Celebrating Auden's Timeless Message
Poet W.H. Auden, shown in 1960, was born 100 years ago today. Erich Auerbach/Stringer/Getty Images hide caption
Poet W.H. Auden, shown in 1960, was born 100 years ago today.
Erich Auerbach/Stringer/Getty ImagesBehind 'Funeral Blues'
Edward Mendelson, W.H. Auden's literary executor, discusses the poem "Funeral Blues," which was used in the 1994 film Four Weddings and a Funeral and also was set to music by composer Benjamin Britten.
Listen to Mendelson
Poet W.H. Auden was born in England 100 years ago today.
The man he chose to be his literary executor, Edward Mendelson, says Auden's goal was to have a conversation with his readers. He believed that the way to be universal was to be individual. Mendelson is the editor of a new collection of Auden's poems.
"Auden, I think, like any very great writer, is someone whom you don't have to translate into the present," says Mendelson. "You read him and he's addressing who you are at almost any age, or at any time, or in any period."
Two Auden poems have received particular attention in recent years: "Funeral Blues," when it appeared in the 1994 film Four Weddings and a Funeral and "September 1, 1939," written as World War II began, resonated with Americans after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Mendelson shares his memories of the large, imposing poet with a gentle manner, and explains why one of Auden's best-known works was one he grew to despise.
This piece was produced by Martha Woodroof of member station WMRA.
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Selected Poems
September 1, 1939
Hear NPR's Scott Simon Read Excerpts of the Poem
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
Copyright © 1939 by W.H. Auden. Used by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.
Funeral Blues
Hear "Funeral Blues" Composed by Benjamin Britten
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round 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 my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: 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 ever come to any good.
Copyright© 1940 by W.H. Auden. Used by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.