Six Poets

  For the present stalks abroad

  Like the past and its wronged again

  Whimper and are ignored,

  And the truth cannot be hid;

  Somebody chose their pain,

  What needn’t have happened did.

  Occurring this very night

  By no established rule,

  Some event may already have hurled

  Its first little No at the right

  Of the laws we accept to school

  Our post-diluvian world:

  But the stars burn on overhead,

  Unconscious of final ends,

  As I walk home to bed,

  Asking what judgement waits

  My person, all my friends,

  And these United States.

  The apartment in which Auden and Kallman lived was in a rather seedy area on the Lower East Side and had formerly belonged to an abortionist, which resulted in frequent misunderstandings. On one occasion, a young woman from Hunter College knocked at the door. Auden answered, and after beating about the bush for some time, she eventually plucked up the courage to say, ‘But aren’t you an abortionist?’ ‘No,’ said Auden flatly. ‘Poet.’

  The story has a point in that there was a matter-of-factness in his approach to writing, and although he didn’t actually put ‘poet’ on a brass plate on the door, he did feel that a poet should be able to turn his hand to anything in verse – to wedding poems, poems for celebrations, librettos, poems in obscure metres – and he took great pride in being a craftsman able to produce these to order. This, though, is one of his earlier and best-known poems, written in 1938:

  Musée des 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 Brueghel’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.

  Auden thought of poetry as dual: poetry as song, poetry as truth. It’s perhaps this that, in his poem ‘Their Lonely Betters’, written in 1950, made him sceptical of birds who sing without feeling and with no regard for truth.

  Their Lonely Betters

  As I listened from a beach-chair in the shade

  To all the noises that my garden made,

  It seemed to me only proper that words

  Should be withheld from vegetables and birds.

  A robin with no Christian name ran through

  The Robin-Anthem which was all it knew,

  And rustling flowers for some third party waited

  To say which pairs, if any, should get mated.

  Not one of them was capable of lying,

  There was not one which knew that it was dying

  Or could have with a rhythm or a rhyme

  Assumed responsibility for time.

  Let them leave language to their lonely betters

  Who count some days and long for certain letters;

  We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep:

  Words are for those with promises to keep.

  Auden died in Vienna in 1973, when he was only sixty-six, but it would be hard to say his work was not finished. His output had been prodigious, and he went on working right until the end in a routine that was every bit as rigid as that of Housman, whom he so briskly diagnosed when he was a young man (‘Deliberately he chose the dry-as-dust, / Kept tears like dirty postcards in a drawer’). But you’re no more likely to find consistency in a writer than you would in a normal human being. Besides, as Auden himself said: ‘At thirty I tried to vex my elders. Past sixty it’s the young whom I hope to bother.’

  I would be hard put to say what a great poet is, but part of it, in Auden’s case, is the obscurity with which I started. If his life has to be divided into two parts, there are great poems in both. Perhaps he was too clever for the English. Bossy and not entirely likeable, when he died his death occasioned less regret than that of Larkin or Betjeman, though he was the greater poet. This would not have concerned him as he was not vain: criticism seldom bothered him nor did he covet praise or money. And though he would have quite liked the Nobel Prize, all he demanded at the finish was punctuality.

  I’ll end with the final part of the poem Auden wrote in memory of another poet, W. B. Yeats, who died in January 1939. The last two lines are inscribed on Auden’s memorial in Westminster Abbey.

  from In Memory of W. B. Yeats

  (d. Jan. 1939)

  Earth, receive an honoured guest:

  William Yeats is laid to rest.

  Let the Irish vessel lie

  Emptied of its poetry.

  Time that is intolerant

  Of the brave and innocent,

  And indifferent in a week

  To a beautiful physique,

  Worships language and forgives

  Everyone by whom it lives;

  Pardons cowardice, conceit,

  Lays its honours at their feet.

  Time that with this strange excuse

  Pardoned Kipling and his views,

  And will pardon Paul Claudel,

  Pardons him for writing well.

  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.

  Louis MacNeice

  1907–1963

  Louis MacNeice was born in Belfast the son of a bookish Church of Ireland minister, a bishop-to-be. Academically precocious, he was already writing verse at seven, around the time of his mother’s death. He was educated in England at Sherborne and Marlborough. At Merton College, Oxford, he made the acquaintance of Auden and Spender and published his first book of poems, Blind Fireworks (1929). He worked subsequently as a translator, literary critic, playwright, autobiographer, BBC producer and feature writer. In 1941 he was appointed scriptwriter/producer in BBC Radio’s Features Department, where he worked until his death. Letters from Iceland (1937) was written in collaboration with Auden. Subsequent collections include The Earth Compels, Autumn Journal, Plant and Phantom, Springboard, Holes in the Sky and Autumn Sequel. MacNeice published highly acclaimed translations including the Agamemnon of Aeschylus (1936) and Goethe’s Faust. He scripted more than 150 radio plays, including The Dark Tower (1947). The Burning Per
ch, his last volume of poems, appeared shortly before his death in 1963.

  Prayer before Birth

  I am not yet born; O hear me.

  Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the club-footed ghoul come near me.

  I am not yet born, console me.

  I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,

  with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,

  on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.

  I am not yet born; provide me

  With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk

  to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light

  at the back of my mind to guide me.

  I am not yet born; forgive me

  For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words

  when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,

  my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,

  my life when they murder by means of my

  hands, my death when they live me.

  I am not yet born; rehearse me

  In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when

  old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains

  frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white

  waves call me to folly and the desert calls

  me to doom and the beggar refuses

  my gift and my children curse me.

  I am not yet born; O hear me,

  Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God come near me.

  I am not yet born; O fill me

  With strength against those who would freeze my

  humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,

  would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with

  one face, a thing, and against all those

  who would dissipate my entirety, would

  blow me like thistledown hither and

  thither or hither and thither

  like water held in the

  hands would spill me.

  Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.

  Otherwise kill me.

  The public like labels (or newspapers think they do), and particularly when it comes to art and literature, which are both potentially dangerous or at least awkward to handle. ‘The Poets of the Thirties’, which is itself a label, generally comes in a nice boxed set labelled ‘Auden and Co.’ – that is, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis and Louis MacNeice.

  This must have been more irritating for Spender, Day Lewis and Co. than it was for Auden, though it’s true they all knew one another, had been at the same schools or known one another at university, and sometimes collaborated. But then came the war and they went their different ways, some of them not seeming to survive the loss of their corporate identity, just as actors who have been a big hit when with the National Theatre or the Royal Shakespeare Company then go off on their own and are lost sight of. One should never underestimate the importance of one’s setting. When Louis MacNeice died in 1963, an obituary (admittedly in a Chicago newspaper) identified him as ‘a writer with the BBC’ and concluded: ‘He was formerly a poet.’

  Carrickfergus

  I was born in Belfast between the mountain and the gantries

  To the hooting of lost sirens and the clang of trams:

  Thence to Smoky Carrick in County Antrim

  Where the bottle-neck harbour collects the mud which jams

  The little boats beneath the Norman castle,

  The pier shining with lumps of crystal salt;

  The Scotch Quarter was a line of residential houses

  But the Irish Quarter was a slum for the blind and halt.

  The brook ran yellow from the factory stinking of chlorine,

  The yarn-mill called its funeral cry at noon;

  Our lights looked over the lough to the lights of Bangor

  Under the peacock aura of a drowning moon.

  The Norman walled this town against the country

  To stop his ears to the yelping of his slave

  And built a church in the form of a cross but denoting

  The list of Christ on the cross in the angle of the nave.

  I was the rector’s son, born to the anglican order,

  Banned for ever from the candles of the Irish poor;

  The Chichesters knelt in marble at the end of a transept

  With ruffs about their necks, their portion sure.

  The war came and a huge camp of soldiers

  Grew from the ground in sight of our house with long

  Dummies hanging from gibbets for bayonet practice

  And the sentry’s challenge echoing all day long;

  A Yorkshire terrier ran in and out by the gate-lodge

  Barred to civilians, yapping as if taking affront:

  Marching at ease and singing ‘Who Killed Cock Robin?’

  The troops went out by the lodge and off to the Front.

  The steamer was camouflaged that took me to England –

  Sweat and khaki in the Carlisle train;

  I thought that the war would last for ever and sugar

  Be always rationed and that never again

  Would the weekly papers not have photos of sandbags

  And my governess not make bandages from moss

  And the people not have maps above the fireplace

  With flags on pins moving across and across –

  Across the hawthorn hedge the noise of bugles,

  Flares across the night,

  Somewhere on the lough was a prison ship for Germans,

  A cage across their sight.

  I went to school in Dorset, the world of parents

  Contracted into a puppet world of sons

  Far from the mill girls, the smell of porter, the salt-mines

  And the soldiers with their guns.

  The concerns of writers are selfish and to be born in Northern Ireland is to inherit a set of circumstances which, however painful, are also useful: they are something to write out of. It was less so in MacNeice’s youth, and though, as a child, he was shocked by the poverty of the Carrickfergus Catholics, he seldom dealt explicitly with his divided country. His concerns were generally more personal. His father was a Church of Ireland rector, an Anglican who later became a bishop, and MacNeice’s childhood seems to have bred in him a melancholy and an aloofness that always set him apart.

  Stephen Spender tells a story how, when the Soviet Union came into the war in 1941, the British ambassador Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr thought he would give a party for British poets with a view to putting them in touch with their Soviet counterparts.

  Throughout this party, MacNeice – sleek, dark and expressionless – leaned against the chimney-piece, glass in hand, looking infinitely removed from his colleagues. At the end of the evening, Clark-Kerr went up to him and said, ‘Is it true you were brought up in Belfast at Carrickfergus?’

  MacNeice said, ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Clark-Kerr, ‘then that confirms a legend I have heard: that, centuries ago, a race of seals invaded that coast and interbred with the population. Good night.’

  The following is a sad poem about the death of MacNeice’s mother when he was five.

  Autobiography

  In my childhood trees were green

  And there was plenty to be seen.

  Come back early or never come.

  My father made the walls resound,

  He wore his collar the wrong way round.

  Come back early or never come.

  My mother wore a yellow dress;

  Gently, gently, gentleness.

  Come back early or never come.

  When I was five the black dreams came;

  Nothing after was quite the same.

  Come back early or never come.

  The dark was talking to the dead;

  The lamp was dark beside my bed.

  Come back early or never come.

  When I woke they did n
ot care;

  Nobody, nobody was there.

  Come back early or never come.

  When my silent terror cried,

  Nobody, nobody replied.

  Come back early or never come.

  I got up; the chilly sun

  Saw me walk away alone.

  Come back early or never come.

  When MacNeice did walk away, it was to school in England, to Marlborough, where he was rather hearty, though not wholeheartedly so. MacNeice was never very good at being wholehearted. His closest friend at school was not hearty at all but the very aesthetic Anthony Blunt. At Oxford, it was much the same. MacNeice wrote poetry but didn’t quite fit in. ‘Homosexuality and intelligence, heterosexuality and brawn were almost inexorably paired. This left me out,’ he said, ‘and I took to drink.’ And though most of the other poets and literary figures either took a poor degree or left early with no degree at all, MacNeice – a ‘natural examinee and intellectual window-dresser’ as he described himself – took a double first. One catches already the note – it’s a very English note – of someone who can do it but deprecates the doing of it, a nice characteristic in a man but not always much help to a writer.

  So while Auden and Isherwood were whooping it up in Berlin, MacNeice went off to Birmingham as a lecturer in classics. And that was the way it was going to be, too. MacNeice always on the edge of the group … a radical but never a Marxist, a bohemian but fond of family life.

  ‘I would have a poet,’ he said,

  able bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions … I write poems not because it is smart to be a poet but because I enjoy it as one enjoys swimming or swearing, and also because it is my road to freedom and knowledge.

  This is the poet as good chap.

  Apart from his empirical attitude towards politics, the other thing that set MacNeice apart from many of his contemporaries was that he loved women.

  from Trilogy for X