Thinking Activity : W.H Auden's poem

                                      Introduction

Wystan Hugh Auden was an Anglo-American poet. Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in tone, form, and content.

The famous poem of  W.H Auden

‘September 1st, 1939

‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’

‘The Fall of Rome’

‘The More Loving One’

‘If I Could Tell You’

'Stop all the clocks'

'Epitaph of Tyrant'

‘September 1st, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low 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 offence
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 schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
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 an 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
About 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 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 or 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.

1) Which lines of 'September 1, 1939' you liked the most? Why?

What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

These Lines are my favorite to give my argument that The Huge Imago made Psychopathic god. so in this line i have seen that the it is dependent on culture, where are you living life so point is to be that when you were in that position of violence so must be you have some impact on violence.so The idea of the poet is to be says that the if you have some angressive approach to be comes from the your previous environment.

Example : In the school, There is one child. who does not come with his home work so The teacher always hit the children with daily habit of that pupil. so once upon time there will be no effect of hitness to that pupil. so it is reality of the school's pupil. who always take punished rather than the home work.

In Memory of W. B. Yeats

W. H. Auden - 1907-1973

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.

2) What is so special about 'In Memory of W B Yeats'?

If we see the more special things is that the Art of writing. when any people is died but the work and his poems are alive in the mind of people that's To be more Important for reader to get some thing from the poem after reading of the poem. Also, poet is used to say the death of W.B Yeats with the reason of the winter kind of atmosphere.

Epitaph on a Tyrant

W. H. Auden - 1907-1973

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,

And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;

He knew human folly like the back of his hand,

And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;

When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,

And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

3) Is there any contemporary relevance of 'Epitaph on a Tyrant'?

If we see this Epitaph of The Tyrant. we would like to mention the basic story of the Hitler. He was much doing the activity like The tyrant.

But the point is to be see that it's not whole about the story of Hitler but it is related with contemporary time also. If we see the story of Donald Trump when Joe Biden become the prime Minister of America at that time The previous prime minister could not accept that he lost the election so after the story that we know very well that what happened in America. How people were react for Trump also the same things were that the Hitler join the part of Nazi party so people were supporting the idea of the one person. so I would like to share one quote with you ..

The vote is precious.

It is the most powerful non-Violent tool we have in a democratic society, and we must use it .

Thanks