Cultural Cohesion Read Online Free PDF Page A

poignant than the heterosexual’s freedom, as Auden had already stated in Poems , XXVI:
    Noises at dawn will bring
    Freedom for some, but not this peace
    No bird can contradict: passing, but is sufficient now
    For something fulfilled this hour,
    Â Â Â Â loved or endured.
    In Look, Stranger! , with the 1930s barely half over and the big battles yet to be fought, Auden already knew that for him and his kind the new age, if it ever came, would not come easily. Love would go on being a thing of glances meeting in crowded pubs, risky whispers in lavatories, one night stands in cheap rooms, partings on railway stations, persecution and exile. Rhetorically he still proclaims his confidence; realistically he hints at a maturing doubt; poetically he creates from this dialectic some of the great love poetry of the century. To Poem IX in Look, Stranger! (called “Through the Looking Glass” in Collected Shorter Poems 1930–1944 ) only Lorca’s Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías is even an approximate rival. For his compactness, for his mastery of lyricism as a driving force rather than a decoration, for his unstrained majesty of movement, Auden in this phase of his writing is without an equal. The poetry happens like an event in nature, beautiful because it can’t help it.
    Your would-be lover who has never come
    In the great bed at midnight to your arms. . . .
    Imperfect, ruggedly rounded out, and in places appearing almost uncorrected, the poem creates its effects with a monstrously skilled carelessness that is in every sense superb, as if the mere details had been left to a team of assistants and the haughty master’s attention reserved for passages like
    Such dreams are amorous, they are indeed:
    But no one but myself is loved in these,
    And time flies on above the dreamer’s head
    Flies on, flies on, and with your beauty flies.
    How can we tell the intoxicator from the intoxicated? Lines like these are the loose scrawl of genius in its cups, the helpless, incandescent finale of Auden’s meteorite making contact with the atmosphere of realism. Gorgeous fires of defeat.
    But Auden’s prescient withdrawal into loneliness was pained as well as plangent, as we see in the hard-edged bitterness of Look, Stranger! , XXVIII:
    Dear, though the night is gone
    The dream still haunts today
    That brought us to a room,
    Cavernous, lofty as
    A railway terminus
    In this enormous room crowded with beds, Auden’s lover turns towards someone else. The clarity of the setting belongs less to Lorca’s branch of surrealism than to something colder and more northern. The presiding spirits at Lorca’s lament are those of Buñuel and Dalí. With Auden, it’s Magritte.
    .    .    .
    Poem XXX in Look, Stranger! starts with the famous line “August for the people and their favorite islands” and is dedicated to Christopher Isherwood. In Collected Shorter Poems 1930–1944 it is called “Birthday Poem,” and in Collected Shorter Poems 1927–1957 it does not appear at all—one of that volume’s several shattering omissions. The line about the spy’s career gains luminosity once we have accustomed ourselves to the close identification in Auden’s mind of homosexuality with clandestine activity and all its apparatus of codes and invisible inks. There are lines between the lines of Auden’s younger poems which will come to life in the mild heat of knowledge. Beginning far back in the schoolboy mythology of Mortmere, such symbolic cloak-and-dagger men as the Adversary and the Watcher in Spanish defeat all scholarly attempts to place them as political exemplars, but are easily apprehended as madly camp star turns at a drag ball. They are there to brighten the lives of secret men. As Auden wrote years later in “The Fall of Rome,” all the literati keep an imaginary friend. Auden’s artistic indulgence in the 1930s