Monday's Poetry: "September 1, 1939"

by Pa Rock
Poetry Appreciator

W.H. Auden is widely regarded as one of the most important writers of the twentieth century.  The old poet with his ubiquitous cigarette passed away forty years ago this month.

What follows is one of Auden's best known works.  September 1, 1939 was his reflections on the day that World War II began - the day Hitler's forces invaded Poland.  The most memorable and quoted line in the poem is the last one of the next to the last stanza:  "We must love one another or die."  It is a line that Auden deleted at one time, and changed at another - but history - and publisher's - have chosen to preserve it for its startling clarity and important message.

The novelist, E.M. Forster, famously commented about Auden, "Because he once wrote 'We must love one another or die' he can command me to follow him." 

September 1, 1939
by W.H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-Second Street

Uncertain and afraid

As the clever hopes expire

Of a low and dishonest decade: 

Waves of anger and fear

Circulate over the bright

And darkened lands of the earth,

Obsessing our private lives;

The unmentionable odour of death

Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can

Unearth the whole offense

From Luther until now

That has driven a culture mad,

Find what occurred at Linz,

What huge imago made

A psychopathic god: 

I and the public know

What all those schoolchildren learn, 

Those to whom evil is donenn

Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew

All that a speech can say

About Democracy,

And what dictators do,

The elderly rubbish they talk

To an apathetic grave;

Analysed all in his book.

The enlightenment driven away,

The habit-forming pain,

Mismanagement and grief:

We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air

Where blind skyscrapers use

Their full height to proclaim

The strength of Collective Man,

Each language pours its vain

Competitive excuse:

But who can live for long

In a euphoric dream;

Out of the mirror they stare,

Imperialism's face

And the international wrong. 

Faces along the bar

Cling to their average day: 

The lights must never go out, 

The music must always play,

All the conventions conspire

To make this fort assume

The furniture of home; 

Lest we should see where we are,

Lost in a haunted wood,

Children afraid of the night

Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash

Important Persons shout

Is not so crude as our wish:

What mad Nijinsky wrote

Abotu Diaghilev

Is true of the normal heart;

For the error bred in the bone

Of each woman and each man

Craves what it cannot have,

Not universal love,

but to be loved alone.  

From the conservative dark

Into the ethical life

The dense commuters come,

Repeating their morning vow, 

"I will be true to the wife,

I'll concentrate more on my work,"

And the helpless governors wake

To resume their compulsory game:

Who can release them now,

Who can reach the deaf,

Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice

To undo the folded lie,

The romantic lie in the brain

Of the sensual man-in-the-street

And the lie of Authority

Whose buildings grope the sky: 

There is no such thing as the State

And no one exists alone;

Hunger allows no choice

To the citizen of the police;

We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night

Our world in stupor lies;

Yet, dotted everywhere, 

Ironic points of light

Flash out wherever the Just 

Exchange their  messages:

May I, composed like them

Of Eros and of dust,

Beleaguered by the same

Negation and despair,

Show an affirming flame.