New Year Letter by W. H. Auden

Source of book: I own this

 

This long poem, in the form of a letter to a friend (Elizabeth Mayer), is a fascinating musing on the time it was written (1940, at the beginning of World War Two), and on the relationship of art, life, and politics. In a very real sense, it fits our own time - the rise of Facism and racial hatred, a flood of propaganda and lies, a left that lacks a real message or coherent vision, and all too many people content to live without thinking. 

 

I also must say that I am a bit of a kindred spirit to Auden. I too am conservative by temperament, but find myself accused of being a leftist because I oppose fascism, and support working for the common good of all. We perhaps differ due to nationality - we Americans don’t really support the British class system, whatever our obsession with the British royalty. There is no real movement for a hereditary system of titles here. We prefer to worship celebrities. 

W. H. Auden in 1940 

But I digress. The poem is a long ramble in a lot of ways, a venting of feelings. Auden describes his imposter syndrome, his debt to a whole gallery of past greats, his feeling that the world has come unmoored not merely from order and stability, but from truth and goodness itself. (Me too, W. H…) 

 

The entire work is written in rhymed couplets, with a loose iambic tetrameter. Reading it aloud can become a bit sing-song, but Auden is definitely working in an old tradition with the form. At 44 pages, it is not short, but it also flows quickly. It is divided into three sections, and I read each one in a single sitting. 

 

Throughout, there is a lot of name dropping, from Buxtehude to Rilke. These are in small caps each time, almost like a hyperlink of the internet era. At least that’s how it felt to me. 

 

There really is a lot of food for thought in the poem. I won’t even attempt to summarize it, but I will quote a few passages that I particularly loved. There are many more. While the poem doesn’t seem to have much written about it by professionals, many of us amateur bloggers have written about it, and quoted passages that spoke to us. 

 

Here is the opening: 

 

Under the familiar weight

Of winger, conscience and the State,

In loose formations of good cheer,

Love, language, loneliness and fear,

Towards the habits of next year,

Along the streets the people flow,

Singing or sighing as then go:

Exalte, piano, or in doubt,

All our reflections turn about 

A common meditative norm, 

Retrenchment, Sacrifice, Reform.

 

And this passage, which feels so relevant. In a very real way, MAGA is a shriek of existential terror, a failure to accept mortality, to accept reality, to accept that others exist as equally true humans to ourselves. 

 

How hard it is to set aside

Terror, concupiscence and pride,

Learn who and where and how we are,

The children of a modest star,

Frail, backward, clinging to the granite

Skirts of a sensible old planet,

Our placid and suburban nurse

In SITTER’S swelling universe,

 How hard to stretch imagination

To live according to our station.

For we aqree all insulted by

The mere suggestion that we die

Each moment and that each great I

Is but a process in a process

Within a field that never closes;

As proper people find it strange 

That we are changed by what we change,

That no event can happen twice

And that no two existences

Can every be alike; we’d rather

Be perfect copies of our father,

Prefer our idees fixes to be

True of a fixed Reality. 

 

There is a brief line that made me laugh a bit, as it actually is true. 

 

If she will look as if she were

A fascinated listener,

Since men will pay large sums to whores

For telling them they are not bores.

 

I also liked this passage, which cuts to the heart of the fundamentalist and fascist ideologies, while also rejecting full relativism. (Again, conservative by temperament, but humanist by ideology.)

 

For, if dualities exist,

What happens to the god? If there

Are any cultures anywhere

With other values than his own, 

How can it possibly be shown

That his are not subjective or

That all life is a state of war?

While, if the monist view be right,

How is it possible to fight?

If love has been annihilated

There’s only hate left to be hated. 

To say two different things at once,

To wage offensives on two frogs,

And yet to show complete conviction,

Requires the purpler kinds of diction

And none appreciate as he

Polysyllabic oratory.

All vague  idealistic art

That coddles the uneasy heart

Is up his alley, and his pigeon

The woozier species of religion,

Even a novel, play or song,

If loud, lugubrious and long;

He knows the bored will not unmask him

But that he’s lost if someone ask him

To come the hell in off the links

And say exactly what he thinks.

To win support of any kind

He has to hold before the mind

Amorphous shadows it can hate…

 

This one is also good:

 

Hell is the being of the lie

That we become if we deny

The laws of consciousness and claim

Becoming and Being are the same,

Being in time, and man discrete

In will, yet free and self-complete;

Its fire the pain to which we go

If we refused to suffer, though

The one unnecessary grief

Is the vain craving for relief,

When to the suffering we could bear

We add intolerable fear,

Absconding from remembrance, mocked

By our own partial senses, locked

Each in a stale uniqueness, lie

Time-conscious for eternity.

 

I also liked this passage:

 

Now in that fully alienated land,

An earth made common by the means

Of hunger, money, and machines,

Where each determined nature must

Regard that nature as a trust

That, being chosen, he must choose,

Determined to become of use;

For we are conscripts to our age

Simply by being born; we wage

The war we are, and may not die,

With POLYCARP’S despairing cry,

Desert or become ill: but how

To be the patriots of the Now? 

Here all, by rights, are volunteers,

And anyone who interferes 

With how another wills to fight

Must base his action, not on right,

But on the power to compel; 

Only the “Idiot” can tell

For which state office he should run,

Only the Many make the One. 

 

Hunger, money, and machines…

 

And how about the uselessness of war? And of tribalism and hate?

 

Whatever nonsense we believe,

Whomever we can still deceive,

Whatever language angers us,

Whoever seems the poisonous

Old dragon to be killed if men 

Are ever to be rich again,

We know no fuss or pain or lying

Can stop the moribund from dying.

 

Auden doesn’t spare modern soulless capitalism either. 

 

Out of the noise and horror, the

Opinions of artillery,

The barracks chatter and the yell

Of charging cavalry, the smell

Of poor opponents roasting, out

Of LUTHER’S faith and MONTAIGNE’S doubt,

The epidemic of translations,

The Councils and the navigation,

The confiscations and the suits,

The scholars’ scurrilous disputes

Over the freedom of the Will

And right of Princes to do ill,

Emerged a new Anthropos, an

Empiric Economic Man,

The urban, prudent, and inventive,

Profit his rational incentive

And Work his whole exercitus,

The individual let loose

To guard himself, at liberty 

To starve or be forgotten, free

To feel in splendid isolation

Or drive himself about creation

In the closed cab of Occupation. 

 

Free to starve - that’s pretty much the libertarian ethos, if you think about it. 

 

This next bit seems to apply to a certain Orange Narcissist:

 

He never won complete support;

However many votes he bought,

He could not silence all the cliques,

And no miraculous techniques 

Could sterilize all discontent

Or dazzle it into assent,

But at the very noon and arch

Of his immense triumphal march

Stood prophets pelting him with curses

And sermons and satiric verses…

 

I’ll end with this passage, an indictment of those who mistake good intentions for actual action.  

 

But wishes are not horses, this

Annus is not mirabilis;

Day breaks upon the world we know

Of war and wastefulness and woe; 

Ashamed civilians come to grief

In brotherhoods without belief,

Whose good intentions cannot cure

The actual evils they endure,

Nor smooth their practical career,

Nor bring the far horizon near. 

 

This problem is not really a left or right issue, but an ideology issue. It is the belief that good intentions plus an ideology is all you need to solve problems. In reality, problems are messy and difficult to solve, because they involve messy humans and human systems. Easy, pretty answers don’t fix things. And neither do good intentions. (Not that evil intentions are better, of course.) I feel that one reason my parents are unable to see the damage they have caused to me and other members of my birth family is this very thing: they had good intentions (or at least believe they had…I’m not so sure in some cases) so they cannot see the actual results of their choices as consequences.

 

There are so many other lines I could have featured. The poem is best seen as a conversation, an attempt to make sense of a senseless world, fallen into violence and hate and a war that should never have happened. Auden was a thoughtful writer, and his humble and introspective wrestling with the sorrow of existence truly resonates today.