguistic strategies. Freeman asserts that the most important part for this
poetic design is "… syntactic foregrounding, the exploitation by the poet, at points crucial to
a poem's thematic structure, of rarely used rules of the language," or by "the creation of
syntactic texture in a poem by motivated use of particular structures in a disproportionately
high frequency compared with that encoun-tered in non-poetic language" (20). In this way, a
linguistic analysis includes a particular technique that is used to demonstrate that important
part which is "foregrounded exceptional manipulation of syntax, blendings but not breaches
of the rules" (Fowler 1975:6). Indeed, it is for this reason that Freeman says that the
foregrounded syntactic features are what matter most, for "one doesn't want to know every
syntactic fact about a poem; one wants to know the significant ones, where significant units
means essential to the poem's design" (Freeman 21).
While writing a poem, a poet tends to manipulate a range of syntactic means and
structures to produce the effect of imitation the situation he refers to. Epstein provides an
account of syntactic mimeses when he argues that, in the process of producing language, the
speaker first "constructs a lexical constellation which mimes a state of affair; the constellation
then is realized in linear and segmental form syntactically”. The choice and disposition of
linear segments may be either automatic or conscious. Automatic disposition results in
writing causal prose in the sense that "no principle of selection operating among its linear
element other than the style of the speaker or writer, whereas conscious disposition
constitutes, by its arrangement of syntactic and phonological linear elements of form, the
poetic function…"( 1975:4).
What emerges from the brief overview of statements made by linguists is that
significant syntactic arrangements are stylistically motivated and semantically rich. These
make up for the textual ‘content’, together with the patterns of lexis and sound; if at all poetry
has at all any content. This in fact runs counter to the standard belief that themes, sentiments,
tones etc are the content, to be explored by the critic, although in reality these are categories
of the perception and experience of poetry. For his part, Epstein (1975) defines content in
terms of the styles of representation, namely mimetic and non-mimetic. As regards mimetic
representation, it is divided into two types: objective mimesis and subjective mimeis.
Objective mimesis is restricted to imitation of the "psychological processes involved in the
apprehension of phenomena external to the consciousness of the observer as well as the
linealy successive phenomena them-selves". Subjective mimesis, on the other hand, involves
imitation of personal sequences of emotions and it is the subtlest, most valuable and most
difficult to achieve (50). The close syntactic analysis of a poem, Epstein adds, "reveals
complex mimetic schemata which reinforce and convey the subjective state to the
reader"(60).
Accordingly, the poet's experiences, feeling, sequences of emotions and states can be
clearly effected or imitated through his cunning employment of his particular range of
syntactic structures. Cureton (1980) believes that the poet’s manipulation of syntactic
structures and patterns may create a considerable number of stylistic effects of syntax. Some
major types of such effects are as follows;
1- 'Iconic syntax' a means by which the poets "shape the formal and/or the spatiotemporal structure of the syntax so that …… it 'resembles' the situation to which the
syntax refers" (Ibid: 320). In this case the poet exploits particular combination of
words and in order to imitate or depict spatial or temporal juxtaposition. In other
words, he can "scramble words to indicate situational confusion, inverts word to
indicate thematic inversion"(318).
2- Rhetorical Emphasis: Many ways are followed by the poet in order to achieve the
effect of using to increase the perceptional prominence of signs to direct the attention
to their conceptual content. Among these words are: syntactic version, syntactic
pivots, syntactic breaks etc (318).
3- Structures to lead the reader to the referents of the noun phrase: The impact of using
nominal structure lies in their ability to destroy "the narrative, assertive force of the
statement Nominal Syntax: As regards the nominal function of syntax, the poet can
use syntactic in a poem" leaving "the reader in a direct confrontation with the bare
referents of the noun phrases"(322).
4-
Syntactic Tension: A poet can exploit the temporal dimension of the syntax by
"setting up structural expectations at one point in a complex structure and then
delaying the satisfaction of these expectations until some later point in that structure"
(322).
5-
Syntactic Ambiguity: syntax may be used to present two different contextually
appropriate units. This device enables the poet to exploit different structures in order
to create syntactic ambiguity :
Dependent clauses that can modify either a preceding or following clause; verbs
which can be either transitive or intransitive, dynamic main verbs or stative passive
participles; genitive constructions which can be interpretive as either subjective or
objective genitives; clauses that can be read as either subjective-objective or objectverb-subject; and so forth. ( 325)
6-
Syntactic Parallelism: Syntax can be used as "an indexical frame to compare or
contrast the meaning of lexical items or phrases which appear in equivalents structural
positions in syntactically parallel clauses"(326).
7-
Semantic Tension: Temporal dimensions of syntactic struc-tures can be used to
"exploit what readers know about the semantic interpretation of finished syntactic
structures by setting up semantic expectations (i.e, presuppositions) and then
frustrating these presuppositions later on"(324).
One deduces from the foregoing theoretical discussion that syntax is both the resource
for meaning and clue for interpreting them. It is the apparatus for the representation of ideas
and feelings through various structural devices that merit keen attention. In this chapter I
shall attempt syntactical analysis of some of Auden’s poems. The texts shall be cited in the
full, as has been done in the previous chapter, followed by syntactical analysis in each case.
5.2 Syntactical Analysis of Auden’s Poems
5.2.1 Analysis-1
That Night When Joy Began
That night when joy began
Our narrowest veins to flush,
We waited for the flash
Of morning’s levelled gun.
But morning let us pass,
And day by day relief
Outgrows his nervous laugh,
Grown credulous of peace.
As mile by mile is seen
No trespasser’s reproach,
And love’s best glasses reach
No fields but are his own.
This short poem was written by Auden in November 1931. It has been included in the
Collected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson. The poem has an air of anxiety and tension,
although one does not know for sure whether it is because of a war looming large over the
people who wish to make the most of an apparently safe and mirthful night, or it is about the
fear of a terrible punishment (death penalty) awaiting the lovers after stolen moments of
guilty sexual pleasures at night.
Even as silence and peace which provide solace to some, these are the source of
suspicion for others. In this poem there is this sneaking suspicion that appearances are
deceptive, and danger lurks beneath silence and peace. As conflicting categories of
knowledge, the “real” and “virtual”, create confusion among the people, the peculiar syntax
seems to raise more questions than it answers them. Whose nervous laugh? Who outgrows
his laugh and has become credulous of peace? Who is the trespasser, whether the lover/lovers
or someone else whom the lovers fear?
In the middle of the line are a couple of principal caluses: “We waited for the flash/
Of morning’s levelled gun” and “But morning let us pass”. Like all principal clauses that
contain the main ideas in sentences – which is a basic semantic principle – the main clauses
in fact tell us the gist of the poem that a danger apprehended does not materialize. But the
subordinate clauses complicate the subject, for the danger remains very much so, unabated.
The first stanza offers a very interesting structure in that “That night”, the adverbial, which
occurs at the beginning, actually qualifies not merely the main clause “We waited for the
flash of morning’s leveled gun”, but also the adverb clause “When joy began/our narrowest
veins to flush”. It can be diagrammatically represented thus:
When joy began our narrowest veins to flush
That night
We waited for the flash of morning’s leveled gun.
“That night” becomes the “marked theme” of the sentence. As Quirk and Greenbaum have
said, the initial part of a clause is the theme, and the most important part of a message, while
the rest of it is the information focus. It becomes “marked", only when if it is an adverbial
and may occur at a backward position and can be brought to the front (411-412). Assuming
enormous semantic importance as the marked theme, it seems to be the intense moment of
time synchronizing both acts of waiting and love making, as it were.
Further, we also find a highly unusual use of the verb “flush” in the lines:
That night when joy began
Our narrowest veins to flush.
We are made to speculate if it has two components that have been nestled into one another,
and one of them is:
1. “when ___________began our narrowest veins to flush, where “our narrowest veins”
is the subject and “began” , the verb precedes it, moving as it does from a later
position:” began to flush”
2. “when joy began__________ to flush”
This is deliberate on Auden’s part to facilitate a fusion of the senses of “joy” and “our
narrowest veins” so that both items become inseparable. The “flushed” lovers, with obvious
erotic connotations, also become the embodiment of joy. What is effected is ambiguity of
meaning, which, however, suggests the richness of the experience of joy, apprehension,
anxiety and sexual excitement.
Later in the poem we also encounter problem as to whom does “his” refer to in the
following lines, and who is grown” credulous of peace”.
But morning let us pass,
And day by day relief
Outgrows his nervous laugh,
Grown credulous of peace.
Very likely “morning” is the subject to which ‘his” refers, and it is “morning” which
has grown “credulous”. Indeed, if “that night” assumes thematic importance in the previous
stanza, then morning, its semantic opposite, ought to be the theme, and subject, which brings
relief in this stanza.
On the other hand, could the subject as well be the partner of the speaker – a
homosexual male in the light of Auden’s personal life? Considering that homosexuality was a
criminal act in the 1930s in England, the ominous overtones of “morning’s leveled gun” in
terms of a terrible punishment looks justified. Here the fusion between morning and a lover
takes place, and both express relief.
The third stanza begins with a conditional clause in which an adverbial of time “ mile
by mile” is thematized, since transposition of adverbial and verb takes place there. This
thematization of space is a contrast to the thematization of the adverbial of time “that night”
in the first stanza. Here too we confront an ambiguity as to who the trespasser is. Secondly,
the last line is syntactically very unusual because of the verb “are’:
And love’s best glasses reach
No fields but are his own.
Had it not been there, the clause would have read “And love’s best glasses reach no fields but
his own”. The last line of the poem would have been alright, had it been a separate clause,
and had not occurred as the object of the verb “reach”. Given the peculiar pattern we have to
guess if the speaker is saying that the lovers glasses are not “field glasses’, but his “own”
spectacles. Field glasses or binoculars give excellent view of distant objects, on the contrary
spectacles can suggest myopia. Our guess seems reasonable.
In the immensity of space and safety no trespasser’s reproach’ is seen because
“Love’s best glasses” are suggested as short-sighted. The poet has ironically qualified “best”
since “Love’s best glasses reach/No fields but are his own” this short-sightedness indicates
that love is not alert or vigilant. It believes what it sees and accepts it as real. It never looks
beyond it or ever apprehends the future.
The conventional expectations that a morning should offer are contrasted to the harsh
reality it presents in the poem. This is the reality of violence and bloodshed that stares one in
the face. This reality is only apprehended by those having foresight. But those having “the
narrowest veins” are so much charmed by the illusion of “night” that they have no sense of
the impending danger at day-break. The night which is deceptive and creates the illusion of
peach and safety overshadows the “reality” of the ‘morning; and creates an atmosphere of
apparent safety.
The violation of conventional expectation and a sense of uncertainty about the future
have been represented through the scrambled syntax and clauses that have been nestled into
one another.
The full stops used at the end of the first two stanzas create an illusion that it is the
end, but then there is a continuation of thoughts and ideas in the following stanza. The first
stanza runs into the second stanza even after the full stop (.). This is because the second
stanza begins with ‘but’. And the second stanza appears to end with the full stop but
continues into the third stanza beginning with “as”. In the common man’s perception there is
peace. The full stop draws an apparent conclusion indicating the deceptive “peace” but “we”
having enough of foresight apprehend the future and look beyond the “lover’s best glasses”.
5.2.2 Analysis 2
Spain" -1937
Yesterday all the past. The language of size
Spreading to China along the trade-routes; the diffusion
Of the counting-frame and the cromlech;
Yesterday the shadow-reckoning in the sunny climates.
Yesterday the assessment of insurance by cards,
The divination of water; yesterday the invention
Of cartwheels and clocks, the taming of
Horses. Yesterday the bustling world of the navigators.
Yesterday the abolition of fairies and giants,
the fortress like a motionless eagle eyeing the valley,
the chapel built in the forest;
Yesterday the carving of angels and alarming gargoyles;
The trial of heretics among the columns of stone;
Yesterday the theological feuds in the taverns
And the miraculous cure at the fountain;
Yesterday the Sabbath of witches; but to-day the struggle
Yesterday the installation of dynamos and turbines,
The construction of railways in the colonial desert;
Yesterday the classic lecture
On the origin of Mankind. But to-day the struggle.
Yesterday the belief in the absolute value of Greek,
The fall of the curtain upon the death of a hero;
Yesterday the prayer to the sunset
And the adoration of madmen. but to-day the struggle.
As the poet whispers, startled among the pines,
Or where the loose waterfall sings compact, or upright
On the crag by the leaning tower:
"O my vision. O send me the luck of the sailor."
And the investigator peers through his instruments
At the inhuman provinces, the virile bacillus
Or enormous Jupiter finished:
"But the lives of my friends. I inquire. I inquire."
And the poor in their fireless lodgings, dropping the sheets
Of the evening paper: "Our day is our loss. O show us
History the operator, the
Organiser. Time the refreshing river."
And the nations combine each cry, invoking the life
That shapes the individual belly and orders
The private nocturnal terror:
"Did you not found the city state of the sponge,
"Raise the vast military empires of the shark
And the tiger, establish the robin's plucky canton?
Intervene. O descend as a dove or
A furious papa or a mild engineer, but descend."
And the life, if it answers at all, replied from the heart
And the eyes and the lungs, from the shops and squares of the city
"O no, I am not the mover;
Not to-day; not to you. To you, I'm the
"Yes-man, the bar-companion, the easily-duped;
I am whatever you do. I am your vow to be
Good, your humorous story.
I am your business voice. I am your marriage.
"What's your proposal? To build the just city? I will.
I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic
Death? Very well, I accept, for
I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain."
Many have heard it on remote peninsulas,
On sleepy plains, in the aberrant fishermen's islands
Or the corrupt heart of the city.
Have heard and migrated like gulls or the seeds of a flower.
They clung like burrs to the long expresses that lurch
Through the unjust lands, through the night, through the alpine tunnel;
They floated over the oceans;
They walked the passes. All presented their lives.
On that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot
Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe;
On that tableland scored by rivers,
Our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our fever
Are precise and alive. For the fears which made us respond
To the medicine ad, and the brochure of winter cruises
Have become invading battalions;
And our faces, the institute-face, the chain-store, the ruin
Are projecting their greed as the firing squad and the bomb.
Madrid is the heart. Our moments of tenderness blossom
As the ambulance and the sandbag;
Our hours of friendship into a people's army.
To-morrow, perhaps the future. The research on fatigue
And the movements of packers; the gradual exploring of all the
Octaves of radiation;
To-morrow the enlarging of consciousness by diet and breathing.
To-morrow the rediscovery of romantic love,
the photographing of ravens; all the fun under
Liberty's masterful shadow;
To-morrow the hour of the pageant-master and the musician,
The beautiful roar of the chorus under the dome;
To-morrow the exchanging of tips on the breeding of terriers,
The eager election of chairmen
By the sudden forest of hands. But to-day the struggle.
To-morrow for the young the poets exploding like bombs,
The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;
To-morrow the bicycle races
Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle.
To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;
To-day the expending of powers
On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.
To-day the makeshift consolations: the shared cigarette,
The cards in the candlelit barn, and the scraping concert,
The masculine jokes; to-day the
Fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace before hurting.
The stars are dead. The animals will not look.
We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and
History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.
Spain was ravaged by the civil war that lasted from 1936 to 1939. W.H. Auden has
written Spain as a pamphlet and “Spain 1937” as his painful response to the devastation of
human life and the misery. Passionately preoccupied with the war, Auden expressed to a
friend in a letter dated early December 1936 that he wanted to go to Spain as an ambulance
driver: “I so dislike everyday political activities that I won’t do them, but here is something I
can do as a citizen and now as a writer, and as I have no dependents, I feel I ought to go”
(Carpenter 206). In another letter about the same time he wrote “I am not one of those who
believe that poetry need or even should be directly political, but in a critical period such as
ours, I do believe that the poet must have direct knowledge of the major political events”
(Carpenter 207).Although these statements express the civic concern of Auden the man and
his sincere engagement with the pressing political issues of the times as a poet, he was
grossly misunderstood by Orwell in the essay “Inside the Whale”( 1940) that he was naïvely
idealistic and frustrated with his Marxist expectations of war; that he wanted to fight for the
Republicans against the Fascists, and he glorified the war without being aware of its
brutalities. Whatever merit Orwell’s criticism may have does not concern us so much here,
but the fact is that his opinions of the poem were based more on the reading of Spain (1937),
not “Spain 1937” cannot be disputed. The latter is a revision of the former poem in crucial
ways and it was published in Another Time (1940). The two versions seem to set up a debate
over the political role of the poet which was put to rest, with Auden declaring still later in
“Squares and Oblongs”(1948) that poets should dissociate themselves from politics
completely, and nor should they try to exercise control over the readers. The radical change
in his line of thought amounting to unqualified rejection of the poet’s direct knowledge of the
major political events was clearly a post-war thought, and it had already been foreshadowed
in the poem chosen for discussion.
I choose to dwell on the textual background and the contextual aspects of the text
because its semantics and stylistic features are structured upon its modification of the earlier
version. First of all, as Tania Flores observes, the incorporation of semicolons in the revised
poem which replace many, if not most, of the periods, commas and colons of Spain is a
radical revision of the tone of the poem. “In contrast to the urgency, definitiveness and
passion of Spain, the tone of ‘Spain 1937’ is hesitant, rambling, and lacking in will. By
means of excision and the inversion of the meanings of the poem’s punctuation, Auden robs
his poem of its potency and of its potential for framing the Spanish Civil War
constructively”(2011:4). She also rightly observes:
The primary effect of the incorporation of the semicolon is that of reducing the
effectiveness, momentum, definitiveness, passion, and manifesto-like quality of the
poem. Vacillation characterizes “Spain 1937”, the tone of which contrasts sharply
with the self-assured quality of Spain. The semicolon lessens the effect of the anger
and sense of urgency on the reader, in large part because the use of the semicolon
mirrors the loss of agency found elsewhere in the transition between Spain and
“Spain 1937”.(13)
The beleaguered, war-torn Spain has been at the centre of three temporal orders,
namely past, present and future. The first six stanzas beginning with the time adverb of
“Yesterday” dwell on the past, enumerating the scientific, technological, cultural milestones
of achievements as well as changes in human history in its progress towards modernity .
What is interesting here is the foregrounding of nominal syntax paratactically, consisting of a
series of loose noun phrases and clauses, coordinated by commas and semicolons, and a
conspicuous absence of finite verbs in it until we come to line no 25 in the seventh stanza.
Such paratactic mode of nominal syntax, characterized by absence of cohesive devices to
bind the loose phrases, deliberately undermine the notion of teleology and human agency
underlying the history of progress towards scientific and technological modernity. It is the
absence of teleology again which makes the dialectical relation between the past and present
impossible. Therefore the future that is suggested is not a resolution of the dialectic conflict
of past and present, and the schema of history fails, according to the concluding stanza:
The stars are dead. The animals will not look.
We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and
History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.
The hopeless mechanical progress preceding “But/but to-day the struggle” gives the
lie to struggle that continues in the present, and ironically qualifies it. History is neither “the
operator/ Organizer”, nor is “Time the refreshing river” (stanza 9).
The present time has a number of finite verbs in stanzas 7 to 17. But these verbs
signify actions like whispering, peering, crying, invoking, hearing which are not strenuous
and energetic, but largely perceptual and very weakly communicative. All the strenuous and
productive actions of founding, establishing, descending, intervening etc are ascribed not to
the ordinary people – of whose lives the speaker has to inquire (stanza 8) – but to the abstract
“life”, which is invoked as a force by nation, or the abstract collective body of the people. On
the other hand life denies that it is the “mover” any more:
And the life, if it answers at all, replied from the heart
And the eyes and the lungs, from the shops and squares of the city
"O no, I am not the mover;
Not to-day; not to you. To you, I'm the
"Yes-man, the bar-companion, the easily-duped;
I am whatever you do. I am your vow to be
Good, your humorous story.
I am your business voice. I am your marriage.
Here, the repetitive structure of “I am…”with a number of complements signifying a state
of subordination, subjection, obligation of life to the abstract collective will of the nation, It is
now devoid of its natural procreative force that built “the city state of the sponge”,” the vast
military empires of the shark and the tiger” and “the robin's plucky canton”. In fact the
scientific and technological development of humanity and human organization into nations
was made possible at the cost of the alienation of humanity from nature and its primal force
even as humans have made these through a natural process:
They clung like burrs to the long expresses that lurch
Through the unjust lands, through the night, through the alpine tunnel;
They floated over the oceans;
They walked the passes. All presented their lives.
On that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot
Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe;
On that tableland scored by rivers,
Our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our fever
In the founding of Spain the colonists did not have any agential role. Like burrs and
other seeds, they were carried afar air-borne, afloat and accidentally to present their lives “on
that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive
Europe”. The use of intransitive verbs, i.e., “clung’, ‘floated’, “walked” deny agential role to
the colonists, who accidentally and naturally landed in Spain as it were. Although “All
presented their lives” marks the use of “presented” as transitive in a technical sense, the fact
that the subjects themselves are their own lives makes us to interpret that they presented
themselves, not some others. As for the formation of Spain, it is presented through passive
constructions: “nipped off from hot Africa”, ‘soldered so crudely to inventive Europe” to
suggest as if it was the consequence of an automatic process.
The alienation of humans from nature can be overcome if they acknowledge their
corporeality and naturalness reclaim their bodies and reintegrate these into civilization. If we
compare line 180 of ‘ Spain 1937’ with its counterpart in Spain, we find that this poem brings
in “body” in line 180, which is: “Our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our
fever”, although it is found missing in its counterpart in Spain: “Our fever’s menacing shapes
are precise and alive”.
Again, the nominal clauses and phrases in a paratactic mode begin to signify events of
the future from paragraph 20 to 23. What is anticipated is a modern bourgeois life-style of
leisure, pleasure, pursuit of the hobbies of travel, sports, dog-breeding, photography, healthcare, romance, electioneering etc which centre around the body in a liberal cultural economy.
Once again, the absence of finite verbs precludes a sense of order in the world the future
holds in store after the struggle of to-day is over.
As for stanzas 24 and 25, which focus on the war or the struggle of today, we find
interesting changes from “To-day the inevitable increase in the chances of death; / The
conscious acceptance of guilt in the fact of murder;…”( Spain) to “To-day the deliberate
increase in the chances of death, / The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary
murder;…”( ‘Spain 1937’). The changes in diction are a calculated attempt to remove agency
at the level of lexis, which the syntax parallels by removing the verb. What is effected
thereby is a shift of the burden of guilt from the soldiers in war to the nature of the war itself.
The changes Auden made thus preempt further charges of warmongering likely to be made
against him. Indeed, while a “deliberate increase”, which is premeditated, presupposes it as
planned and thus presupposes a thinking subject, “inevitable increase” could well seem an
exigent need from the war itself . Similarly, a “necessary murder” requires rational action by
a subject and the ethical burden on him, while “the fact of murder” creates the illusion that
killing is not an act carried out by an individual, but rather, that it’s simply an unfortunate
event that sometimes occurs.
What emerges from the above discussion is that paratactic syntax and the
foregrounding of nominal phrases and clauses that appear loosely put together in absence of
finite verbs. This absence also entails absence of a thinking, agential subject.
In the last stanza the three temporalities meet. The past, i.e., “The stars are dead”,
and the future that “animals will not look” have been enunciated from the present:
The stars are dead. The animals will not look.
We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and
History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.
The sentences strike us with a chilling sense of finality of humanity’s alienation from nature,
which is manifested both in the world of cosmos and the animal world. Since both past and future do
not imply agency, which is evident from the absence of finite verbs, and even in the struggle of today, i.e., the war, there is no rational, thinking subject, history – at least in the Marxian sense –
becomes a failed project; hence, perhaps, the unmitigated solitude of human beings and the failure of
History.
5.2.3 Analysis 3
In Memory of W.B Yeats
(d.january 1939)
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.
This elegy not only combines beautifully the traditional elements of elegiac poetry
and innovations of modernity, but also celebrates the power and value of poetry to survive the
loss of an accomplished poet and remain a source of hope to humankind, even as poetry
cannot intervene in politics and “makes nothing happen”. Poets die, people suffer the defeat
of a great political cause after struggle and life goes on in its worldly ways. Nevertheless,
poetry does remain a powerful affective and commemorative power to move people, make
them remember loss and pains not with rancor but with sweet sadness. The elegy is not so
much a lament over the loss of Yeats as the attestation of the eternity of the poet through his
work to which Walter Benjamin ascribes “after-life”, the supreme literary power, in his essay
“The Task of Translator” (1923). This is evident from the fact that Yeats finds mention only
in the title of the poem, not anywhere else.
The poem was written in January 1939, one of the most turbulent periods of Europe,
coupled with a phase of Auden’s life that was full of disappointment. In 1939, Spanish Civil
War ended with the fall of Barcelona, and for a liberal Republicanist like Auden, it was a
great loss of a cause and cause for huge disappointment. It is in this period that Auden began
to be skeptical about the efficacy of poetry to impact politics and affect the course of life in
general, and became more so in the years to come.
The poem in its three sections shows a wide range of metrical variations, following
the conventions of pastoral elegy and also bringing in the remarkably modern metrical
elements of free verse. There are echoes of unevenly long dactylic lines in the first two
sections, interspersed with free verse as in the line “The | dáy of his | déath was a | dárk cóld
dáy” (6). The third section, however, consists of trochaic meters with emphasis on the first
syllable of the elegiac foot. Classicist though Auden was in taste, he employs blank verse to
create effects of chaos and disorder.
Since the death of Yeats is the subject of the poem, and Yeats functions in the title as
the point of reference and only once more occurs in the 3rd section, all pronouns like “he’,
“his” and “him” assume simultaneously the function of exophoric deixis (making reference to
person existing outside the text) and cataphoric deixis (making reference to unspecific person
until of course the person concerned is mentioned in the 3rd section as “William Yeats” ).
These two modes of deictic functions interact through homophoric deictical references
(ubiquitous references that are semantically self-sufficient) of space and time.
For example, in the first section the clauses and phrases like “He disappeared” , “The
day of his death”, “ his illness”, “his last afternoon”, “his body”, “his feeling failed”; “he
became his admirers”, “he is scattered” and “his happiness” contain exophoric third-person
deictic references until the reader has come to the lines “Earth, receive an honoured guest:/
William Yeats is laid to rest” in the third section. Thus, until then these remain unreferenced
in themselves and become cataphoric only after one reaches the third section. However, as
these are inflected in terms of the ubiquitous homophoric references to places and time
references, the exophoric “he” undergoes a strange transformation. The transformation is
from a bodily and mortal authorial self into a self-sustaining textual authorial self that
survives death together with his texts, precisely because, as Foucault has already explicated
that the author’s ontology is but a textual projection in psychologizing terms( ‘What is an
Author’ 110).
In keeping with the convention of pastoral elegy, nature reflects the tragedy of the
occasion in the first section; hence the snowy weather seems appropriate for the funerary
occasion. As a temporal deixis winter is homophoric, but it is inflected in terms of the simple
past tense of verbs within the commemorative framework of the elegiac narrative. Because
“the day of his death was a dark, cold day” we find interesting metaphorical exchanges
between time reference and the mortal author in metaphors like “the dead of winter” and “it
was his last afternoon as himself. Here the homphoric winter and afternoon, despite their
pastness, invest in the mortal self – a self in its pastness – its homophoric self-sufficiency.
Just as winter and afternoon, as a season and a time of the day in the annual and diurnal
schemes of time respectively, are applicable to all years and days, similarly the dead poet
acquires ubiquitous status in the commemorative schema.
Further, in the following lines another series of metaphorical exchanges occur
between the dead poet and homphoric references of place as the death of Yeats becomes the
trope for the fall and dissolution of an embattled city, possibly Barcelona:
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; …
Even as a city falls, it does not vanish from knowledge or memory. In its pastness
and its ruins it is remembered fondly like Athens or Alexandria, and is considered still
self-sufficient in beauty and significance. The ruins of such ancient cities become selfreferential and homophoric. Similarly, the poet, although dead, is not forgotten and
consigned to oblivion. For this reason the poem declares: “He disappeared in the dead of
winter…”. While death is tellingly conclusive, disappearance offers possibilities of
reappearance and entails an ambiguous status of presence. So, the poet is
epistemologically alive, as it were, in the readers’ reading of the poems. Thus, the funerary
mourning calls forth a commemorative agenda of keeping alive the poet through reading
his poems:
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
This is in fact the commemorative logic of the elegy underlying the exchanges between
exophoric, cataphoric and homophoric references, so that what is effected is the
transformation that “he became his admirers”. This is a clear deviation from linguistic rule,
and a stylistically significant proposition in that it is richly ambivalent, suggesting death,
mutation and survival in the reading of 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.
.
In the densely metaphorical lines cited above, “the poet is scattered among a
hundred cities”; he finds “his happiness in another kind of wood”; his “words are modified in
the guts of living” . The lines involve unusual choice of words that amounts to lexical
deviation, but are perfectly structured if we closely look at the syntactic parallels between the
main clause of the sentence that runs into four lines, and the other sentence:
[…] he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
The passive constructions, which are parallel, establish semantic equivalence between
the subjects “he” and “the words of the dead man”. This helps the transformation of the poet
into a diffusive textual presence, and it also gestures towards the Christian meaning of
Eucharist, which is all about the trans-substantiation of bread and wine into Jesus’s flesh and
blood. In this way Auden’s poem performs the conventional role of the elegy to argue for the
immortality of the deceased. Once it has been successfully done , and in the second section
the poetic power to survive has been established, there follows an incantatory address to the
poet.
5.2.4 Analysis 4
The Unknown Citizen
(To JS/07 M 378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
“The Unknown Citizen” was written in the year 1939 shortly after Auden migrated to
the U.S.. It was first published in 1939 in The New Yorker and reappeared in the anthology
Another Time (1940). Having been born a British and living in New York, America, Auden
probably wrote the poem out of culture shock he got on being confronted by the impersonal
and highly bureaucratized State in America. He may have alluded to the oppressive Nazi state
as well. The poem is a satire upon the modern State, which robs the citizen of his individual
freedom and autonomy, denies him personal identity and private life, and reduces him to a
figure or information in the official documents. Armed with statistics, dossiers, records and
surveillance system, the State, almost like the dystopic Orwellian state, sets its own yardstick
of good citizenry and promotes its own standards of civic virtues by coercing the citizen to
conform to them. What Auden is extremely critical of is that the worst form of conformism
and moral dumbness of the citizen is touted by the state as the best civic virtue. The supreme
irony of the poem is that a heavily dossiered individual still remains unknown, and the
question if the man in question was happy is dismissed as absurd.
In fact right from the beginning the chief irony of the poem becomes evident from the
epigraph, which is an engraving on the tombstone of the unknown citizen, and it reads:
(To JS/07 M 378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)
It appears as though the poem is an official celebration of a dead person, who is declared to
be JS/07 M 378, an incomprehensible jumble of letters and numbers. Since the deceased
remains ironically unknown, the poem becomes the self-celebration of the state. Although
ordinarily a tomb stone marks the presence of the dead in the grave, here it only marks the
presence of the State, for the engraving announces pompously that the State has erected the
"marble monument".
The register of the language is prose-like, almost like that of an elaborate and a
somewhat pompous report, and style of the poem is distinctly official. It seems to be spoken by
a bureaucrat on behalf of the State. The officialese is reflected not only in the speaker’s choice
of bureaucratic words and expressions, but by its convoluted syntax in the first five lines:
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
These are convoluted because these could have been structured in a simpler way. For example,
the first two lines could have been rephrased:
‘The Bureau of Statistics found no official compliant made against him’,
or alternatively
‘No official complaint was found against him by the Bureau of Statistics’.
But the passive construction in the poem thematizes the unknown citizen as the subject
of official knowledge, and that is the irony of the poem. However, in doing so, it produces a
rather strange kind of construction in which the subject gets removed from the subject
complement by the agent, i.e., the Bureau of Statistics:
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be one against whom there was no official…
Sb
Agent
Subject complement
As surface structure it is the complex process of embedding and transformation. The kernel
sentences that have been embedded and transformed are:
1. The Bureau of Statistics found him
2. He is the him
3. No official complaint was there against him
Firstly, the kernel sentence no 1 is passivized to yield:
1. He was found by the Bureau of Statistics
Then the second kernel sentence undergoes PRO-form transformation to become:
2. He is the one
At the third stage takes place the transformation of NP-raising, producing:
3. Against him there was no official complaint.
Then takes place the conjoining of 2 and 3:
He is the one against him there was no official complaint.
This undergoes the whom- replacement transformation to become
He is the one against whom there was no official complaint.
Then takes place embedding:
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics [he is the one against whom there was
no official complaint].
According to the case theory of Chomsky within the framework of GB, the tensed verb
assigns nomimative case to the subject ‘He’, whereas the complement has to be untensed, and,
therefore, has to be an infinitive construction:
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be the one against whom there was no
official complaint.
This entire analytic exercise explains how the nominative “He” in the passive
construction is the object of the verb that has been raised to the subject status only nominally. It
is case-governed by the verb ‘found’, which actually agrees with “the Bureau of Stastistics”. In
other word, the syntactic structure explains that the subject is under the control of the Bureau.
The complement qualifying it takes an infinitive PRO form and accusative case. Hence, all the
information it intends to provide to us about the subject is under the control of the Bureau.
The next four lines are a string of clauses coordinated to the foregoing lines with ‘and’.
But the information unit falling on the nucleus, or the most prominent of the tone unit, is “he is
a saint”. Semantically, it is the focus and information wise very important. Rhetorically a
hyperbole, the statement comes ironically after seemingly careful weighing of words:
…in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word…
But syntactically, it is part of a noun clause [that …] complementing “And all the reports on his
conduct agree…” In other words, the syntactic ordering in the lines subordinates the citizen to
the knowledge regime of the State-owned agencies. Whatever knowledge about him is
documented and declared only serves to reinforce the idea that his identity is a product of the
knowledge and reports circulated about him. In brief, he is the construct within an officially
produced and controlled discourse.
Strangely enough, the next clause begins with “Except for the War till the day he
retired/He worked in a factory”, although we should expect this post-modifier phrase to come
at the end of “in a factory”, and normally the structure should have been:
He worked in a factory till the day he retired, except for the War
Such a fronting is for the purpose of thematizing the war or war-like situation as an exception
to the rule that the deceased citizen was a diligent factory worker, a productive and pliable
member of the society. Further, such deviant structuring of fronting the post-modifier delays
the grammatical subject and de-emphasizes the agential quality of the unknown citizen.
The irregular rhyme scheme shifting between ABAB pattern, AA and BB without
consistency gives the impression as if Auden is consciously disturbing the rhetorical control
which the speaker would like to exert over his utterances through rhyme. Some of the rhymes
are found to be sandwiched between other rhymes, and the examples are:
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc. ( line 8)
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.( line 13)
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare( line 18)
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire( line 21)
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content (22)
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year; ( 23)
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went. (24)
These rhyming irregularities are deliberately deployed to draw the reader’s attention to the
lines, which would perhaps have gone less carefully noticed otherwise in the unbroken rhyming
order. These lines in each set are also semantically related, as one can see, stating three
important virtues of the citizen which the State highly commends:
1. He is sincere, hardworking, productive, sociable, and therefore not a threat to the
corporatized industrial unit.
2. He is himself an up-market consumer.
3. He is a conformist, and he holds popular opinion.
These statements made on behalf of the State render the unknown citizen exterior to the
domain of power and knowledge. The first person collective pronouns (“our” and “we”), which
are preponderant in the poem, occur as pre-modifiers in the Subject NPs of main clauses thus:
Our report on his Union shows ……
Our Social Psychology workers found…
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content…
…our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation…
…our teachers report
In contrast, throughout the poem a large number of “he” and “his” occur as premodifiers of complements or objects in the main clauses, and in the subordinate NCs ( noun
clauses) in the subject and pre-modifier positions.
At least in a few cases “he” occupies the subject position in the main clauses. But we
have already seen that in the opening line it is the subject of a passive construction, and in
line no 6, it is a delayed subject with de-emphasized agentiality.
The we/our versus he/him/his binary semantics of the poem is syntactically structured
to give the former agency and controlling power, so that he/his/him etc. are constructed
within and subjected to our information and knowledge regimens. “He” only appears
mediated through official dossiers, but does not exist in his own rights. Nor does he speak for
himself. Hence he remains unknown.
5.2.5 Analysis-5
If I Could Tell You
Time will say nothing but I told you so
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.
If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time will say nothing but I told you so.
There are no fortunes to be sold, although,
Because I love you more than I can say,
If I could tell you I would let you know.
The winds must come from somewhere when they blow,
There must be reason why the leaves decay;
Time will say nothing but I told you so.
Perhaps the roses really want to grow,
The vision seriously intends to stay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.
Suppose the lions all get up and go,
And the brooks and soldiers run away;
Will Time say nothing but I told you so?
If I could tell you I would let you know.
This poem (written in 1940) has already been analyzed for its sound patterns and the
villanelle stanza form. At the risk of being repetitive I say that the poem reveals the power of
a mysterious ‘will’ whose workings can not be explained by the human community. Let alone
human beings, even Time is unable to explain it. Nothing in this world can be foretold, be it
the natural changes or unnatural events. Neither the future of the lovers can be foretold, nor,
indeed, the blowing of the winds or the decaying of leaves can be explained. All that human
beings can do is to wait patiently for things as they happen and to bear the consequences.
This poem indicates the inability and also the refusal of “Time” to explain “When”, “Why”
and “Where” of the incidents those take place in the world. The speaker constantly tries to
impress upon his lover, what unknown things, the future has in store for them. The speaker
further explains to his lover that wishes are not always fulfilled nor do dreams come always
true. He cites the examples of the roses which perhaps want to bloom more and more or the
vision perhaps of love, wants to stay on permanently. But these are mere uncertainties which
can not be explained.
The above poem is a paradox in the sense that it is a statement about being unable to
say anything regarding why, when and where. “Time” having (-human) features incapable of
speaking is expected to say. Time is unable to explain the actions of an impersonal “Will”.
Although it controls the natural and unnatural events in the world, it can not be explained.
Even time is unable or rather unwilling to unravel it to human being.
Time can not explain:
…when clowns put on their show
and
…when musicians play.
It can not explain “……why the leaves decay”. Nor can it explain from where the winds
blow, for “the winds must come from somewhere when they blow.”
In the first line “Time will say nothing but I told you so”, we find there is no comma
before the word ‘but’. Had there been a comma, it would have signified a contrast between
“Time will say nothing” and “but I told you so”. Here, however, the absence of comma
makes “but I told you so” a post-modifying phrase; modifying “nothing”, a nominal. In “but I
told you so”, “so” is a pro-form which should normally assume an anaphoric function
replacing an antecedent prediction such as follows:
Time did not tell us (to stop procrastinating)
But I told you so.
Here “so” replaces or refers to the prediction “to stop procrastinating”. But as it appears, the
pro-form “so” assumes a cataphoric function in the poem. In other words, “so” not only refers
to what the speaker has already been telling the implied addressee of the poem much before
the poem begins as a discourse, it also refers anaphorically to what is being said in the poem
later. The “told”, within the poem, turns out to be a repetition of the “already told so many
times” before the poetic enunciation has begun.
This line “Time will say nothing but I told you so” has been repeated in lines 1, 6 and
12, according to the convention of villanelle. These repetition shows that Time has been
depicted as an evasive presence and authoritative force which demands only “the price we
have to pay”.
The cataphoric reference of “so” signifies that probably “there are no fortunes to be
told”. This statement is thematically central in the poem, for it turns out to be a discourse on
the impossibility of predicting and knowing an impersonal and mysterious ‘Will’ according
to which events occur: leaves decay, human beings live their lives, laugh and weep, love
grows between lovers and turns into a vision and the like. Even time provides no answer to
questions such as:
If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
and
If we should stumble when musicians play …
Time will say nothing but (other than) what the speaker has been telling the implied
addressee (probably his lover). What he is telling is that nothing can be foretold or told about
the invisible ‘Will’ which is unknowable. But on the other hand, if this is the case, why is the
speaker then telling about the inability to tell anything worthwhile? Why is he engaged in a
discursive exercise which is circular in its logic and basically futile? This is because as he
says, he loves the addressee:
Because I love you more than I can say
If I could tell you I would let you know
The whole effort on the part of the speaker is to suggest that the “When”, “Why” and
“Where” are controlled by the powerful “Will” is futile, for ‘Time can not say anything
neither “fortunes can be foretold” nor the speaker could tell even if he possesses these
knowledge of ”When”, “Why” and “Where’.
Here “If I could tell you” is a pre-posed unreal condition, suggesting a wish on the
part of the speaker to “let” the addressee know what he needs to be known. The line “If I
could tell you I would let you know” has been repeated in lines 3, 9, 15 and 19. This shows
even though the speaker knows the refusal of Time to explain “When”, “Why” and “Where”
of events happening, still he continuously persists to let the addressee or his lover know about
the uncertainty, the mystery that the future holds in store. Line 18 is repeated as in line 1, 6
and 12, but in a questioning form. The line repeated in 1, 6 and 12 is “Time will say nothing
but I told you so”. But in line 18, the modal “will” and the “noun” has been transposed. The
same sentence now turns out to be a rhetorical question without expecting any answer.
The circularity in the logic of the poem is well demonstrated by the repetition of the
same lines in the end of the poem, with which the poet had started it. Towards the end “Time
will say nothing” turns out to “Will Time say nothing but I told you so?”
The speaker is aware of the refusal of Time to say anything about the future. Still he
asks “Will Time say nothing?” without expecting any answer to the question.
In this poem we find two uses of “if”. One as in the following lines:
If we should weep………..
If we should stumble………
In the case of these two lines “if” expresses simple conditionals. In the second case, “if”
results in a pre-posed unreal conditional expressing a wish as in the line:
If I could tell you I would let you know
In the last stanza the clauses and hypothetical meanings in the following lines:
Suppose the lions all get up and go,
And all the brooks and soldiers run away,
These show that Time is unwilling to tell us the reasons for the natural phenomenon taking
place in the world. Along with this it also can not provide us any answer to these hypothesis
and suppositions.
As “there are no fortunes to be told”, life continues to be sustained by hopes, beliefs,
hypothesis and suppositions.
5.2.6 Analysis-6
The Shield of Achilles
She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble, well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hand had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.
A plain without feature, bare and brown,
No blade of grass, no sigh of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down;
Yet, congregated on that blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots, in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.
Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place;
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed,
Column by column, in a cloud of dust,
They marched away, enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.
She looked over his shoulder
For ritual pieties,
White flower-garlanded heifers,
Libation and sacrifice:
But there on the shining metal
Where the altar should have been
She saw by his flickering forge-light
Quite another scene.
Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot;
A crowd of ordinary decent folk
Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.
The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same,
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help, and no help came;
What their foes liked to do was done; their shame
Was all the worst could wish: they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.
She looked over his shoulder
For athletes at their games.
Men and women in a dance
Moving their sweet limbs,
Quick, quick to music;
But there on the shining shield
His hands had set no dancing-floor
But a weed-choked field.
A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
The girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who’d never heard
Of any world where promises were kept
Or one could weep because another wept.
The thin- lipped armorer
Hephaestos hobbled away;
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.
"The Shield of Achilles" was first published in the year 1952. The title of the poem
was also taken by Auden as the title of his collection of poems which he published in 1955.
The poem is Auden’s meditations upon Homer’s the Iliad in the form of an ekphrasis. The
context of the poem is that the Homeric narrative is interrupted while Hephaestus makes
Achilles new armor for Achilles' mother, the goddess Thetis, to carry to her son. He has lost
his armour, and needs some new armour to fight. But re-entering the war means he will die
soon, so he has chosen to die as he seeks to avenge the death of his friend Patroclus. Auden’s
poem develops the contrast between the war-torn modern world, and the horror of its
devastation, the impersonality of the totalitarian state on the one hand, and the Homeric world
where, even amid warfare, imagination, peace, harmony, plenitude and joy prevail, according
to Auden’s imagination. The target of Auden is not Hephaestus, nor Thetis, but Achilles, the
“Iron-hearted man-slaying” hero, who embodies the maniacal, retributive frenzy of the war
that is ultimately self-destroying.
Auden uses two different stanza forms, one consisting of shorter lines, the other of
longer lines. The stanzas with shorter lines describe the making of the shield by the god
Hephaestus, and report the happy and fulfilling scenes of happiness, peace and fulfillment
that Achilles' mother, Thetis, expects to find engraved on the shield. However, in Auden's
version, Hephaestus does not make comply with her wish.
A close look at the syntactic aspect of the stanzas reveals some patterns that become
conspicuous, and these patterns match the dynamics of Thetis’s expectations and
Hephaestus’s portrayal of the reality, which are like points and counter-points within and
across stanzas. Let us first look at the following stanzas that serve as counterpoints to what
Thetis’s expectations have been:
But there on the shining metal
His hand had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead. ( Stanza 1)
Yet, congregated on that blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,. ( Stanza 2)
But there on the shining metal
Where the altar should have been
She saw by his flickering forge-light
Quite another scene. ( Stanza 4)
But there on the shining shield
His hands had set no dancing-floor ( Stanza 7)
Three of the counterpoints to Thetis’s expectations begins with the clausal coordinator
“But” , and one begins with “Yet”. The introduction of these in each case brings about
interesting changes to the normal syntactic sequences through transformations, which can be
reconstructed thus:
Kernel sentence(Stanza 1)
His hand had put instead an artificial wilderness and a sky like lead there on the shining
metal.
(fronting of the prepositional phrase)
There on the shining metal his hand had put instead an artificial wilderness and a sky like
lead.
(clausal coordinator addition transformation)
But there on the shining metal his hand had put instead an artificial wilderness and a sky like
lead.
Kernel sentence(Stanza 2)
An unintelligible multitude stood, congregated on that blankness.
( fronting of the prepositional phrase)
Congregated on that blankness, an unintelligible multitude stood.
(subject-verb transposition)
Congregated on that blankness, stood an unintelligible multitude.
(Clausal coordinator addition transformation and addition of comma)
Yet, congregated on that blankness, stood an unintelligible multitude.
Kernel sentence(Stanza 4)
She saw by his flickering forge-light quite another scene where the altar should have been
there on the shining metal
.
( fronting of the prepositional clause)
Where the altar should have been there on the shining metal she saw by his flickering forgelight quite another scene
(clausal coordinator addition transformation)
But where the altar should have been there on the shining metal she saw by his flickering
forge-light quite another scene
Kernel sentence(Stanza 7)
His hands had set no dancing-floor there on the shining shield.
.
(fronting of the prepositional clause)
There on the shining shield his hands had set no dancing-floor there.
( clausal coordinator addition transformation)
But there on the shining shield his hands had set no dancing-floor.
The shifting of the positions of the syntactic elements brings about the delaying of the
subject, and the semantic effect of thematization takes place whereby the prepositional
phrases that signify locations become visually conspicuous and arresting. In fact what is
hoped for and what is visualized become more important than Hephaestus and Thetis, the
people who engrave and watch the scenes.
In addition, shifting of syntactic constituents through transformation is a stylistic
choice, as the prepositional locative phrases at the end are carried over to the front, what
remains after the Subject-noun clause of the sentence has interesting semantic possibilities. In
Stanza 1, for example, the objects of the verb “put” such as “artificial wilderness” and “a sky
like lead” do propel the narrative to tell us what the nature of artificiality is like, and why the
sky is like lead. Hence the need of the next stanza arises, where the war-ravaged featureless,
bare and brown plain is no doubt an artificial wilderness, not the Biblical wilderness that saw
the trial and rescue of Jesus, nor the wilderness that Israelites crossed to enter the promised
land. The sky is lead like because it lacks transparency and the power to blazon the signs of
salvation from Heaven as have been narrated in the Bible in Exodus, Matthew, Revelation
etc.
In Stanza 2, because of the fronting, as the ‘unintelligible multitude” which remains
towards the back is specified in terms of “million eyes”, and “a million boots, in line”, these
NPs function synecdochically so as to signify the disembodiment and dehumanization of the
human( soldiers) in the artificial wilderness under a leaden sky, waiting for “signs”, which
are also disembodied, as these are broadcast by the radio. The divine sanction and oracular
authority warranting the truth value of such sign has been replaced by ‘statistics”.
Because of the transformation and fronting so described earlier, stanza 4 ends with
“quite another scene”, which is elaborated in the next couple of stanzas as the killing of three
men, reminding us ironically of the crucifixion of Christ with other two people. Similarly,
“But there on the shining shield / His hands had set no dancing-floor ( Stanza 7) leads on to a
“weed-chocked field”, which enacts a scene of gratuitous violence and the banality of evil.
The vast panorama of futility and death caused by a war fought in the present time is
essentially wasteful and emptied of meaning, grace and hope. It is a visual representation of a
modern dystopian wilderness that offers no possibilities rest, relief or redemption either in
the classical, pagan sense through ritualized pieties, sacrifice and libation, or in the Christian
sense through Crucifixion. The stark negative power of such a dystopian condition of
existence is borne out well through the foregrounding of phrases with negative determiners
and pronouns throughout the poem. The effect of dreariness is produced by the following
phrases:”No blade of grass”, “ no sigh neighborhood”, “ neither moved nor spoke”, “Nothing
to eat and nowhere to sit down”, “No one was cheered and nothing was discussed, no
dancing-floor. “…And could not hope for help, and no help came”.
In the same vein the foregrounding of noun phrases with the following structures
like NP + PP is cited as follows:
A plain without feature…
A million eyes… without expression…
Voice without a face
These portray a Limbo like landscape, a morally condemned state of human existence, without any
hope of redemption. A distinct sense of absence of purpose in the world is described by disjoined
declarative sentences with finite verbs in the form of simple past tense:
A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
The girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him…
The lack of logical linking devices among these sentences serving as propositions
contributes to the meaninglessness and coherence of this world, which is murderous, pitiless
and not obligated to redeem pledges and fulfil promises. In such a word moral choice and
ethical action of avenging the death of Patroclus war on the part of Achilles becomes
valueless, and he is reduced to a figure on the shield: “Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles”, a
highly compound nominalized phrase, similar to the structure of others figures, i.e., “Marble,
well-governed cities”, “White flower-garlanded heifers”, “ the shining shield”, “ dancingfloor”, “a weed-choked field. These structures are results of nominalizing transformational
rules applied to clauses and sentences at Deep Structure level.
The above discussion reveals that all the foregrounded features are stylistic choices,
consciously exercised by Auden to structure meaning, manipulate focus and thematize
various issues.
***
CONCLUSION
The conclusion is very brief. I do not wish to make a statement of what I have done in
the foregoing chapters for the risk of being repetitive. I shall only gesture towards
possibilities of stylistic research on Auden as may be envisaged in future.
The thesis, as is evident, is very limited in scope. The stylistic analysis offered is
also narrow in scope in so far as it explicates meanings of the poems more or less in a new
critical mode, using linguistic terminology. But stylistics as a discipline has acquired a great
deal of complexity and richness. For example, Stanley Fish has developed a model of stylistic
analysis which he calls “Affective Stylistics”. It is a phenomenological view of the responses
of the reader and his/her affective engagement with a poem. The focus diverts from the
externalities of a poem to the receptive dynamics of the reader. One may possibly apply the
theoretical insight of Stanley Fish to the analysis of Auden’s poems and explain how the
reader is moved and informed by poetry reading. This kind of work is a possibility that can be
explored in future.
One may as well isolate some problematic of Auden’s poetry such as his negotiation
between a disturbingly private libidinal self and public performance. In doing so, one can
analyze the linguistic resources of the poetry that facilitate such negotiations. Auden’s
dramatic verses and operas can also be interpreted from the stylistic point of view to gain a
rich of perception of his mind and art.
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