Six Poets (16 page)

Auden thought of poetry as dual: poetry as song, poetry as truth. It's perhaps this that, in his poem ‘Their Lonely Betters', written in 1950, made him sceptical of birds who sing without feeling and with no regard for truth.

As I listened from a beach-chair in the shade

To all the noises that my garden made,

It seemed to me only proper that words

Should be withheld from vegetables and birds.

A robin with no Christian name ran through

The Robin-Anthem which was all it knew,

And rustling flowers for some third party waited

To say which pairs, if any, should get mated.

Not one of them was capable of lying,

There was not one which knew that it was dying

Or could have with a rhythm or a rhyme

Assumed responsibility for time.

Let them leave language to their lonely betters

Who count some days and long for certain letters;

We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep:

Words are for those with promises to keep.

Auden died in Vienna in 1973, when he was only sixty-six, but it would be hard to say his work was not finished. His output had been prodigious, and he went on working right until the end in a routine that was every bit as rigid as that of Housman, whom he so briskly diagnosed when he was a young man (‘Deliberately he chose the dry-as-dust, / Kept tears like dirty postcards in a drawer'). But you're no more likely to find consistency in a writer than you would in a normal human being. Besides, as Auden himself said: ‘At thirty I tried to vex my elders. Past sixty it's the young whom I hope to bother.'

I would be hard put to say what a great poet is, but part of it, in Auden's case, is the obscurity with which I started. If his life has to be divided into two parts, there are great poems in both. Perhaps he was too clever for the English. Bossy and not entirely likeable, when he died his death occasioned less regret than that of Larkin or Betjeman, though he was the greater poet. This would not have concerned him as he was not vain: criticism seldom bothered him nor did he covet praise or money. And though he would have quite liked the Nobel Prize, all he demanded at the finish was punctuality.

I'll end with the final part of the poem Auden wrote in memory of another poet, W. B. Yeats, who died in January 1939. The last two lines are inscribed on Auden's memorial in Westminster Abbey.

(d. Jan. 1939)

Earth, receive an honoured guest:

William Yeats is laid to rest.

Let the Irish vessel lie

Emptied of its poetry.

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;

Pardons cowardice, conceit,

Lays its honours at their feet.

Time that with this strange excuse

Pardoned Kipling and his views,

And will pardon Paul Claudel,

Pardons him for writing well.

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.

1907–1963

Louis MacNeice was born in Belfast the son of a bookish Church of Ireland minister, a bishop-to-be. Academically precocious, he was already writing verse at seven, around the time of his mother's death. He was educated in England at Sherborne and Marlborough. At Merton College, Oxford, he made the acquaintance of Auden and Spender and published his first book of poems,
Blind Fireworks
(1929). He worked subsequently as a translator, literary critic, playwright, autobiographer, BBC producer and feature writer. In 1941 he was appointed scriptwriter/producer in BBC Radio's Features Department, where he worked until his death.
Letters from Iceland
(1937) was written in collaboration with Auden. Subsequent collections include
The Earth Compels, Autumn Journal, Plant and Phantom, Springboard, Holes in the Sky
and
Autumn Sequel
. MacNeice published highly acclaimed translations including the
Agamemnon
of Aeschylus (1936) and Goethe's
Faust
. He scripted more than 150 radio plays, including
The Dark Tower
(1947).
The Burning Perch
, his last volume of poems, appeared shortly before his death in 1963.

I am not yet born; O hear me.

Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the club-footed ghoul come near me.

I am not yet born, console me.

I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,

with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,
on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.

I am not yet born; provide me

With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
   at the back of my mind to guide me.

I am not yet born; forgive me

For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,
   my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
      my life when they murder by means of my
         hands, my death when they live me.

I am not yet born; rehearse me

In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when
old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains
   frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white
      waves call me to folly and the desert calls
         me to doom and the beggar refuses
            my gift and my children curse me.

I am not yet born; O hear me,

Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God come near me.

I am not yet born; O fill me

With strength against those who would freeze my
humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
   would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
      one face, a thing, and against all those
         who would dissipate my entirety, would
            blow me like thistledown hither and
               thither or hither and thither
                     like water held in the
                        hands would spill me.

Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.

Otherwise kill me.

The public like labels (or newspapers think they do), and particularly when it comes to art and literature, which are both potentially dangerous or at least awkward to handle. ‘The Poets of the Thirties', which is itself a label, generally comes in a nice boxed set labelled ‘Auden and Co.' – that is, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis and Louis MacNeice.