So Long As I’ Alive
Nones
by W. H. Auden.
Random House. 81 pp. $2.50.
Read The New Yorker, trust in God
And take short views.—“Under Which Lyre”
Make me chaste, Lord, but not yet.
—“The Love Feast”
For Auden, the Unseen (long views) is frankly unpleasant; the love feast is sensual. His poems exhibit the bon vivant’s uneasiness at the thought that the tangible world must sooner or later be given up—at the end of a long or short pleasure cruise through life, death like a fare-collector waits and one will be returned to a void of nothingness. This attitude is more like a 5th-century Greek’s than a modern believer’s, except that with his pre-acedia sense of sheer joy in living the Greek did not know boredom or despair as the modern intellectual knows it.
One would have to stretch the word religion to the breaking point in order to apply it to these poems. Instead of faith, instead of fear and trembling before the crucial issues of moral conduct, instead of responsibility to God or the artist’s ethos, Auden seems more and more drawn to an attitude of let’s-go-on-living-as-comfortably-as-we-can, for any other attitude is too fraught with complex questions of choice and action in our time. One cannot conceive of a truly religious poet, such as Merton or the metaphysical Herbert (for all his conceits), writing a book like Nones. Fundamentally, what seems to be so glaringly missing is passion—in its etymological sense of suffering, as well as in its current construction to mean deep feeling. The kind of spiritual and emotional passion that is ineluctably part of religious experience, such as in Lord Weary’s Castle of Robert Lowell, serves to illustrate the point. Auden talks about suffering, he verbalizes; he does not present it as part of a felt experience. What a gulf between Blake’s:
How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the
airy way,
Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your
senses five?
and Auden’s:
Be happy, precious five,
So long as I’m alive. . . .
It does not matter that in Auden’s poem (“Precious Five”) the attitude is one of acceptance of the given, the corporeal, to “do as you are told.” What is relevant is his conclusion, namely, that he must exercise his full powers of sensing but admit that he does not understand the design or nature of being, the command of his religion to “Bless what there is for being. . . .” Blake’s religion was based on a profound faith in that Eternity which lies beyond the grasp of the senses. He does not fear it. To him, as to Plato or Jesus, the unseen world of the spirit was the reality and the seen a mere shadow:
We like Infants descend
In our Shadows on earth.
For Auden, as for any materialist, the converse is apparently true. It is hard to understand why he is regarded, or regards himself, as a religious poet. It would be truer to regard him as a materialist manqué, a poet in quest of a belief.
Meanwhile, he is temporizing. It is not by chance that the titles of former books are For the Time Being and Another Time. In Nones (meaning three in the afternoon in the Catholic canonical hours), he is more concerned with time than with eternity. He is anxious about its passage, about growing older; he is anxious, one might say, about not having faith enough in the religious solution to the problems of finite existence. Three in the afternoon: it is getting late (one is in one’s forties). Evening (old age, death) is coming on. The sun is still hot, but one does not feel as strongly, shout as loudly, as when he rose in the morning and the world was fresh: “. . . the blood/Of our sacrifice is already/Dry on the grass.” And what is worse.
. . . we are not prepared
For silence so sudden and so soon;
The day is too hot, too bright, too still,
Too ever, the dead remains too nothing.
What shall we do till nightfall?
The last question gives it all away. It is not the question of the true believer, but of the early Eliot, pre-conversion: “What shall we ever do?” And as such, it is unbelieving, fearful.
Auden’s answer is stated in many of the poems in this volume: have a good time. It’s the American answer to the chaos of multiple comforts, gadgets to please the senses and beguile the inquisitive mind from more portentous issues. As such, it is hedonism in the afternoon. He praises limestone pools, where athletes “made solely for pleasure” go to swim. As for Sin and Resurrection, Love and Death:
I know nothing of
Either, but when I try to imagine a faultless
love
Or the life to come, what I hear is the mur
mur
Of underground streams, what I see is a lime
stone landscape.
_____________
