"Who stands, the crux left of the watershed.…" (August 1927)
This poem is fragmented and quite obscure, perhaps a production of modernist work - those who wanted to revive old and classical forms. It this is so then the poem can almost be seen as a rejection of current liberty models. The prose is slightly broken, the syntax awkward which is apparent in the very first line to some extent this reflects the broken society that Auden feels he is part of. He writes about "An industry already comatose" which reflects his view of what the desecration to the surrounding landscape signifies - a destructive modernized force. Not only is the industry dead but so are those who worked for it: "And further here and there, though many dead / Lie under the poor soil, some acts are chosen" Auden writes of the miners who have died in the shaft for the sake of the industry. He also recognizes the power of his poetry - they are 'chosen' by the poet and the poem rather than the world.
The second stanza of the poem takes on a very different tone he didactic: "Go home, now, stranger, proud of your young stock". He is ironic and sets the 'young stock' up in direct opposition to the dead and old-fashioned industry; it is a sardonic poke and the new world. Throughout the stanza it is hinted that the stranger is young and privileged: "Beams from your car may cross a bedroom wall" - he owns modern, wealthy commodities. Yet Auden warns this person that he is merely transitory - he will make his mark and then it will disappear and no one will notice - just like the beam of the car on the wall. Whereas the first stanza was very particular - a specific location, even places named ("At Cashwell raises water") the second is much more general - we are introduced to a generic man - a symbol of the modern world. The poem ends on an ominous note: "Ears poised before decision, scenting danger." The warning tone again reminds the reader that nothing is definite and the world continually changes.
"Consider this and in our time…." (March 1930)
This first line sets the dictatorial tone of the poem which is imperative in its mood and assertive and direct towards the reader we are being asked to take a step back from and criticize the bourgeois civilization ("As the hawk sees it or the helmeted air-man"). The poem itself is fractured - made up of a series of random observances, he preaches about modern life asserting that there is a sickness in society that is spread by the individual - in the fifth stanza he specifies - pointing to society's characters - the "financier" and the "nurse". This image of sickness is continually presented to us yet we are meant to view it dispassionately, void of emotions through "plate-glass windows". The poet directs us to observe the attractiveness of a garden "border" which is mitigated by the dirty unpleasant detail of a "cigarette-end smouldering" there. We are shown this debased world as if through the eye of a news camera, homing in on particular atrocities.
In the second stanza Auden alludes to the Freudian concept of a "supreme Antagonist" - the idea that the wide-spread neuroses is evidence of the decay of capitalist society that Karl Marx so condemned. He warns the financier that "the game is up for you" in the fifth stanza. Contemporaries of Auden's also mixed the ideas of Marx of Freud, Spender and Jack Lindsey spring to mind. Along with his tirade against the society he so despises he also includes warnings, he is almost sympathetic towards those whom he condemns.
The third section becomes more obscure, syntax and grammar are complicated. In a sense e turns "supreme Antagonist" - what Bayley refers to as the Freudian death wish set on the destruction of the "high-born mining captains", the "handsome and diseased youngsters" and the "solitary agents in country parishes". The tone of this stanza is elevated - full of lofty diction. He writes of "strangled orchards" where an idyll is debased by death and destruction, of "a bird [who] was shot" - an image of freedom abruptly halted. Within this stanza there is a sense of melodrama, a certain sensationalism and sense of burlesque:
"Which spreading magnified, shall come to be
A polar peril, a prodigious alarm"
Auden uses alliteration and a typical Beowulf device to emphasize the extent of the magnification. The stanza is vague and alarmist, employing the tools and language of newspaper headlines. Freud's intelligent work has been reduced to attention grabbing, pithy metaphors.
In the fourth stanza Auden groups together those who he presumes are doomed, they become objects of the poet's scorn. Not only has the 'financier' come to the end of his productive life, it is also finished for those:
"Who, thinking, pace in slippers on the lawns
Of College Quad or Cathedral Close,
Who are born nurses, who live in shorts,
Sleeping with people and playing fives".
The tone has changed, his threats are weakened and more colloquial, less apocalyptic as he tells them "it is later than you think". He ends the stanza with an enigma - the fate for the middle-classes worrying and will end in psychosis, however, it will end - either with "mania" or a slow, burn out "fatigue".
"Lay your sleeping head, my love,…." (January 1937)
This poem is an untraditional love lyric which is not politically charged. It is about unequal relationships made immediately obvious by the fact that he is addressing his lover whilst they sleep. Thus, although this is liberating for Auden, his lover is unable to answer or question what he is being told. Furthermore the poet's liberation is merely transient as all that the tells his lover will not be remembered or consciously registered. Initially we are presented with the dramatic and intimate cameo of the lovers lying together in bed then we are pulled away from the particular and presented with the general - a philosophical statement about love and the progression of life:
"Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral".
The irregular rhythm in this stanza and basically throughout the poem mimics speech modulation with the muted rhyme and meters. This is evident in the irregular trochaic rhythms of the lines that run into each other and the half rhymes that exist amongst them and contrast greatly to what we would expect of a traditional love lyric. Similarly the emotion displayed in the poem differs from the high octain rhetoric employed in the more traditional works. The first stanza ends with a paradox:
"Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful".
These lines could be seen as an acceptance of the mutual infidelity that Auden has mentioned at the beginning of the poem. The entirely must refer paradoxically to moral beauty as well a physical because of the presence of the "but" and in light of the "mortal, guilty".
In the second stanza Auden asserts that "Soul and body have no bounds" which is an idealistic view and one that suggests that there is no division between the soul and body - it refers to man's duality. The whole stanza is engulfed in an almost orgasmic stupor as Auden uses words such as "enchanted", "swoon" and "vision Venus" the reader lies, post-coital with the lovers. Not only does Venus allow the lovers this moment - conversely the hermit who has already had a spiritual vision ("The hermit's sensual ecstasy") is given bodily ecstasy - for the lovers a boundary still exists between the two.
The spell that has been cast by the previous two stanzas of the poem is broken by the intrusion from the outside world ("Certainty, fidelity / On the stroke of midnight pass / Like vibrations of a bell"). The anticipatory idea of free choice is set in opposition against acceptance. There is a Cinderella expectation that certainty and fidelity will pass. The last stanza acknowledges the fact that physical and spiritual love, eroticism and so on are all subject to the movement of time. Although the overall theme behind the poem is that we are being instructed to enjoy love now and pay for all the comes after it later, each of the stanzas develop on this point thus creating their own themes too. In the first stanza time poses the threat to the lovers, in the second it is the distinction between the lover's minds and bodies, the third anticipates the extentialist idea of choice before automatic acceptance and the fourth is almost a celebration of sex. Within the second and fourth stanza's Freud's ideas are most prevalent. Thus it obvious that although the stanza's work together they also function on a separate basis.
"Musee des Beaux Arts" (December 1938)
Essentially this is a contemplation of the silent suffering of humanity. It refers to the painting "The Fall of Icarus" by Breueghel. In this painting the seemingly momentus event of Icarus falling from the sky is ignored by the surrounding people as they continue with their everyday chores. Auden refers to this painting by way of proving that people suffer in isolation, remaining anonymous to the rest of the world:
"The ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure"
Auden's comment on the tragically selfish nature of society is enhanced by the form tha the uses to describe it. Metrically the poem is quite precise, with decasyllabic lines and complete rhymes (such as "wrong" and "along"). Despite this formal structure the tone remains controversial and the rhyme is subtle, a scheme not being followed.
Tragic details, and pathetic visions such as Icarus' "forsaken cry" and the image of the "aged; reverently, passionately waiting / For the miraculous birth" give the poem a certain poignancy. Moreover their juxtaposition with the banal and everyday make them all the more glaring. Farcical images such as dogs who:
"Go on with their doggy
Life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree"
add a comical element to the poem. They seem out of place in the world of the 'Old Masters' and mythical legends such as Icarus.