I do love me some W.H. Auden

I've been enjoying the opportunity to explore more of Auden's poetry.  Today: "September 1, 1939," "In Memory of Sigmund Freud," and "In Memory of W.B. Yeats."  These are three very specific, very personal poems.  While I enjoyed them all, the first really hit home.  It is Auden's reaction to the news that Germany has invaded Poland.  Auden chooses not to attack Hitler and the Nazis specifically.  Instead he addresses the false and common belief that the masses must follow authority - that the Fuhrer, or the President, or the Prime Minister knows best and will protect us.  Auden acknowledges that each individual ultimately only acts in his or her own best interest and warns that without love we will perish (an idea that he later recanted, cutting the poem from future printings).  Of course we won't die, we'll just live a bit more miserably than we would without love.  But, as I posted on our class discussion board, without respect, we will die.  If I cannot respect those with whom I disagree, how can I expect them to respect me?  And more importantly, how can we then coexist peacefully?  I wonder where wars come from, huh?

Love, War, Alienation, and Inanity

Today I read "Lullaby" (not "A Lullaby" - took me a few to figure out I'd read the wrong poem) and "Refugee Blues" by W.H. Auden and "Not Waving But Drowning"" and "Pretty" by Stevie Smith.  I loved them all.  (I did enjoy "A Lullaby" as well, but it was a bit difficult to answer questions about romantic love based on this poem.)  It's funny.  We started out with T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land."  Eliot seems to have crammed every bleak, confusing, contradictory thing about life into that poem.  Now, we're looking at several of these issues individually.  Life in modern society can be overwhelming.  We can't fix everything.  Personally, I've tried to stake out one or two little corners where I might be able to make a small difference.  I did enjoy each of these poems, as I have enjoyed everything I've read so far.  I just find it depressing sometimes, focusing on problems for which I suspect no solution will be forthcoming in my lifetime.

Back to Eliot

So, today I read a few more T.S. Eliot poems, only one of which, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," I had read before. The other two, "The Hollow Men" and "Ash Wednesday," were new to me therefore more fresh and interesting. The biggest surprise of the three was "Ash Wednesday." After the despair of "The Waste Land" and "The Hollow Men" and the melancholy resignation of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” I found “Ash Wednesday” refreshing, if a bit heavy on the religion for my taste. I suppose I’m just happy that Eliot found something to believe in, something to relieve the hopelessness and despair he experienced just from his view of everyday life. Yes, war influenced the dire vignettes of “The Waste Land,” but the mundane contributed its fair share as well. I don't agree with Eliot's conception of humanity's need for intercession, for salvation. But I can't fault him for the beauty and peace of the language and images in "Ash Wednesday":
"I pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss"
"Because of the goodness of this Lady
And because of her loveliness, and because
She honours the Virgin in meditation,
We shine with brightness."

"And neither division nor unity
Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance."

"The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green
Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute.
Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown,
Lilac and brown hair"

Really, 'nuff said. I doubt that I can hope to write anything so beautiful.

A hodge-podge of poetry?

This week's (ha!) poems at first glance seem to be a hodge-podge of seemingly unrelated themes.  There were six poems: "Dulce Et Decorum Est" by Wilfred Owen, "Aubade" by Edith Sitwell, "Hap" by Thomas Hardy, "Repression of War Experience" by Siegrfried Sassoon, "Leda and the Swan" by W.B. Yeats, and "Love on the Farm" by D.H. Lawrence.  I think that it was while I was reading Lawrence's poem that I began to see a connection woven among the poems: power and its lack.  We've got two anti-war poems, three poems dealing with women and "love," and a poem in which a man reflects on the nature of god versus the nature of chance.  Owen's soldiers are manipulated by those in power with promises of glory.  Sassoon's are encouraged by society as a whole to keep their problems to themselves, thus relinquishing their power to heal.  Leda is raped (a show of power), Jane loses the power to enjoy life once her man is gone, and the woman on the farm seems to willingly yield herself to the power of her husband.  Hardy's speaker seems to long for Someone in power, Someone at whose feet he can lay responsibility for the misery of his life.

We need to use our own power, whether society, the gods, or those who consider themselves dominant over us approve or not.

My life is a Waste Land?

So, here I am again, posting because I have to. I fancy myself a writer but find it difficult to write without a gun to my head. Lately, I've been having trouble assimilating all the bits and pieces of my life into a coherent whole. And now, here we are, the first reading of the semester (yes, I'm beginning work on the semester at the incorrect end of said semester): Eliot's "The Waste Land." Is there another piece of literature out there that takes so many disjointed pieces of life and puts them together in this way? Perhaps something by Pynchon, but with him you get a nod and a wink, the feeling of an inside joke. "The Waste Land" is serious as can be. For something that seems so hard to understand, I understood it all too well. The joys and pains, laughter and - okay let's just stop that cliche right there. All the disparate bits of life that don't seem to connect in any possible way, connect in one very important way - through the person who experiences them. The trouble comes when we try blend these bits and make sense of all those unrelated pieces: death, driving, school, the check-out line, conversations with friends we don't really like all that much, puddles, late-night television, pine trees, macaroni, war, puppies, literature . . . I think you get the point. How do all of these things gel into a complete, coherent life experience. It can be rather overwhelming.