Only.

There are good books which are only for adults, because their comprehension presupposes adult experiences, but there are no good books which are only for children.

W.H. Auden, from Forwards and Afterwards

Happy Birthday, Auden

There must always be two kinds of art: escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love.

W.H. Auden, born on this day in 1907

Humanizing.

Stevens said it -- technique is the proof of your seriousness ...

Maybe what I'm trying to say is: I don't want to believe it. I don't want to lump Auden in with the cocktail consumers I've seen belly up to bars at innumerable happy hours, lean their elbows on the polished wood or marble or zinc, and, with an air of sophisticated authority, order an extra-dry vodka martini with extra olives. I want to pry away their drinks and replace them with real martinis—made with gin and considerably more than a rumor of vermouth, and garnished, if garnished they must be, with clean, curly twists of lemon peel. It's much the way I feel when, riding the subway some evenings, I catch sight of someone reading Atlas Shrugged, and want to tear the book from his or her hands and replace it with Paradise Lost or The Prelude. Life is too short for Ayn Rand, when one's time could be spent with Milton or Wordsworth—that is, with something beautiful and humanizing and good. And life is too short for a 10-ounce glass of chilled vodka masquerading as a cocktail, too short to forgo the pleasure of the real martini, a drink that at its best, too, is beautiful, and humanizing, and very, very good.

Happy Birthday, Auden

As a poet – not as a citizen – there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one’s language from corruption. And that is particularly serious now. It’s being so quickly corrupted. "Speech is the mother of thought, not the hand-maiden." When it is corrupted, people lose faith in what they hear, and that leads to violence. As a citizen obviously one has a host of political duties. The issues are too obvious to go into. But that’s as a citizen. My only duty as a poet is to defend the use of language.

W.H. Auden, born on this day in 1907

Learn.

Learn from your dreams what you lack. 

W. H. Auden

Time.

Martini-time, time to draw the curtains and

Choose a composer we should like to hear from

W.H. Auden

Gourmand.

A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their images precooked out of a can and swallow them down whole, absent-mindedly and with little relish. 

W. H. Auden

Happy Birthday, Auden

W.H. Auden was born on this day in 1907.

The MORE LOVING ONE

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well

That, for all they care, I can go to hell,

But on earth indifference is the least

We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn

With a passion for us we could not return?

If equal affection cannot be,

Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am

Of stars that do not give a damn,

I cannot, now I see them, say

I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,

I should learn to look at an empty sky

And feel its total dark sublime,

Though this might take me a little time.

W.H. Auden

Reconnoitering.

Sargent, Reconnoitering, 1910

Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,

Hath not old custom made this life more sweet

Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods

More free from peril than the envious court?

Here feel we not the penalty of Adam,

The seasons’ difference, as the icy fang

And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind,

Which when it bites and blows upon my body

Even till I shrink with cold, I smile, and say

’This is no flattery. These are counsellors

That feelingly persuade me what I am.’

Sweet are the uses of adversity

Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,

Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;

And this our life, exempt from public haunt,

Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,

Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

William Shakespeare, from As You Like It

Praise.

In MEMORY of W.B. YEATS

I

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

III

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

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.

W.H. Auden

Alternative.

Knight, Sir Alfred James Munnings, 1911

Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.

W. H. Auden

Thank you, Freiherr von Naarenburg.

Me.

The MORE LOVING ONE

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

W.H. Auden

Gourmand.

Cathedral of Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Campan, 1562

A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their images precooked out of a can and swallow them down whole, absent-mindedly and with little relish. 

W. H. Auden

It's sandwich time.

Happy birthday, Auden.

W.H. Auden was born on this day in 1907.

AFTER READING A CHILD'S GUIDE to MODERN PHYSICS

If all a top physicist knows
About the Truth be true,
Then, for all the so-and-so's,
Futility and grime,
Our common world contains,
We have a better time
Than the Greater Nebulae do,
Or the atoms in our brains.

Marriage is rarely bliss
But, surely it would be worse
As particles to pelt
At thousands of miles per sec
About a universe
Wherein a lover's kiss
Would either not be felt
Or break the loved one's neck.

Though the face at which I stare
While shaving it be cruel
For, year after year, it repels
An ageing suitor, it has,
Thank God, sufficient mass
To be altogether there,
Not an indeterminate gruel
Which is partly somewhere else.

Our eyes prefer to suppose
That a habitable place
Has a geocentric view,
That architects enclose
A quiet Euclidian space:
Exploded myths - but who
Could feel at home astraddle
An ever expanding saddle?

This passion of our kind
For the process of finding out
Is a fact one can hardly doubt,
But I would rejoice in it more
If I knew more clearly what
We wanted the knowledge for,
Felt certain still that the mind
Is free to know or not.

It has chosen once, it seems,
And whether our concern
For magnitude's extremes
Really become a creature
Who comes in a median size,
Or politicizing Nature
Be altogether wise,
Is something we shall learn. 

W.H. Auden

Old-fashioned.

This is now the measure of success for the humanities. Do undergraduates want to come? The material decline of the humanities has made theoretical and political debates secondary, if not irrelevant. Recovery and survival must start from the base.

The Auden-based course at Oklahoma is a small but significant instance of how it may be done. Western-canon talk offends many people in the humanities these days, the few faculty traditionalists often contesting the progressive orthodoxy. But 30 years ago, when the Eurocentrism-versus-multiculturalism debate became a national story, nothing much changed within the departments. The trend toward contemporary, "nontraditional," and "relevant" readings continued.

I advise the traditionalists to try the Oklahoma way. Design your Western-civ or Great Books course and ramp it up to Auden levels. Be frank about the reading challenge. Boast of the aged, uncontemporary nature of the materials. Highlight the old-fashioned themes of greatness, heroism and villainy, love and betrayal, God and Truth, and say nothing against intersectionality and other currencies. Your antagonists are mediocrity, youth culture, presentism, and the disengagement of professors and students. You occupy a competitive terrain, and your brand is Achilles, Narcissus, the Wyf of Bath, Isolde, and Bigger. Let’s see what happens. Let the undergrads decide.

CONNECT

Much.

AMOR LOCI

I could draw its map by heart,

showing its contours,

strata and vegetation,

name every height,

small burn and lonely sheiling,

but nameless to me,

faceless as heather or grouse,

are those who live there,

its dead too vague for judgement,

tangible only

what they wrought, their giant works

of delve and drainage

in days preterite: long since

their hammering stopped

as the lodes all petered out

in the Jew Limestone.

Here and there a tough chimney

still towers over

dejected masonry, moss,

decomposed machines,

with no one about, no chance

of buttering bread,

a land postured in my time

for marginal farms.

Any musical future

is most unlikely.

Industry wants Cheap Power,

romantic muscle

a perilous wilderness,

Mr Pleasure pays

for surf-riding, claret, sex:

it offers them none.

To me, though, much: a vision,

not (as perhaps at

twelve I thought it) of Eden,

still less of a New

Jerusalem but, for one,

convinced he will die,

more comely, more credible

than either day-dream.

How but with some real focus

of desolation

could I, by analogy,

imagine a Love

that, however often smeared,

shrugged at, abandoned

by a frivolous worldling,
does not abandon?

W.H. Auden

Routine.

Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.

W.H. Auden

Dance.

Faeries, come take me out of this dull world,

For I would ride with you upon the wind,

Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,

And dance upon the mountains like a flame.

W.B. Yeats

The dance's pattern, dance while you can.

Dance, dance, for the figure is easy

The tune is catching and will not stop

Dance till the stars come down from the rafters

Dance, dance, dance till you drop.

W.H. Auden

I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; Garlands from window to window; Golden chains from star to star ... And I dance.

Arthur Rimbaud

Happy birthday, Auden.

W.H. Auden was born on this day in 1907.

MUSEE de BEAUX ARTS

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

W.H. Auden

Heart.

AMOR LOCI

I could draw its map by heart
showing its contours
strata and vegetation
name every height,
small burn and lonely shieling

W.H. Auden