Sunday 25 April 2021

Poem of W. H. Auden

 Introduction :- 


W.H. Auden :-


1907-1973 



Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England, on February 21, 1907. He moved to Birmingham during childhood and was educated at Christ Church, Oxford. As a young man he was influenced by the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost, as well as William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Old English verse. At Oxford his precocity as a poet was immediately apparent, and he formed lifelong friendships with two fellow writers, Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood.


In 1928, his collection Poems was privately printed, but it wasn't until 1930, when another collection titled Poems (though its contents were different) was published, that Auden was established as the leading voice of a new generation.

Ever since, he has been admired for his unsurpassed technical virtuosity and an ability to write poems in nearly every imaginable verse form; the incorporation in his work of popular culture, current events, and vernacular speech; and also for the vast range of his intellect, which drew easily from an extraordinary variety of literatures, art forms, social and political theories, and scientific and technical information. He had a remarkable wit, and often mimicked the writing styles of other poets such as Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, and Henry James. His poetry frequently recounts, literally or metaphorically, a journey or quest, and his travels provided rich material for his verse

He visited Germany, Iceland, and China, served in the Spanish Civil war, and in 1939 moved to the United States, where he met his lover, Chester Kallman, and became an American citizen. His own beliefs changed radically between his youthful career in England, when he was an ardent advocate of socialism and Freudian psychoanalysis, and his later phase in America, when his central preoccupation became Christianity and the theology of modern Protestant theologians. A prolific writer, Auden was also a noted playwright, librettist, editor, and essayist. Generally considered the greatest English poet of the twentieth century, his work has exerted a major influence on succeeding generations of poets on both sides of the Atlantic.

W. H. Auden served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1954 to 1973, and divided most of the second half of his life between residences in New York City and Austria. He died in Vienna on September 29, 1973.



Three poems of W. H. Auden :-


In our Syllabus we have three well-known poem of W.H.Auden :


  1. Epitaph of A Tyrant 

  2. September 1, 1939

  3.  In Memory of W.B.Yeats 



1.  Epitaph of A Tyrant 


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.



Analysis of the poem :-



‘Epitaph on a Tyrant’ is one of Auden’s short masterpieces. W. H. Auden spent some time in Berlin during the 1930s, and it was here that he probably wrote ‘Epitaph on a Tyrant’, which was published in 1939, the year that the Second World War broke out. The specific tyrant Auden had in mind, then, was probably Adolf Hitler, though the poem can be analysed as a study in tyranny more generally, too.


The rhyme scheme is ABBCAC, wherein line 1 rhymes with line 5; lines 2 and 3 rhyme, and lines 4 and 6 rhyme. The poem consists of one stanza.


The building of an image of a tyrant is utterly persuasive: the one-dimensional thinking, the certainty of rectitude, the urge to ‘perfect’, the facile vacuity of a message which must be enforced. Fully aware of tyrannical momentum, Auden recognises the snowballing irresistibility of the rhetoric, and the compliance which follows in its thunderous wake. The forced laughter of the senatorial chamber might be Roman, or it might be at the Berghof, but all amount to subservience to a zealously, and brutally, enforced idealism.


The final, harrowingly poignant line measures death by the standard of the tyrant’s tears, as though the Wagnerian drama unfolding in his imagination transcended the material consequences of his dystopian odyssey. The ideological ends, for tyrants, always justify the sacrificial means.



2. September 1, 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.



Analysis of the poem :-

https://www.litcharts.com/poetry/w-h-auden/september-1-1939


W.H. Auden's "September 1, 1939" was first published in the October 18, 1939, edition of The New Republic, before being included in the poet's collection Another Time. Written upon the outbreak of World War II, the poem captures feelings of fear and uncertainty in the face of fascism and war—as well as glimmers of hope that people might come together to counter authoritarianism. It is one of Auden's most well-known poems, and widely considered one of the greatest poems of the 20th century; ironically, however, the poet himself grew to despise it. Despite his disavowal of the poem, "September 1, 1939" remains a text to which people turn in times of crisis, including, famously, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001.




3.   In Memory of W. B. Yeats :-



I

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.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow

When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the bourse,

And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed

And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom

A few thousand will think of this day

As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree

The day of his death was a dark cold day.

 

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:

The parish of rich women, physical decay,

Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

In the valley of its making where executives

Would never want to tamper, flows on south

From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,

Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,

A way of happening, a mouth.

 

III

Earth, receive an honoured guest:

William Yeats is laid to rest.

Let the Irish vessel lie

Emptied of its poetry.

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.

 

 

Analysis :- 

Written in 1939.

‘ In memory of W. B. Yeats is a different kind of elegy by W. H. Auden. W.H. Auden admired W. B. Yeats but he did not exaggerate Yeats’s contribution and the impact of his death on poetry and art in general. 


William Butler Yeats died in winter. The brooks were frozen and all airports were quite empty and deserted. The statues were covered with snow. The thermometer showed that the day he died was a dark cold day.


Nature followed its course but the mourners kept his poems alive.  They did not allow the death of the poet to interfere with their admiration for his poetry. However for Yeats, mind and body failed. He was no more but he lived through his poetry scattered among unfamiliar readers and admires of his poetry. W. H. Auden says that the rest of the civilization moves on while a few thousand people would continue to remember the poet and lament his death. 


In the second section of the poem, yeats is called “ silly like us” by W. H. Auden. The poet says that W. B. Yeats was also silly and ordinary like us. He was not an exceptional hero different from common men. 


It was “ Mad Ireland “ that made him a poet. The sufferings of Ireland turned him into a poet and made him write poetry. 


W.H. Auden further says that time is intolerant of the brave and innocent. It is Indifferent towards humans whether they are ordinary or celebrity.


The poem is an elegy but written in a different mood. There is no serious lamentation. There is no undue exaggerated admiration of the dead poet. W. H. Auden loved Yeats but as a rational poet , he does not lament his death in a traditional manner. He pays tribute to him proving that poetry survives even in the cold dark world of desire. 


Themes :-


  1. Loss

  2. Memories 

  3. Mourning 



 

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Thursday 22 April 2021

The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot

  Hello ! 


In this blog I am going to answer the three questions of Barad sir. Here I am putting his blog link which consists those three questions. 


http://dilipbarad.blogspot.com/2014/10/presentations-on-ts-eliots-waste-land.html 


About the author :-



Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)was a poet, dramatist and literary critic. He received the NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE IN 1948. He wrote the poems, 


  • The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 

  • The Waste Land 

  • The Hollow Man 

  • Ash Wednesday

  • Four Quarters   


The plays-


  • Murder in the Cathedral 

  • The Cocktail Party 


The essay 


  • Traditional and Individual Talent 



ABOUT THE POEM ‘ THE WASTE LAND’ :-



`` The Waste Land’ is the most important poem written by T.S. Eliot. The poem is about modern time. The whole poem is based on only two themes: 1. Sexual perversion and 2. Spiritual digression. Eliot not only ponders about his particular time but also speaks about universality. Poem talks about universality and how humans fall and commit sins. He talks about the spiritual pollution of society and human beings.




Answer of three questions :


Q. 1) What are your views on the following image after reading 'The Waste Land'? Do you think that Eliot is regressive as compared to Nietzsches views? or Has Eliot achieved universality of thought by recalling mytho-historical answers to the contemporary malaise?




Friedrich Nietzsche and T. S. Eliot both are the greatest authors. Here we can see the conflict of different views between Eliot and Nietzsche. T.S. Eliot was believing in supernatural power and god. He was very spiritual in a way, he wrote only about how spirituality is important. He talks about suppression of inner desires. He is mentioning about homosexuality, Sexuality, lust, extra marital affairs and spiritual digression. Through the mythical views like Upnishads ,logic, supernatural power and various cultures, Eliot wants to evoke the people that the past is a very good lesson to make a better future, people can learn through the past and from supernatural things.


Nietzsche is very practical in his theory. Nietzsche believes in human power as 'superman', he does not believe in supernatural things and tradition, For him God is nothing and he is talking about human centric perceptions. 


We can give water tight tank discussion that Eliot is right and Nietzsche is wrong or Nietzsche is right and Eliot is wrong. Eliot is right from his point of view. He had read very wide literature. He came across so many theories and works. He was a genius so he talked about it very spiritually. While Nietzsche was atheist, but both are right in their own way. Nietzsche believed in "Ubermensch" who gave solutions to the problem for the contemporary crisis while Eliot believed in God. 


According to me Nietzsche’s view of superman is very practical and believable. If we are considering this pandemic time then we came to know only doctors(humans) , no God or Goddesses come to help. In short Nietzsche’s views are more practical than the theory of T.S. Eliot. 




2) Prior to the speech, Gustaf Hellström of the Swedish Academy made these remarks:





What are your views regarding these comments? Is it true that giving free vent to the repressed 'primitive instinct' leads us to a happy to a happy and satisfied life? Or do you agree with Eliot's view that 'salvation of man lies in the preservation of the cultural tradition'?


According to me it is true that giving free vent to the repressed ‘ primitive instinct instinct’ leads us to a happy and satisfied life. Eliot's views on the suppression of desire has led human beings to mental diseases. It's  unnatural if we suppress our inner desire. It does not mean to live with lust and desires but whatever is nature  be with this.




3) Write about allusions to the Indian thoughts in 'The Waste Land'. (Where, How and Why are the Indian thoughts referred?)

In this poem T.S. Eliot has presented various cultures and languages to connect the world with one universal thought. In the first four parts Eliot described how sexual perversion has overpower than spirituality of human and solution of spiritual degradation by referring to Indian culture and Upanishad. 


Eliot also referred to Buddhism and Upanishad. Indian culture is very rich. Sanskrit is the mother of every language and Eliot very significantly uses that in the poem waste land. 


In the last part ‘ What the Thunder said ‘ in this part Eliot use this allusion :-


"Ganga was sunken, and the limps leaves

waited for rain, while the black clouds

gathered far distant, over Himvant

The jungle crouched, humped in silence."


Then Eliot gives three 'Da'


  1. Da - Datta :- To give (to give: not only charity but giving oneself for some noble cause – passionate participation, not mere mechanical – devote oneself for noble deeds) 



  1.  Da- Dayadhvam :- (sympathise – empathise yourself with the sorrows and suffering of others, come out of your isolation and live into others)



  1. Da - Damyata :-  (Self Control, control over one’s passions and desires, abscond the life of senses)



At the end of the poem Eliot uses Shanti , Shanti , Shanti. It is from the shanti mantra. 




The Shanti Mantras or "Peace Mantras" or Pancha Shanti are Hindu prayers for Peace (Shanti) found in Upanishads. Generally they are recited at the beginning and end of religious rituals and discourses.

Shanti Mantras are invoked in the beginning of some topics of Upanishads. They are supposed to calm the mind of the reciter and environment around him/her. Reciting them is also believed to be removing any obstacles for the task being started.



T. S. Eliot gives a very significant message to everybody that spirituality is the base of living. The whole poem is about sexual perversion and spiritual digression. 


Thank You ……


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