American Academy of Religion

W. H. Auden and The Circumstance of Praise

Author(s): Stanley Romaine Hopper
Source: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Jun., 1975), pp. 135152
Published by: Oxford University Press
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W. H. Auden
and

The Circumstance of Praise

STANLEY ROMAINE HOPPER
Praise him with trumpet sound;
praise him with lute and harp!
Praise him with timbrel and dance;
praise him with strings and pipe!
Praise him with sounding cymbals;
praise him with loud clanging cymbals!
Let everything that breathes praise
the Lord!

(Psalm 150 [RSV])

Someday, emerging at last from this
terrifying vision,

may I burst into jubilant praise

to assenting angels!

(Rilke, Duino Elegies I)

he first of these epigraphs, the 150th Psalm, coming at the very end of the
Psalter, is an obvious doxology, a hymn of praise, a burst into jubilant
praise to the God of the Hebrews. It tells where God is to be praised - in
the sanctuary and in the firmament; it tells why He is to be praised - for His
mighty deeds; it tells how he is to be praised - with the string instruments, th
pipes, and the cymbals (the percussion instruments appropriately coming last

And then its splendid conclusion --let everything that breathes, literally

everything in creation, praise Him!

The second epigraph, from Rilke, suggests (1) that this penchant for praise
remains also an aspiration of the modern poet, and (2) that the circumstance o
praise is difficult to come by, since it presupposes receptivity and "openness" and a

STANLEY ROMAINE HOPPER (Ph.D., Drew University) is the Bishop W. Earl Ledden
Professor of Religion, Emeritus, at Syracuse University. He was formerly Dean of th
Graduate School at Drew University, where he presided over an important series
International Consultations in Hermeneutics. He was for twelve years president (now

Emeritus) of the Society for the Arts, Religion and Contemporary Culture. He is the auth
of The Crisis of Faith, The Exposition of the Book of Jeremiah in The Interpreter's Bib

editor of Spiritual Problems in Contemporary Literature (Harper Torchbook), and co

editor (with David Miller) of Interpretation: The Poetry of Meaning.

Copyright ? 1975 American Academy of Religion

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136

STANLEY

ROMAINE

movement

into

very

the

likely

HOPPER

what

place

Rilke

(as

Roethk

Hopkins' "Pied Beauty" which

ends "He fathers-forth whose
on completing her canticles, s
the glory of life."
Auden, too, aspired to this c
show an affirming flame." In
expresses what may well be th
the poet in a time such as ou

Follow, poet, follow right

To the bottom of the nigh
With your unconstraining

Still

persuade

us

to

rejoic

With the farming of a ver

Make a vineyard of the cu

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.

I am persuaded that this is for Auden, at bottom (that is, when he is not
thinking too much or trying too hard), what he believes poetry is all about. That
this is a rare moment in Auden points at the same time to something in his genius,

and points also perhaps to something in us and in our time which might be
described as an obstructive, recalcitrant, or inhibiting factor - something deep
within us that prevents our coming to the place where the knock is open wide, and

which thwarts thereby the circumstance of praise.

Perhaps we should put alongside these fortunate verses a broken poem from
his Sonnet Sequence called "The Quest." It is entitled "The Waters."
Poet. oracle and wit

Like unsuccessful anglers by

The ponds of apperception sit,
Baiting with the wrong request
The vectors of their interest;
At nightfall tell the angler's lie.

The waters long to hear our questions put

Which would release their longed-for answer, but.

This dangling conjunction, "but," may very well suggest the famous prayer
Saint Augustine: "Grant me chastity and continency, but not yet." But Augusti
also said, "Man himself is a great deep,"' and what we have here, by reason of t
I Saint Augustine, Confessions IV, xiv. 24.

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W. H. AUDEN AND THE CIRCUMSTANCE OF PRAISE 137

confessional dimension in these sonnets of the q

oracle, and wit, sitting by the ponds of apper
request the vectors of his (and our) interest. F
ponds of apperception. Doubtless we would like

are under the earth, in the waters of the

apprehensive - we do not quite wish to risk w

the venture

Into the snarl of the abyss

That always lies just underneath
Our jolly picnic on the heath
Of the agreeable, where we bask,
Agreed on what we will not ask,
Bland, sunny and adjusted by

The light of the accepted lie ... 2

It is just here at this juncture (between following to the bottom of the night or
dropping down into the waters and his evident reluctance actually to do so) that I
should like to probe briefly the strange ambivalence in Auden's poetic vision,
which makes him at one level so penetrating and oracular, and at another so
"irritating," so rhetorical and, at times, so hortatorily beside the point.
I shall undertake this probe in two brief steps: the first, by way of Auden's
dream as recounted for us in one of his last poems; and second, by way of his
images and representative anecdotes and the contrast thus evoked between Auden
and Rilke as representative poets of our time.
I

This is not to take anything from Auden's genius or from his greatness as a
poet. "The best poet of the Auden generation is Auden," as William York Tindall
puts it.3 His major poems, in the opinion of Louise Bogan, "constitute the most
minute dissection of the spiritual illness of our day that any modern poet, not
excluding Eliot, has given us."4 "What Auden brought to poetry," wrote John
Peale Bishop, "was a new sensibility; his poems are the record of what has hurt and
sustained that sensibility."5 Amos Wilder noted, back in 1952, that "Auden offers
us the forum of the modern consciousness."6 As Auden remarks in his poem
honoring a former professor, Nevill Coghill, upon his retirement, these and other
estimates of his work are sufficient to "assure (us) that (he will) pass muster."
Nevertheless, there has been a curious reluctance on the part of the critics
generally to commit themselves overly far. One critic (David Daiches) described
Auden as "this combination of prophet and clown."7 Monroe Spears, at the end of
2Auden, "New Year Letter," The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (New York: Random

House, 1954), p. 286.

3 Tindall, Forces in Modern British Literature (New York: Vintage Books, 1956), p. 46.

4 Bogan, Selected Criticism (New York: Noonday Press, 1955), p. 280.

5 Bishop, The Collected Essays of John Peale Bishop (New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons, 1948), p. 309.
6Wilder, Modern Poetry and the Christian Tradition (New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons, 1952), p. 196.
7 Daiches, Poetry and the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940),
p. 228.

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138

STANLEY

ROMAINE

HOPPER

his excellent book on The Po

poet who is also a clown, a vir
also a musician and lyricist. .
influence of Auden's own ver
poet, a capricious artist deligh
torn between agnosticism and

and a lover of extravagant

dialectician - in short a poe

enchantment."9

It is interesting to see how, in his late book of poems (City Without Walls),
Auden views himself somewhat more modestly, though acknowledging at the
same time his logistical pranks and wizardry. He classifies himself with the

Horatian tradition:

You thought well of your Odes, Flaccus, and

believed they
would live, but knew, and have taught your
descendants to

say with you: "As makers go,

compared with Pindar or any
of the great foudroyant masters who don't ever
amend, we are, for all our polish, of little
stature, and as human lives,
compared with authentic martyrs

like Regulus, of no account. We can only

do what it seems to us we were made for, look at
this world with a happy eye
but from a sober perspective."'0

Which brings us to his dream. He tells us ("Forty Years On") that

For three nights running
now I have had the same dream

of a suave afternoon in Fall. I am standing on high ground,

looking out westward over
a plain run smoothely by Jaguar farmers. In the eloignment,
a-glitter in the whelking sun,
a sheer-bare cliff concludes the vista. At its base I see,
black, shaped like a bell-tent,
the mouth of a cave by which (I know in my dream) I am to
make my final exit,

8 Spears, The Poetry of W. H. Auden, The Disenchanted Island (New York: Oxfor

University Press, 1963), p. 339.

9 Untermeyer, Modern British Poetry (combined mid-century edition, with Modern

American Poetry) (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1950), p. 430.
10 Auden, "The Horatians," in City Without Walls and Other Poems (New Yor
Random House, 1969), p. 28.

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W. H. AUDEN AND THE CIRCUMSTANCE OF PRAISE 139

its roof so low it will need an awkward duck to

"Well, will that be so shaming?"
I ask when awake, "Why should it be? When h
ever solemned himself?"''

It is not difficult to see, on the face of it, that th

pre-figuration of death, the cavern being the grav
But we know also that the cave is an initiation symb
of a mountain, one is invited to enter and to find th
Jungian psychology it relates to the Mother Archet
it one may be reborn from the deep Self. In the in
shamans, it is in the caves that the candidates mee
Spears has told us about Auden's "obsession with
overlaps symbolically with the cave in psychical f
In Auden's book, About the House (1966), two c
"The Cave of Making," begins promisingly:

For this and for all enclosures like it the arc

is Weland's Stithy, an antre

more private than a bedroom even...13

But while this "antre" (cave, cavern) is the coverin

study, the archetype appropriate to it is the "stithy

the second, "The Cave of Nakedness," the cave is a

dreams and sleep and intimations of death; but th

paean to sunrise when

he, she, or both ensemble,

emerge from a private cavity to be reborn,
reneighbored in the Country of Considerat

(In the previous poem, death is allegorized as the

Thus in Auden's late work, the house as a kind
becomes a central image. Bachelard, in his Poetic
image to the Mother-Archetype. He quotes a rele

Here the conscious acts like a man who, hearing a susp

hurries to the attic and, finding no burglars there de
noise was pure imagination. In reality, this prudent m

the cellar.'5

The cellar obviously refers to the unconscious and

Auden at his home in Austria wrote (in 1971):

I IAuden, "Forty Years On," in City Without Walls,

12 Spears, The Poetry of W. H. Auden, p. 11.

'3 Auden, About the House (New York: Random Ho

14 Ibid., p. 34.

15 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (New York: Orion Press, 1964), p. 19.

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140

STANLEY

ROMAINE

HOPPER

Every morning and most after

staircase to his cluttered study

off

by

warning

sign

in

Ge

Apparently Auden's house in

poems devoted to these ("Dow

and

for

the

subconscious
Self-walled,

most

may
we

part

be

sleep

lite

gleaned
aloft,

but

The poet goes on to describe

barrels, bottles, jars. .. ." But

fantasy

takes

over.

The

att

psychoanagogical reading; and

attic one's fears are easily "ra
poetic cleverness and virtuosi
employed with accomplished d
noises in the cellar.

In an early essay (published in 1939) Delmore Schwartz accused Auden of

having two voices. One voice, he said, "is that of the clever guy, the Noel Coward of

literary Marxism. ..... let us call this voice the Ego, thus using terminology in

which the poet himself is interested." The other voice will then have to be called the
Id, from which we get many images of import and power. This voice is "a kind of
sibyl" (who prophesied, it will be recalled, from in front of a cave, or labyrinth).
Schwartz preferred the poet of the Id to the poet of the Ego. The Id with its images
is far ahead of the Ego, which "is merely clever and ingenious." As he anticipated

Auden's development as a poet, everything would depend, as he saw it, upon

Auden's ability to break with the "public poet.. .fashioned by the conscious will"
and to return to "the role of obedience to the passive, subconscious self' with its
images of power and import.'18

It is interesting to follow Auden's development in the light of this

prognostication.
In one of Auden's better early poems, entitled (under some influence, we
assume, from Paul Tillich's earlier work) "Kairos and Logos," we find these lines:
Night and the rivers sang a chthonic love,

Destroyer of cities and the daylight order ... .9

The chthonic voices from below are seen here as destructive, while order belongs to
the daylight, to the rational part. Here emerges also Auden's symbol of the City,

for him the symbol of civilization and order. It is perhaps the most pervasive
16 Alan Levy, "On Audenstrasse," The New York Times Magazine, August 8, 1971, p. 36.

17 Auden, "Down There," in About the House, p. 14.

18 Schwartz, "The Two Audens," in Selected Essays ofDelmore Schwartz, ed. Donald E.
Dike and David H. Zucker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 143, 144, 147

152.

19 The Collected Poetry, p. 12.

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W. H. AUDEN AND THE CIRCUMSTANCE OF PRAISE 141

symbol in his poetry. It persists to the end. It i

polis, which imitates the order in the heave

valorization by way of Augustine's civitas terre

To set in order - that's the task

Both Eros and Apollo ask...

he says in "The New Year Letter.'"20 And in his later poem, "Memorial for th
City," we see Adam still "waiting for His City."21
The whole question here, of course, is what is concealed behind the word order
What kind of order is supposed? Law, nature, mimesis, etc., may well belong to the
"Aristotelian City"; but the resonances of these terms as used by Auden, along
with order, will, administration, etc., (plus his appeal to Horace) often sound les

Greek than Roman.

It is fascinating, in the light of these evidences, to turn to Auden's elaborate

interpretation of Wordsworth's dream, which he expounds in The Enchafe

Flood. Wordsworth, seated in a rocky cave and facing sea-ward while reading Don
Quixote, falls asleep and dreams. He is in the desert, where he is met by a Bedoui
who resembles Don Quixote. The Bedouin has two treasures, a stone and a shell
The stone is geometric truth; the shell is Poetic Truth. It is a truth built by
passion which itself
Is highest reason in a soul sublime
(for it is) a god, yes many gods
(has) voices more than all the winds
(and is) a joy, a consolation and a hope. .. .22

The shell, says Wordsworth, is more valuable than the stone; but, when held to the
ear in his dreams, it foretells a great deluge about to overwhelm the earth, and the
dreamer sees the Bedouin hurrying away across the desert on his dromedary wit
"the fleet waters of the drowning world in chase of him." The dreamer then awake

in terror.

Auden aligns the stone with the desert, and the shell with the sea. He recognizes
the dangers of inundation from the unconscious, but not through benefit of Jung.
It is rather that one must be a sublime soul to ride out the storms of Poetic Truth.

Later, however, Jung slips in undetected by way of Robert Penn Warren

masterful analysis of The Ancient Mariner, under which influence Auden align
Day and the Sun with consciousness and the Paternal Principle and Night and th
Moon with the Unconscious and the Maternal Principle. After pursuing these
symbolic images through innumerable literary embodiments, Auden attempts t
distinguish between the ego (which is aware of the self as given) and the self, a sor
of vehicle of existence and potentiality. "As freely owning a self, (the ego) desires a
self of which it can approve. As solitary it desires to be approved of for the self it
has. This approval must have absolute authority ... (Therefore) the ego desires

God."23

20 Ibid., p. 266.

21 Auden, Nones (New York: Random House, 1951), p. 43.

22 Auden, The Enchafed Flood (New York: Random House, 1950), p. 43.
23 Ibid., p. 121.

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142

STANLEY

ROMAINE

HOPPER

The ego, therefore, has three

(1) To know the self and the
(2) To know the true God and
he knows it.

(3) To obey these commands.24

This is a strange and curiously vague psychology. Clearly it is not Jungian. There is

here no deep Unconscious in the Jungian sense, and no deep Psyche either on
which the Ego depends and with which it seeks an integration (or through which it

seeks its Individuation). But it is scarcely a Freudian psychology either. What has
happened is that Kierkegaard - the Kierkegaard of the Stages and the Sickness
Unto Life - has been smuggled in to supplement and undergird Freud; but it is

Kierkegaard without the understanding of the Self having been properly

understood or integrated into the argument - the view, namely, that the self
becomes a self by relating itself to itself in a positive relation, that is, by relating
itself transparently to the power that posited it.25
Meanwhile, the City has made its appearance; and both the stone and the shell
are seen as the means through which the True City is built. Which brings us to the

book's surprising denouement:

We live in a new age in which the artist neither can have such a unique heroic
importance nor believes in the Art-God enough to desire it, an age, for instance,
when the necessity of dogma is once more recognized, not as a contradiction of
reason and feeling, but as their ground and foundation, in which the heroic image
is not the nomad wanderer through the desert or over the ocean, but the less
exciting figure of the builder, who renews the ruined walls of the city.26

The conclusion is arbitrary and unveils the entire project as an elaborate tour
deforce or, better, what Bachelard described as a "rationalization" from the attic.
What we are to note here is that Auden's dream of the cave comes too late for him

to enter and possess the treasure that had there awaited him; that he tends to
remain, in Delmore Schwartz's terms, predominantly the poet of the Ego; that he
fears the chthonic voices as destructive powers and opts for daylight order as the

poet's task; that he rationalizes the symbols of depth (as in the case of

Wordsworth's dream) in the direction of "building the city," and manipulates

Freud through Kierkegaard in such a way as to subordinate the aesthetic to the
ethical and the religious, thus conserving his poetic vocation as moralist at the
crossroads between time and eternity, the civitas terrena and the civitas caelestis.
II

The effect of this on Auden's poetics will be seen the moment we turn to the
second term in Auden's dream which came when he awoke and reflected that death

would be rather awkward and embarrassing for a poet. But why should it be
shameful, he reflects, and adds - "When has Autolycus ever solemned himself?"
24 Ibid.

25 Cf. Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1941), p. 19.
26 Auden, The Enchafed Flood, p. 153.

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W. H. AUDEN AND THE CIRCUMSTANCE OF PRAISE 143

Who was Autolycus, that Auden should so design

first place, the son of Hermes - Hermes the thief
the gods. He was, in the second place, the grandfa

the most laudable of circumstances. And when

manhood, Autolycus gave him boxing lessons;
Schwartz, in the essay already cited, "like a good

guise that Auden sees himself in this poem: "a

courtier's agility to adapt my rogueries to the tim

"rogueries" can best be seen in his deployment of im

and in his presiding anecdotes.

Auden's metaphors are odd. It is often remarked
part at least, from Rilke. Rilke's method, Auden
Elizabethans who aimed at anthropomorphic ident
the Metaphysical poets, who used wit and the in
with things. He thinks in physical rather thah in in
Auden also attempts to do) a psychical geography
lose their thinghood in his landscapes, and someh
because abstract. In a late poem he confesses to ha
abstract noun upon abstract noun.28 When he de
Byron," the "map of all my youth," with its "me
creeks/ The towns of which the master never speak

terms lack specificity: they are not things, t

progressively emptying the intended word of conte

as in his poem to Edward Lear, the effect is beaut

And children swarmed to him like settlers. He
became a land.30

When the strategy fails the effect is baffling and annoying:

We are easy to trap,
Being Adam's children, as thirsty
For mere illusion still as when the first

Comfortable heresy crooned to

The proud flesh founded on the self-made wound,
And what we find rousing or touching

Tells us little and confuses us much.3'

That is the difficulty: it tells us little and confuses us much! It is because of this that

Auden's metaphors turn outward, whereas those of Rilke turn inward and create

27 Auden, "Forty Years On" in City Without Walls, p. 43. It would appear that Auden
came by this happy identification by way of Shakespeare. In The Winter's Tale we find
"Autolycus, a Rogue." Autolycus says of himself: "My father named me Autolycus; who
being, as I am, littered under Mercury, was likewise a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles"
(Act iv, Sc. 3). The name means literally "very wolf' (Graves), compounding abtr6 (self,
very, the same) and X6KoV (a wolf, a person of wolf-like character).
28 Auden, "Eulogy," in City Without Walls, p. 18.
29 Auden, 11. 24-26, Letters from Iceland (London, 1937).
30 The Collected Poetry, p. 77.
31 Auden, "Music is International," Nones, pp. 72-73.

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144

STANLEY

what

he

ROMAINE

called

HOPPER

the

Weltinne

Auden writes

But few have seen Jesus and so many

Judas the Abyss...32

the abyss for Auden has become a moral category and not a metapsychical one.
Part of this is due to Auden's distrust of metaphor:
No metaphor, remember, can express
A real historical unhappiness...33

But Auden distrusts metaphor because he distrusts art:

Art is not life and cannot be

A midwife to society...34

But for Rilke it is just the opposite: "we are the bees of the invisible!"
Here is the time for the Tellable, here is its home.

Speak and proclaim......

Praise the world to the Angel, not the untellable: you
Can't impress him with the splendour you've felt...
Show him

Some simple thing, remoulded by age after age,

till it lives in our hands and eyes as a part of
ourselves.35

What this boils down to in Auden's use of metaphor is that the terms in
comparison tend to function allegorically and interact in such a way as mutually to

enervate the images of their existential virtue: they intellectualize the relation
(between the terms) according to a scale of values or beliefs that remains external
to the terms in the comparison. They aim to formulate recognitions at the level of
Ego-consciousness; they rarely evoke depth recognitions.
We should bear in mind constantly the maxim (Wheelwright) that "what
matters in a metaphor is the psychic depth at which the things of the world ... are
transmuted by the cool heat of the imagination."36

But the very things that tell against Auden in his use of metaphor tell
wondrouslyfor him in his use of wit. Here both Freud and Kierkegaard support
him, and his own genius is free to romp and scintillate as outrageously as it pleases.
Through wit and cleverness the Freudian subconscious can bypass the censorship
32 Auden, "Autumn 1940," The Collected Poetry, p. 102.
33 Auden, "The Truest Poetry Is the Most Feigning," The Shield of Achilles (New York:

Random House, 1955), pp. 44.

4 Auden, "New Year Letter," The Collected Poetry, p. 267.
35 Rilke, Duino Elegies, trans. J. '. Leishman and Stephen Spender (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1939), IX, p. 75.
36 Philip Wheelwright, Metaphor and Reality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1962), p. 71.

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W. H. AUDEN AND THE CIRCUMSTANCE OF PRAISE 145

of the Super-Ego and get through to the Ego with

surprises and so unmask the Ego's pretensions. Poet

skill.

There is a game called cops and robbers; there

is none called saints and sinners.37

As a game, it can be played lightly, dalliantly:

George the Third
Ought never to have occurred.
One can only wonder
At so grotesque a blunder.38

T. S. Eliot is quite at a loss

When clubwomen bustle across

At literary teas,

Crying: "what, if you please,

Did you mean by The Mill on the Floss?"39

So far the clerihew and the limerick. But wit can also probe deeply at th

crossroads of our ultimate antinomies, and there unmask our ego-pretensions, o

egos complying:
For, given Man, by birth, by education,
Imago Dei who forgot his station,
The self-made creature who himself unmakes,
The only creature ever made who fakes,
With no more nature in his loving smile
Than in his theories of a natural style,
What but tall tales, the luck of verbal playing,
Can trick his lying nature into saying
That love, or truth in any serious sense,
Like orthodoxy, is a reticence.40

Thus art and poetry are frivolous (to use the term which Auden takes from
Kierkegaard) and only religion is highly serious; but
... hidden in (its) hocus-pocus,
There lies the gift of double focus.
That magic lamp which looks so dull
And utterly impractical
Yet, if Aladdin use it right,
Can be a sesame to light.41

37 Auden, "Postscript: The Frivolous & the Earnest," The Dyer's Hand and Other Essa

(New York: Random House, 1962), p. 432.

8 Alan Levy, "On Audenstrasse," The New York Times Magazine, August 8, 1971, p. 3

39 Auden, Homage to Clio (New York: Random House, 1960), p. 90.

40 Auden, "The Truest Poetry Is the Most Feigning," The Shield of Achilles, p. 46
41 Auden, "New Year Letter," The Collected Poetry, p. 290.

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146

STANLEY

ROMAINE

HOPPER

Nevertheless, as Auden points

Mirror," we must not be mis
between what we are and wh
aware that the gap is there How different this Kierkegaar
whom the writing of poetry se
almost; whereas in reality it is
language that the poet names
"poetry is the act of establis
fundamentally 'poetic.'. . . An
cannot in the last resort mean
It is much the same with Au
four (the story of the City is
story, the fairy story, and the
of

the

Ego,

the

latter

two

to

th

joined.
The story of Adam is by all odds the most pervasive of the four. Adam is
antecedent to any act of ours. His crime was (1) a legalistic one:
Could not one almost say that the
Cold serpent on the poisonous tree
Was l'Nsprit de gbometrie,

That Eve and Adam till the Fall

Were totally illogical,

But as they tasted of the fruit
The syllogistic sin took root?44

It was also (2) an error:

Since Adam, being free to choose,
Chose to imagine he was free
To choose his own necessity,
Lost in his freedom, Man pursues
The shadow of his images. .. .45

It was also (3) a rebellion of a special kind:

For as long as he was in Paradise he could not sin by any conscious intention or
act: his as yet unfallen will could only rebel against the truth by taking flight into an

unconscious lie; he could only eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil
by forgetting that its existence was a fiction of the Evil One, that there is only the

Tree of Life.46

42 Auden, "The Sea and the Mirror," The Collected Poetry, p. 400.
43 Martin Heidegger, Existence and Being, with an intro. by Werner Brock (London
Vision Press, 1949), p. 306, "Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry."
44 Auden, "New Year Letter," The Collected Poetry, p. 279.
45 Auden, "For the Time Being," The Collected Poetry, p. 420.
46 Ibid., p. 450.

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W. H. AUDEN AND THE CIRCUMSTANCE OF PRAISE 147

This was (4) an egoistic sin:

As long as the self can say "I," it is impossi

not to rebel;...
And the garden cannot exist, the miracle cannot occur.
For the garden is the only place there is, but you will
find it

Until you have looked for it everywhere and found

nowhere that is not a desert;
The miracle is the only thing that happens, but to you it
will not be apparent,
Until all events have been studied and nothing happens
that you cannot explain;
And life is the destiny you are bound to refuse until
you have consented to die.
Therefore, see without looking, hear without listening,
breathe without asking;
The Inevitable is what will seem to happen to you purely
by chance;
The Real is what will strike you as really absurd;
Unless you are certain you are dreaming, it is certainly
a dream of your own;

Unless you exclaim - "There must be some mistake" - you

must be mistaken.47

This is der Mensch im Widerspruch - Man in contradiction! - of existentialist

neo-orthodox theology. It rests, as Auden knew well, upon the dogma of Original
Sin, and was perhaps never expressed better than by Auden in his Oratorio, For
the Time Being. But Rilke knew it also from the human side:
Who's turned us round like this, so that we always
do what we may, retain the attitude

of someone who's departing....

we live our lives, for ever taking leave.48

Auden sees the tragic consequences of this flight from reality; Rilke sees its
pathos. For Auden, our compounded flights from reality bring about the social
crime. Where the Arcadian and the Utopian meet, there is murder!
It lures us all; even the best,
Les hommes de bonne volonte, feel
Their politics perhaps unreal
And all they have believed untrue,
Are tempted to surrender to
The grand apocalyptic dream
47 Ibid., p. 412.

48 Rilke, Duino Elegies VIII, p. 71.

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148

STANLEY

ROMAINE

HOPPER

In which the persecutors

As on the evil Aryan live
Descends the night of the

Auden's

fascination

subordinate

theme

of

with

Adam's

The situation of our time

Surrounds us like a baffling crime.

There lies the body half undressed,
We all had reason to detest,
And all are suspects and involved
Until the mystery is solved...
Who is trying to shield whom?
Who left a hairpin in the room?
Why did the watchdog never bark?
Why did the footsteps leave no mark?
Yet where the Force has been cut down

To one inspector dressed in brown,

He makes the murderer whom he pleases
And all investigation ceases.
Yet our equipment all the time
Extends the area of the crime

Until the guilt is everywhere .....o50

We continually seek a scapegoat, thinking that if we can pin the guilt on someone,
the innocence of the rest of us is established. Not so, says Auden: we all participate
in mankind's collective crime. But it is to be remarked that Auden, through his
craft, is more successful in pointing to the crime than he is in solving it. He thereby
runs the risk, as does all dogma, of committing the very legalistic crime he would
resolve. For it is in the nature of all theology that construes itself in terms of theologic instead of theo-poiesis that it commits the syllogistic sin. It sacrifices its
mythopoeic base in storial forms to the literalizations of dogmatic forms; it lapses
from an ontology of metapoetics to the intellectualisms of Western metaphysics.
Such a poet's appeal to dogma becomes an appeal outside his craft: which is to

commit the sin of lbse majeste against his vocation. By the same token the
mythologem of Adam loses its virtue when no longer held mythopoeically.
Kierkegaard understood this perhaps better than most of his epigones: "All human
speech," he wrote, "even the divine speech of the Holy Scriptures about spiritual
matters, is essentially metaphorical . . . . the essence of the spirit is the quiet,
whispering secrecy of the metaphorical - to one who has ears to hear with."'51
49 Auden, "New Year Letter," The Collected Poetry, p. 273.
50 Ibid., pp. 271-72.

5' Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, trans. David F. and Lillian M. Swenson
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946), p. 169.

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W. H. AUDEN AND THE CIRCUMSTANCE OF PRAISE 149

Perhaps this is the reason why the fairy story has

throughout his years. Fairy tales, as Marie von Fra
and simplest expression of collective unconscious
images are archetypal, and provide many clues fo
processes going on in the deep psyche. Auden is in
the third son (he was himself the third son in his f
brothers have failed, and who, by virtue of his naiv
in finding the treasure or rescuing the princess. In
hero may encounter ogres, dragons, square castles
encounters at the crossroads; but Auden is intrigued
of these quests. Like Alice in Wonderland, there is
pass into the Garden. Marie von Franz goes on to

After working for many years in this field, I have com

fairy tales endeavor to describe one and the same psy

fact is ... the Self. . .53

It may be worthy of notice that in all of Auden's poetic references to the fairy tale,
the adventure which he follows is always a lateral one: he never enters the cave like
Aladdin, nor is he ever swallowed by beasts (like Eliot's dismembered hero in Ash

Wednesday, or like Jonah in the belly of the fish).

Perhaps this explains why the fourth story, that of Orpheus, is the anecdote
that is not there. Auden writes one poem on Orpheus. In it he asks two questions:
"what does the song (of Orpheus) hope for?" and "what will the dance do?"54 He

ignores Orpheus' descent into the underworld, where through his song the
underworld is enraptured and, with Eurydice, he is permitted to
mount more singingly,

mount more praisingly back into the pure relation...

as Rilke says.55 And as for the dance, it is Rilke who exclaims, in his Sonnets to
Orpheus, that "Song is existence!"... and we must learn to "Dance the Orange!"
There are few references to Orpheus in Auden's poetry. There is Quant's
speech, in The Age of Anxiety,56 and the reference in Memorial for the City, in
which "Our Weakness" speaks:
I heard Orpheus sing: I was not quite as moved
as they say."5

52 Marie-Louise von Franz, An Introduction to the Interpretation of Fairy Tales (New

York: Spring Publications, 1971), p. 1.
53 Ibid., p. 2.

54 Auden, "Orpheus," The Collected Poetry, p. 158.

55 Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. M. D. Herter Norton (New York: W. W. Norton,
1941), II, 13, p. 95.
56 Auden, The Age of Anxiety (New York: Random House, 1947), pp. 45-46.
57 Auden, Nones, p. 44.

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150

STANLEY

ROMAINE

HOPPER

Thus

the anecdote of Orpheus i

and by reason of the intellect
sonnets of quest are modelled
III

One is inclined to agree with Nathan Scott when, in his fine essay on Auden, he
observes
that almost nowhere in Auden's poetry does he simply stare and look at the created

world, in amazement and expectancy and adoration and praise.58

But there are signs in Auden's later work that his cerebral obduracy was beginning
to relent. The poems are no longer theological in any explicit sense. He even gives
an ear to "Bird-Language":
Trying to understand the words
Uttered on all sides by birds,
I recognize in what I hear
Noises that betoken fear.

Though some of them, I'm certain, must

Stand for rage, bravado, lust,
All other notes that birds employ
Sound like synonyms for joy.59

Here he has come quite simply upon the circumstance of praise.

And again, surprisingly, in a review of a book by Loren Eiseley, he quotes at
length the professor-scientist's unexpected encounter with a fox cub:
The creature was very young. He was alone in a dread universe. I crept on my

knees around the prow and crouched beside him.......

.... Here was the thing in the midst of the bones, the wide-eyed innocent fox

inviting me to play, with the innate courtesy of its two fore-paws placed
appealingly together, along with a mock shake of its head. The universe was
swinging in some fantastic fashion around to present its face, and the face was so
small that the universe itself was laughing.
It was not time for human dignity. It was time only for the careful observance of

amenities written behind the stars ... On impulse I picked up clumsily a whiter
bone and shook it in teeth that had not entirely forgotten their original purpose.
Round and round we tumbled for one ecstatic moment ... For a moment I had

held the universe at bay by the simple expedient of sitting on my haunches before a
fox-den and tumbling about with a chicken bone. It is the gravest, most meaningful
act I shall ever accomplish, but, as Thoreau once remarked of some peculiar errand

of his own, there is no use reporting it to the Royal Society.

58 Scott, Four Ways of Modern Poetry (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1965), p. 89.
59 Auden, "Bird-Language," City Without Walls, p. 38.

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W. H. AUDEN AND THE CIRCUMSTANCE OF PRAISE 151

Whereupon Auden concludes his review: "Thank G

reported it to me. Bravo! say I."60 Here too he has stu

of praise.
What we must say, then, is simply that the whole of Auden's poetry, taken as a
symbolic form, is an anecdote of quest in a time between the times. From time to
time I think I see beneath his antic disposition a lonely child wanting to be found.

In his several ordeals, he appeals to dogma--Marxian, Freudian,

Kierkegaardian, Athanasian - whereas his contra-type, Maria Rilke, sees

religion as a direction of the heart, and would bring us into the presence of the gods

or would bring the gods to presence. Auden brings us sharply and realistically
upon the dark night of the long knives; Rilke brings us to the dark night of "eternal

blossoming." Auden, disesteeming his poetic voice, confronts the human situation

as a problem, an occasion for wit and analysis; Rilke looks upon the human
situation as a mystery to be marveled at and accepted.
Whoever [says Rilke], within poetic creation, is initiated into the fabulous
wonders of our depths ..... must arrive at developing for himself in marveling one

of the most essential applications of his spirit ..... It is one of the original
inclinations of my disposition to accept the mysterious as such, not as something to

be unmasked, but rather as the mystery that, to its innermost being, and
everywhere, is thus mysterious, as a lump of sugar is sugar throughout.6'

Yet both poets, each after his fashion, were seeking the circumstance of praise.
Wrote Auden:

Praise, tongue, the Earthly Muse

By number and by name
In any style you choose,
For nimble tongues and lame
Have both found favor; praise
Her port and sudden ways,
Now fish-wife and now queen,

Her reason and unreason;

Though freed from that machine,
Praise her revolving wheel

Of appetite and season...

Although your style be fumbling,
Half stutter and half song,
Give thanks however bumbling,
Telling for Her dear sake

To whom all styles belong

The truth She cannot make.62

And Rilke, to much the same effect, but in his very different voice:
60 Forewords & Afterwords, Selected by Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage Books,
1974), p. 473.
61 Rilke, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, vol. 2: 1910-1926, trans. Jane Bannard Greene

and M. D. Herter Norton (New York: W. W. Norton, 1948), p. 343.

62 Auden, "Precious Five," Nones, pp. 78-79.

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152

STANLEY

tell

But

ROMAINE

us,

the

Poet,

dark,

HOPPER

what

the

you

deadly,

do?
the

How do you endure them - h

But the nameless, anonymous
What do you call that, Poet, n
From

whence

is

your

right,

yo

To be sincere in each mask? And you know the stillness, a

As of star, and of storm? - B

But enough of these critical qu

and his wit and his genius and
perhaps Auden was an Orpheus p
descent to the underworld takes
from Rilke's Orphic voice to th
He

is

one

of

those

staying

Who still holds far into the doors of the dead

bowls of fruit worthy of praise.64

63 "O0, tell us, Poet, what you do?" in Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems, trans. Jessie Lemont

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), p. 181.

64 Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, I, 7, p. 29.

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