Six Poets (13 page)

‘Thumping' is what does it. There is so much of Betjeman in the word.

‘The proof of a poet', said Walt Whitman, ‘is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.' Betjeman was so English it was almost a joke and, with his popularity as a performer as well as a poet, his country certainly absorbed him. But he survived his celebrity because he was tough, and he was tough because, despite his terrible raincoats and battered pork-pie hats, he was a dandy and dandies are tough. The times have only just caught up with his taste and proved him as much of a prophet as Auden – ‘triumphant misfit' is right.

There are absences. An artist can be diminished by his virtues and one of Betjeman's virtues is clarity. However much the reader welcomes clarity, some of the most memorable moments in poetry occur when it isn't exactly clear what the poet is talking about. Auden has many such moments, but Betjeman never, because he always is sure, and that's the penalty of being lucid. He may be pretending it's light verse when it isn't, but he knows exactly what he's about. His is not poetry of ideas or argument, but because it is simple doesn't mean that there's nothing to understand.

And he always hits home.

A haze of thunder hangs on the hospital rose-beds,

A doctors' foursome out on the links is played,

Safe in her sitting-room Sister is putting her feet up:

This is the time of day when we feel betrayed.

Below the windows, loads of loving relations

Rev in the car park, changing gear at the bend,

Making for home and a nice big tea and the telly:

‘Well, we've done what we can. It can't be long till the end.'

1907–1973

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, brought up in Birmingham, where his father was a physician, and educated at Gresham's School, Holt, and Christ Church, Oxford. His student contemporaries included poets Cecil Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender. After graduating in 1929, he spent several months in Berlin, often in the company of Christopher Isherwood, his future collaborator. His first book,
Poems
, was published in 1930 by T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber and he later become associated with Rupert Doone's Group Theatre, for which he wrote several plays, sometimes in collaboration with Isherwood. In January 1939 the two of them left England for the United States, where Auden became a citizen in 1946. His later works include
The Age of Anxiety, Nones, The Shield of Achilles
and
Homage to Clio
, and he also wrote texts for works by Benjamin Britten and (with Chester Kallman) the libretto for Stravinsky's opera
The Rake's Progress
. Elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1956, he died in Vienna in 1973.

Look, stranger, on this island now

The leaping light for your delight discovers,

Stand stable here

And silent be,

That through the channels of the ear

May wander like a river

The swaying sound of the sea.

Here at a small field's ending pause

Where the chalk wall falls to the foam and its tall ledges

Oppose the pluck

And knock of the tide,

And the shingle scrambles after the suck-

-ing surf, and a gull lodges

A moment on its sheer side.

Far off like floating seeds the ships

Diverge on urgent voluntary errands,

And this full view

Indeed may enter

And move in memory as now these clouds do,

That pass the harbour mirror

And all the summer through the water saunter.

Much of Auden, even most of Auden, and even some of that first little snatch of Auden, I do not understand. Now, I could say the same for Ezra Pound or Eliot's
The Waste Land
, but there the difficulty is plain: you know you don't understand Pound or T. S. Eliot right from the start. Auden is different. It seems easy. The landscape's familiar, there are no out-of-the-way references, and as often as not there's a gripping opening line to get you off to a good start – only it doesn't last.

I'm not saying that the poems begin well, then taper off, though they do begin well. Auden has some wonderful opening lines:

August for the people and their favourite islands …

What siren zooming is sounding our coming …

Out on the lawn I lie in bed,

Vega conspicuous overhead …

And of course, perhaps his most famous lines:

Lay your sleeping head, my love,

Human on my faithless arm …

But once he's got you with one of these lines, and certainly in his early poems, he's off into a territory of his own, an alternative world of leaders, gangs, frontiers and flight, on what Seamus Heaney has called ‘those oddly unparaphrasable riffs'.

‘He gets carried away' would be another way of putting it, though Christopher Isherwood, with whom he often collaborated in the thirties, said that the obscurity could also be put down to the fact that Auden was very lazy:

He hated polishing and making corrections. If he didn't like a poem, he threw it away and wrote another. If I liked one line, he would keep it and work it into a new poem. In this way, whole poems were constructed which were simply anthologies of my favourite lines, entirely regardless of grammar or sense.

‘This', said Isherwood, ‘is the simple explanation of much of Auden's celebrated obscurity.' More writers have worked like that, Shakespeare included, than is generally admitted, and at least it puts literary criticism in its place.

Some poems don't require exposition, though. Auden was fascinated by verse in all its forms, and this is a pastiche of an eighteenth-century ballad, transformed into a nightmare:

O what is that sound which so thrills the ear

Down in the valley drumming, drumming?

Only the scarlet soldiers, dear,

The soldiers coming.

O what is that light I see flashing so clear

Over the distance brightly, brightly?

Only the sun on their weapons, dear,

As they step lightly.

O what are they doing with all that gear,

What are they doing this morning, this morning?

Only their usual manoeuvres, dear,

Or perhaps a warning.

O why have they left the road down there,

Why are they suddenly wheeling, wheeling?

Perhaps a change in their orders, dear.

Why are you kneeling?

O haven't they stopped for the doctor's care,

Haven't they reined their horses, their horses?

Why, they are none of them wounded, dear,

None of these forces.

O is it the parson they want, with white hair,

Is it the parson, is it, is it?

No, they are passing his gateway, dear,

Without a visit.

O it must be the farmer who lives so near.

It must be the farmer so cunning, so cunning?

They have passed the farmyard already, dear,

And now they are running.

O where are you going? Stay with me here!

Were the vows you swore deceiving, deceiving?

No, I promised to love you, dear,

But I must be leaving.

O it's broken the lock and splintered the door,

O it's the gate where they're turning, turning;

Their boots are heavy on the floor

And their eyes are burning.