Poem of the Month: August 2023
A W. H. Auden Classic
Each Month The Latent Book Club shares one poem that we’ve been contemplating. For August, we have a W. H. Auden classic.
Consider This And In Our Time
W. H. Auden (1907 - 1973). Published: 1930
Consider this and in our time As the hawk sees it or the helmeted airman: The clouds rift suddenly look there At cigarette-end smouldering on a border At the first garden party of the year. Pass on, admire the view of the massif Through plate-glass windows of the Sport Hotel; Join there the insufficient units Dangerous, easy, in furs, in uniform And constellated at reserved tables Supplied with feelings by an efficient band Relayed elsewhere to farmers and their dogs Sitting in kitchens in the stormy fens. Long ago, supreme Antagonist, More powerful than the great northern whale Ancient and sorry at life's limiting defect, In Cornwall, Mendip, or the Pennine moor Your comments on the highborn mining-captains, Found they no answer, made them wish to die -Lie since in barrows out of harm. You talk to your admirers every day By silted harbours, derelict works, In strangled orchards, and the silent comb Where dogs have worried or a bird was shot. Order the ill that they attack at once: Visit the ports and, interrupting The leisurely conversation in the bar Within a stone's throw of the sunlit water, Beckon your chosen out. Summon Those handsome and diseased youngsters, those women Your solitary agents in the country parishes; And mobilise the powerful forces latent In soils that make the farmer brutal In the infected sinus, and the eyes of stoats. Then, ready, start your rumour, soft But horrifying in its capacity to disgust Which, spreading magnified, shall come to be A polar peril, a prodigious alarm, Scattering the people, as torn-up paper Rags and utensils in a sudden gust, Seized with immeasurable neurotic dread. Financier, leaving your little room Where the money is made but not spent, You'll need your typist and your boy no more; The game is up for you and for the others, 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. Seekers after happiness, all who follow The convolutions of your simple wish, It is later than you think; nearer that day Far other than that distant afternoon Amid rustle of frocks and stamping feet They gave the prizes to the ruined boys. You cannot be away, then, no Not though you pack to leave within an hour, Escaping humming down arterial roads: The date was yours; the prey to fugues, Irregular breathing and alternate ascendancies After some haunted migratory years To disintegrate on an instant in the explosion of mania Or lapse for ever into a classic fatigue.
Latent Book Club’s Analysis
Auden once described his aged face as ‘like a wedding cake left out in the rain’; a deep image, and oft-quoted; much like this poem.
It starts at once, viscerally. We can clearly imagine the thousand feet view of the garden party. But, lurchingly and disconcertingly, we are then pulled into something dark.
Many critics believe believe this poem reflects a grim scepticism about the psyche of modern society; a world influenced by Marx and Freud. The 1930 publication date is notable, and perhaps prescient - a mere nine years until the Alpine bands supplying feelings to people who are ‘Dangerous, easy, in furs, in uniform’ would take on another sinister connotation in the Second World War.
We are presented with a nihilistic, neurotic, and even self-destructive view of the world in stanzas two and three.
Stanza two addresses the influence of ‘the supreme antagonist’ on society - this could be satan, or something equally nefarious. It disrupts where peace once was, ‘interrupting The leisurely conversation in the bar’, and ‘mobilises the powerful forces latent’ - those hidden, dark forces to come and tear the world asunder.
Stanza three is addressed to you, the reader, directly. This is not a hypothetical or royal you - it is you: your own wish for this destruction to occur, and blindness towards its coming. This stanza appears to us to be designed to wrest you from a comfortable life, and into awareness, from which there is no escape, ‘Not though you pack to leave within an hour, Escaping humming down arterial roads’. It is a call to awareness, or oblivion.
Consider this and in our time is in parts thrilling, daring and chilling. It is also utterly majestic.
Want More Auden?
Oxford Professor of English Literature Seamus Perry wrote an excellent article for The London Review of Books on Auden and the direction of his later work, as a part of his review of Edward Mendelson's 2017 work Early Auden, Later Auden: A Critical Biography.