No, I don’t wish to contribute much more to the tonnage of comment on the works of W. H. Auden. I just want to add this feather.
Here’s a poem Auden wrote, I have no idea why. It’s from The Sea and The Mirror, and takes up themes from Shakespeare’s the Tempest…but I don’t care.
Warm are the still and lucky miles,
White shores of longing stretch away,
A light of recognition fills
The whole great day, and bright
The tiny world of lovers’ arms.
Silence invades the breathing wood
Where drowsy limbs a treasure keep,
Now greenly falls the learned shade
Across the sleeping brows
And stirs their secret to a smile.
Restored! Returned! The lost are borne
On seas of shipwreck home at last:
See! In a fire of praising burns
The dry dumb past, and we
Our life-day long shall part no more.
***
Read the above, and you presume you’ve been reading rhymed verse. But look hard. No rhymes!
Huh?
Then look harder again. Or hear harder.
The first stressed word of the third line in each stanza rhymes with the last of the fourth.
The first and third lines end in consonant rhyme: it’s delicate, but perceptible.
Even more devilish is the way the second line rhymes fully with the front half of the fourth. (In tricky Auden fashion, there’s no caesura in “Across the sleeping brows”, but the ear still picks up the rhyme because of the quantity of the rhyming syllable, sleep-, and the weakness of the surrounding syllables.)
As if that’s not enough, check out the quasi-rhymes of the middle of the first lines and the ends of the third lines. And the fainter consonant rhymes at the end of each caesura in the first line of each stanza: still-miles, invades-wood, returned-borne. Subtle but audible – and he meant to do it.
All very deliberate…and all quite wonderful. And there’s more deliberate music, beyond those half-buried rhymes and assonances. There are metrical intricacies, too, and much attention to syllabic quantity. Note the slight bump in the metre at the penultimate line, with an alliteration right on the bump.
So clever. So pretty. Why does nobody talk about these things?
Came across this., mosomoso, via comment by ‘Fan of more
discourse’ on Climate Etc blog )
Strange , I hadn’ realised the poem draws on Shakespeare’s
Tempest. Auden also wrote on Calaban, I must look it up.
Beth the serf.
Beth, it’s from The Sea and The Mirror, as I remember. I no longer have a copy of Auden, but there’s another piece in that collection which is a hoot:
Song Of The Master And Boatswain
At Dirty Dick’s and Sloppy Joe’s
We drank our liquor straight,
Some went upstairs with Margery,
And some, alas, with Kate;
And two by two like cat and mouse
The homeless played at keeping house.
There Wealthy Meg, the Sailor’s Friend,
And Marion, cow-eyed,
Opened their arms to me but I
Refused to step inside;
I was not looking for a cage
In which to mope my old age.
The nightingales are sobbing in
The orchards of our mothers,
And hearts that we broke long ago
Have long been breaking others;
Tears are round, the sea is deep:
Roll them overboard and sleep.
It’s a bit clumsy, but that may be on purpose. He did most things on purpose, did Auden.
Say, mosmoso, Auden, the poet of Grimm, I’d say.
This on The Tempest fromThe Sea and the Mirror
as well:
‘The aged catch their breath,
For the nonchalant couple go
Waltzing across the tightrope
As if there was no death
Or hope of falling down.
The wounded cry as the clown
Doubles his meaning and O
How the dear little children laugh
When the drums roll and the lovely
Lady is sawn in half.’
Doesn’t get any lighter, right down ter the grimm finale.,
‘Which goes to show that the Bard
Was sober when he wrote
That this world of fact we love
Is unsubstantial stuff:
All the rest is silence
On the other side of the wall: ( hmmm another wall.)
And the silence ripeness,
And the ripeness all.
Note trickyy subversive rhyme patterns and
assonance ter give a sense of jingly order
but it’s askew … or maybe I misconstrue.
(Caught the smiley habit from a blog poster.)
Beth the serf
That’s a fun piece, serf. The smileys are kind of scary. But I’ve always thought smileys are the stuff of horror.
Now I won’t sleep till I can think of another poem with walls.
Walls…walls…
Nursery rhymes, moso? Plenty of horror, and a few walls there.
A serf.
Re yr enquiry on Climate Etc. letters ter the editer, the
clue werd is ‘stooge.’ The writer has previously disclosed
his name so that’s how I know … Serf
No luck with the letter. Oh well. The English indophile can always just drop it in here as a comment.
If he mentions cricket I’ll just [SNIP] him.