That We May Have Dreams and Visions
“A Summer Night” and “Lullaby” are about visions—“Streams,” one of a series of nature poems, “Bucolics,” written in the early 1950s, contains a memorable account of a dream. The main body of the poem is a celebration of the qualities of water—how it is a playful companion, how it survives man’s company (that coarsens roses and dogs, he reminds us), and so on. But almost half the poem relates to a dream the poet has when he falls asleep beside a Yorkshire stream, and this dream itself becomes a vision.
This is how the dream is introduced:
Lately, in that dale of all Yorkshire’s the loveliest,
Where, off its fell-side helter-skelter, Kisdon Beck
Jumps into Swale with a boyish shouting,
Sprawled out on grass, I dozed for a second …
We might note the poetic effect of inversion in the first line of this excerpt. It is not “in the loveliest of all Yorkshire’s dales,” but “in that dale of all Yorkshire’s the loveliest.” The word order here gives greater emphasis to the quality of loveliness and is more powerful for that. The English language allows us some room to play with word order, although not as much as one might imagine. Perhaps there are even more tolerant languages still—languages in which words can be used in any order one wishes, leaving a great deal of ambiguity in the decipherment of most statements. Such languages would not lend themselves to understanding but would make for intriguing ambiguity.
The fact that the stream shouts boyishly is typical of Auden’s personalization of the inanimate. We are accustomed to the roaring of rivers, but roaring is something that many inanimate things might do: a jet engine, thunder, a volcano. Shouting is more closely associated with human agency, even if advertisements and notices do it; shouting boyishly is even more clearly a human thing to do. But, dozing by the stream:
And found myself following a croquet tournament
In a calm enclosure, with thrushes popular …
More inversion: not “popular with thrushes,” a phrase prosaic enough to come from a bird-watching manual, but “with thrushes popular,” which is altogether more striking. The lines trigger associations, and memories too. “A croquet tournament” evokes the image of the figures on a lawn, clad in white. White-clad figures in turn stand for something: for calmness, order, purity, and they make me, at least, think of how another game, cricket, used to be played by players dressed entirely in white. Baseball, perhaps, was like that too. Today cricketers appear in outfits of every color, plastered with slogans. The purity has gone, and the cricket field is no longer a place of somnolent, gentle play but one of fast bowling and overt competitiveness. Games in which traditionally nothing much happened, or happened rather slowly—and both cricket and baseball are very similar to one another in that respect—are, I imagine, under pressure to become more dramatic, more of a spectacle.
And then there is the phrase “with thrushes popular.” I cannot read this without thinking of a particular picture that I first saw on the cover of a book and then in the Ulster Museum in Belfast. It is Edward Maguire’s portrait of the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, painted in 1974, when Heaney was in his mid-thirties. The poet sits behind a small table on which a white cloth has been placed. He is reading a book, which lies open upon the table, and he is looking out directly at the viewer. He is wearing striped trousers of some rough material, and a dark green shirt; he is in a paneled alcove and behind him is a window with astragals. And behind the window, outside, is a luxuriant plant in which, half-hidden by the leaves, three birds are to be seen—thrushes, I think. The significance of the birds is obvious enough, and one does not need Hall’s Dictionary of Subject and Symbol in Art to interpret it. It is a painting of real presence, but what makes it important for me is that it is a painting with thrushes popular. Now, if I sit on the bank of a river that appears teaming with salmon—as I did a year or two ago, when I watched salmon leap exuberantly on their way up a river in northern Scotland—the phrase comes to me and I think, this is a river with salmon popular.
He finds himself, then, in that calm enclosure where
of all the players in that cool valley
the best with the mallet was my darling …
Onto this scene “in a cream and golden coach drawn by two baby locomotives” comes Eros, a figure described as “the god of mortal doting.” A dance is commanded and those present fly round in a ring (the ring again!) until the poet awakes. The final lines of this extraordinary poem are ones of resolution and hope. They show, too, Auden’s insight into the consolation provided by a sense of the sacred. The “least of men” are those who lack power and wealth, who are at the bottom of the heap, and yet may find magnificence in a religious myth or a holy place—a sacred river, for instance. I close my eyes and see the Ganges, with crowds of people bathing in its waters, and one of those high Indian skies above, with circling birds, and heat. The dignity of the ordinary person is affirmed by the sacrament of water; a god, a figure of splendor, watches from a shelf in the rock.
… But fortunate seemed that
day because of my dream and enlightened
and dearer, water, than ever because of your voice, as if
glad—though goodness knows why—to run with the human race,
wishing, I thought, the least of men their
figures of splendour, their holy places.
I had read this poem before I experienced the dream that was for me the equivalent of falling asleep beside Kisdon Beck. I cannot say that the poem led to the dream, but what is possible is that the knowledge of the poem made me receptive—even if at a subconscious level—to a dream of the sort that I had. I think that is quite feasible and should not be in the least surprising. The way in which we stock our minds will surely determine the quality of our experiences, conscious and subconscious.
In my dream—and it is the most memorable dream that I have ever had, hence the term my dream—I was somewhere on the west coast of Scotland. There was a very clear geographical locus—I was in no doubt as to where I was: on one of the Hebridean islands that lie off Scotland’s Atlantic coast. They are very beautiful islands—verdant in summer, purple-tinted by heather in the autumn—ringed with white sand and water that is pure and cold and green—the color of aquamarine. There is a special Gaelic name for the strip of pasture that joins beach to land here: the machair, a lovely word redolent of the gentle landscape in which it occurs. The machair has light, sandy soil, has fragments of sea-shell, has carpets of tiny flowers.
I was staying in a house beside the machair. In front of this house was a stretch of lawn, and at the edge of the lawn there was a river. By the riverside, its door wide open, was a shed into which I wandered. Inside the shed was a large art nouveau typesetting machine.
I was being called, and I turned away from my discovery of the typesetting machine to make my way back to the house and to our hostess. People in dreams do not always have names, but she did. She was called Mrs. MacGregor.
And then I awoke, and just as Auden did when he awoke from his dream of the croquet match, I felt that I had been vouchsafed a vision. It was a feeling of utter elation and goodwill—in other words, a feeling of agape. I felt bathed in the warm, golden glow of this feeling.
Some year later my wife and I were having dinner with psychiatrist friends in an Edinburgh restaurant. The talk turned to dreams, and I recounted my dream. Unfortunately, as I did so, there was a lull in the conversation at nearby tables, with the result that others heard what I had to say. At the end there was silence. Then one of the psychiatrists said: “I know what your dream is about.”
A pin could have been heard to drop.
“Mrs. MacGregor is your mother.”
It was exactly the right thing for a psychiatrist to say. The restaurant became noisy again. It was Italian, and the food was delicious. It could not be allowed to get cold. After all, life is not just about visionary dreams, it is about pasta and such matters too. Auden would have agreed with that. The pleasures of the table were important for him; indeed he thought having somebody to cook good meals for one was one of the great goods of this life. Standing at the stove, preparing a sauce, a glass of something at our side, we may well think of Auden and hear his voice extolling the pleasures of domesticity. Yes, he says: take pleasure in exactly this.