And Then There Is Nature
Auden’s work may be cerebral—his lines are packed with ideas, often densely so—but he is also poet of landscape. His own preferred landscape was the Yorkshire Dales, with its small limestone valleys, and the lead mines lovingly described in “Not in Baedeker,” a poem that somehow manages to blend images of Italian religious processions and preening bus drivers with references to English architecture and fauna. But he was sensitive to the charms of very different places too. He did not particularly like mountains, it seems, as he makes clear in his amusing “Mountains,” one of his “Bucolics” series. This poem begins,
I know a retired dentist who only paints mountains
But the Masters rarely care
That much, who sketch them in beyond a holy face …
The normal eye, he goes on to say,
… perceives them as a wall
Between worse and better, like a child scolded in France
Who wishes he were crying on the Italian side of the Alps …
This image is haunting because it evokes so powerfully what we all must have felt as children—the conviction that things are better elsewhere if only we could get there. The powerlessness of the child is what makes that so poignant: children are trapped in the world created for them by adults, and for most children the possibility of escape is remote. The same idea is present in the Freud poem, where he talks about the child
… unlucky in his little State,
some hearth where freedom is excluded,
a hive whose honey is fear and worry …
The sympathetic effect of these lines is immediately apparent. Yes, we all knew people like that when we were ourselves children. I knew a boy at school who lived under the rule of an unduly strict father, and who looked miserable most of the time. His unhappiness must have been compounded by the fact that for several years we shared a mean and sadistic teacher, an Irishman of poisoned temperament who took delight in tormenting his charges. Ireland, the home of many examples of that particular breed of monster, whom she exported in numbers to the rest of the world, has at last set her house in order in that regard and has publicly renounced the Catholic hierarchy that made life so miserable for generations of Irish children. But nobody dared in those days to question such bullies, and the freedom that is more normal these days has come too late for these victims. Auden would have helped, because the whole message of his life and his poetry is the antithesis of cruelty and meanness of spirit.
In the final stanza of “Mountains” the limits of his tolerance for heights is revealed:
… For an uncatlike
Creature who has gone wrong
Five minutes on even the nicest mountain
Are awfully long.
Nor does he like plains, which he says in “Plains” he cannot see without a shudder.
So with what sort of terrain is Auden happiest? Look at where he chose to live. An important part of his life was spent in America, particularly in New York, but the vastness of America certainly did not appeal to him. Italy was more to his taste, and he liked, too, his Austrian village. There was also that short period living in a cottage in the grounds of his old college in Oxford: all small homes with a strong sense of local attachment. It has been suggested that Auden’s imagination was not a particularly visual one. While it is true that music and ideas were perhaps more important to him than the visual arts, there is still an extraordinarily rich topography in his works, and landscapes are not only very much present in his poetry but more than mere backdrops to something else. The early landscapes are highly symbolic. “Paysage Moralisé,” which was written in 1933, has, after all, a highly revealing title: valleys, mountains, and islands perform an allegorical role—elicit human temptations, moods, disappointments. Later, as this tendency to use landscape symbolically began to play a less prominent role in his poetry, Auden found the human body itself to be a metaphor for place. “The provinces of his body revolted / The squares of his mind were empty” he wrote of the dying Yeats.
The people whom we encounter in Auden’s earlier landscapes are often engaged in a quest: they are where they are physically because it is a stage in their journey, the objective of which is the healing of division. They may be lost, as the strangers are in “New Year Letter,” standing
… puzzled underneath
The signpost on the barren heath
Where the rough mountain track divides
To silent valleys on all sides …
Deserts abound, symbolic of emptiness and aridity; mountains threaten with their violence; paths meander and confuse. As for cities, these can either stand for the alienation and loneliness or, quite the opposite, represent that ideal civis to the finding of which the pilgrim’s journey is dedicated. In creating a city, or indeed any human habitat, in which it is possible to live in harmony, we reconcile the concerns of spirit and body—which is exactly the goal that Auden sought in his later works. In allowing for the destruction of cities, we create ruins that remind us of the tragic consequences of our divided selves.
Gardens are, of course, something special. It is in the garden that for a brief moment we are allowed to indulge ourselves in music or art: the real world, the world outside, being kept outside by the garden wall. And it is in the walled garden that we might see, of all things, a unicorn
In his Later Auden, Edward Mendelson reminds us that Auden’s earlier fascination with glaciers and crossroads began in the late 1940s, to be replaced by a much more realistic appreciation of a real world inspired, to begin with, by what he saw in Italy: “his Italian townscapes,” Mendelson writes, “had real barbers and buses in them; instead of symbolic winds in allegorical deserts, a real sirocco and long dog days; instead of titanic struggles, a tangible landscape you could settle into.”
“In Praise of Limestone,” perhaps Auden’s best-known poem, represents this point of transition between imaginary landscapes and the real. The poem has been included in numerous anthologies and has been the subject of lengthy critical evaluation. It is a comfortable poem (as befits any paean to limestone), personal, indeed conversational in its tone, and yet it has an extraordinary amount to say about a wide range of subjects: landscape, history, geology, theology, the human body, and sex. It begins in a casually didactic way, with an observation about the properties of limestone—it dissolves in water, Auden reminds us—but becomes increasingly urgent, culminating in echoing, resonant final lines that speak not only to our very human need for love but also to our much more complex spiritual yearnings:
… when I try to imagine a faultless love,
Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur
Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.
“In Praise of Limestone” is written in the easy, conversational style that became a hallmark of Auden’s later work and that goes a long way toward explaining the striking effect that his work has when read aloud. Auden chose to write this poem in regular syllabic meter that eschews the looseness and subjectivity of free verse—verse that does not stick to strict requirements of meter and allows varying lengths of line, different points of stress, and so on. As Edward Mendelson has pointed out, regular syllabic lines became Auden’s preferred way of writing about the human body and “the shared meanings signified by the regular metre correspond to the bodily rhythms which everybody has in common and which cannot be imagined as belonging only to the lost past.” The reference to the lost past here is to the archaic feel of many poetic meters, which we associate with poems written well before our time. But there is something else in this observation that raises some very interesting issues. The regularity that we see in Auden’s verse after “In Praise of Limestone” contributes greatly to the appeal of what he wrote. It is easy on the ear—and ease here has no pejorative implications: the fact that something is easy to listen to does not make it less intellectually significant. Think back to some of the lines already quoted: “The winds must come from somewhere when they blow”—a very regular meter, and one that is widely used in poetry, but very reassuring, like the thrumming of a horse’s hooves on the ground, like the oscillation of a clock’s pendulum, like the very beating of the pulse. Or perhaps even like the sound of the maternal heartbeat we heard when in the womb; the first sound, no doubt, that any of us heard. Similarly, even when Auden is not using any of the tried and trusted meters of poetry but is writing his regular syllabic lines, there is a rhythm there that seems essentially right. Let’s go back to the lines at the end of “In Praise of Limestone”: “What I hear is the sound of underground streams / What I see is a limestone landscape.” Close your eyes and try to imagine the shape of these lines. I see a falling, a descent, a softening, with the gentlest of landings at the end. And I feel resolution, calmness, and forgiveness. These feelings are all triggered by the pace of the two lines, but their motion, their tone is one of sharing, the imparting of understanding. A musician might resort to musical concepts to explain this feeling. There is cadence here in exactly the same way as there is cadence in musical composition.
The widespread anthologizing of “In Praise of Limestone” confirms that people like it—but why? Is it just because of the way it sounds, or is it because of its meaning? Answering this question is not easy, largely because the poem’s meaning is not immediately apparent; one can read “In Praise of Limestone” and reach the end without being sure what the poem is really about. Is it just about limestone and its comfortable properties? Is it about Italy, or is it in fact about England? Is it about sex? Is it possibly religious?
Some of the most useful insights into this entrancing poem are offered by Edward Mendelson, who goes to some lengths to explain it in the second part of his two-volume study of Auden, Later Auden. Mendelson was appointed to the post of Auden’s literary executor at an early age. A common mistake that writers make is to appoint a literary executor from the ranks of their coevals. It is understandable why they do that: if anybody can be trusted to be a sympathetic curator of a body of work, surely it will be a friend—and friends tend to be rough contemporaries. But the problem with this is that the literary executor dies either before the writer or not long after. Mendelson was an instructor—an assistant professor—at Yale when he met Auden and impressed the poet with his knowledge of his work. By appointing a young man, Auden ensured the likelihood of a good, long period of attention and curatorship. He also got scholarship and loyalty, both of a particularly high order.
My first meeting with Edward Mendelson had its origin in a letter I received from him a few years after the publication of my Botswana novel, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. I had recently begun a new series of books in which the principal character was an Edinburgh moral philosopher, Isabel Dalhousie, who happened also to be a devotee of the works of W. H. Auden and who was in the habit of thinking about—and quoting—Auden rather a lot. Auden, it seems, had something to say about many of the dilemmas and issues that Isabel encountered in her daily moral life. Mendelson noticed this and wrote me a letter in which he pointed out that in his view W. H. Auden would have agreed with Mma Ramotswe—the heroine of my Botswana novels—on almost every subject.
To hear from Auden’s literary executor was something of a thrill—almost as good as hearing from the poet himself, which was, alas, no longer possible. I wrote back and suggested that when I was next in New York—where Mendelson is a professor of English at Columbia University—we might perhaps meet for coffee or lunch. He wrote back and said that he thought this a good idea. A few months later we met in the Russian Tea Room next to the Carnegie Hall. Edward was with his wife, Cheryl, a novelist with whom I shared a New York publisher, and I was with my wife and one of my daughters. In the course of the meeting, I asked Edward whether he would care to appear as a real character in my next Isabel Dalhousie novel. He courteously agreed.
That mention was duly made in the next Dalhousie novel. He and Isabel exchanged letters in that book, with Isabel raising a point about the possible influence of Burns on one of Auden’s poems. But then, a year later, in the next Isabel Dalhousie novel, Edward made an even more important appearance, coming to Edinburgh to deliver a lecture on the role of neurotic guilt in Auden’s work. In that book, after the lecture he goes to dinner at Isabel’s house, where he meets a number of her friends.
I enjoyed creating this link between fiction and reality and indeed have always enjoyed writing real characters into books (with their consent, of course, and always in a positive light). But what followed took this jeu d’esprit even further. The following year I invited Edward Mendelson to come to Edinburgh to deliver the lecture he had delivered in the book. Afterward he joined us for dinner with other real people who had appeared as friends of Isabel Dalhousie in the novels. Real life was imitating fiction, but in this case fiction had preceded the real event—a reversal of what might normally be expected to happen.
Later Mendelson came Edinburgh for a longer visit—as the first holder of a fellowship set up in Isabel Dalhousie’s name—and we had the opportunity to spend time talking about individual poems. There was so much that I wanted to ask Edward about, and he helpfully explained the meaning of some of the more opaque poems. I was very fortunate, of course, in being able to take advantage in this way of his understanding of poems such as “If I Could Tell You,” but even if I had not had this access, I would have been able to find marvelously nuanced explanations in his critical works.
Mendelson sees “In Praise of Limestone” as being not only a series of ruminations on landscape—and it undoubtedly is that—but also a musing on the body, and on the needs of the body. This, he feels, is at the heart of the poem: it is about the flesh, and as the poem progresses it becomes a love poem. The body is always there: it is our home, it is where we are. We may deny that, we may try to rise above the physical yearnings that the flesh inspires, but ultimately we come back to them. Ultimately we are physical creatures. The soft, limestone landscape is mother.
The recognition of these claims of the flesh is what makes Auden seem such an intensely human poet. There are plenty of poets, especially those given to the writing of confessional verse, who are ready to tell us about their particular experience of love. We listen sympathetically and may indeed be touched or inspired by their insights. But few poets transcend the personal when talking about love. They are talking, really, about how they felt when they were in love; Auden digs far deeper than that. He talks about love and the flesh as it can be experienced by all of us—he transcends the specific experience in a particular place and time, to get to the heart of what we are. In doing so, though, even if he does not dodge the most complex philosophical and theological issues raised by our human existence, he will still locate everything in the very immediate: in the guts of the living, to use an expression he uses in poem to Yeats. This means that we feel we understand Auden’s work even when we do not, or when we need a fair amount of coaching to appreciate fully his references and his meaning.
His concern with the body and its significance can become microscopic. There is a wonderful poem in which Auden turns to the subject of the yeast, bacteria, and viruses that live upon the skin of all of us. “A New Year Greeting” is addressed to these microorganisms, probably the only poem in the English language to concern itself with these invisible presences. The life of these tiny creatures is a perilous one. By what myths, Auden asks, would the priests of these fauna account for
the hurricanes that come
twice every twenty-four hours,
each time I dress or undress,
when, clinging to keratin rafts,
whole cities are swept away
to perish in space, or the Flood
that scalds to death when I bathe?
This extraordinary poem often sometimes comes back to me when I look, thoughtfully, at human skin—at my own or another’s—as I suppose we all do now and then. Their effect is not only to engender a certain curiosity about what the microworld looks like (the poem itself was inspired by Auden’s reading of an article in Scientific American), but also to make us more aware of what we are. We are individuals with hopes and conceits, but we are also simply flesh, and colonized flesh at that. Again we see Auden’s insight into our physicality and the vulnerability that goes with it. And it is humbling, in the real sense of that somewhat abused word.
“A Limestone Landscape” is about the large-scale natural world—the earth on which we live; “A New Year Greeting” is about the microscopic natural world. What about the world inbetween—the natural world of animals? There are plenty of animals in Auden’s poems—rather unexpectedly, perhaps. Auden’s world encompasses music, psychology, and theology, but one would not have thought that there would be many animals. And yet they are there, either as bit players or, in the later poems, as the principal subject of the poem. There are plenty of dogs, perhaps most famously in his well-known poem about the banality of suffering, “Musée des Beaux Arts,” where “the dogs go on with their doggy life” while the small, unobserved tragedy of Icarus falling into the water occurs in the background. Surprisingly, for a poet who personalizes all sorts of inanimate objects (talking streams, rocks, and so on), few of the animal references are anthropomorphic. Dogs seem to represent anarchy and threat, or sometimes just sheer exuberance. Auden’s iconography of dogs differs little from the use of dogs in painting, where their iconographic role includes domesticity and loyalty. I have in my study a Dutch painting of a young boy and his dog. There are quite a few iconographic references in the picture—an hourglass and a spear being the obvious ones—but there is also a dog, and there is no doubt about its significance. The dog stands up on its hind legs, its forelegs resting against the boy’s skirts (the boy is about six, and at that time, the seventeenth century, small boys were dressed in skirts); the boy’s future is alluded to by the hourglass, his costly garb, and the spear; the dog the represents the companionship and loyalty that will see him through this future.
Auden’s dogs may be violent and rumbustious, but they are also fun and friendly. In Caliban’s address to the audience in The Sea and the Mirror he refers to a “green kingdom, where the steam rollers are as friendly as the farm dogs.” And in “A Bad Night (a lexical exercise)” we see Auden in playful form coming up with a new adjective for the dogs owned by the “infrequent shepherds, sloomy of face.” These are “scaddle dogs,” a term that will send all of us to the dictionary to discover that scaddle, when applied to an animal, means badly behaved or skittish. Sloomy, which is one of those words we feel we know the meaning of even if we do not—describes the look of one who is sleepy or sluggish. Although not a word in everyday use, it crops up in John Clare, who says “O’er pathless plains, at early hours, The sleepy rustic sloomy goes.” The picture is clear enough: sloomy seems right for the image of somebody going to work at an unearthly hour but does not quite fit the modern pastoralist who will have to be energetic if he is to survive the mechanized agriculture of our age. In that same poem, Auden thinks he will defeat us with the line “far he must hirple.” That may bring out the dictionary for many, but not in Scotland, where hirple is a Scots word that is in everyday use. It means to limp, and it is what one does when one has pulled a tendon. A scaddle dog would certainly hirple if his skittishness caused him to overexert himself and hurt a paw.
There are countless other instances of Auden’s delight in using words on the cusp of that damning dictionary verdict archaic. Never does one get the impression that these words are being used in a showy way: they are there deliberately, and sometimes, no doubt, they are chosen not only for their pleasurable quality but because they have the right number of syllables for the line, but they are never used to impress. Rather, they are used to express and share the poet’s delight in the sheer richness of the English language. In my own reading of Auden I was led to widdershins (counterclockwise) and deasil (clockwise)—in “Lakes” he says that “sly foreign ministers” should always meet beside a lake because
… whether they walk widdershins or deasil,
the path will yoke their shoulders to one liquid centre,
Like two old donkeys pumping as they plod;
such physical compassion may not guarantee
a marriage for their armies, but it helps …
Then there is the water in “Streams” that makes fun of our human feuds
by opposing identical banks
and transferring the loam from Huppim
to Muppim and back each time you crankle.
Crankle is not the difficulty here—onomatopoeic words, or words that are close to onomatopoeic, usually make their meaning clear enough, but Huppim and Muppim? A biblical reference: the sons of Benjamin, it seems, rather than, as in our ignorance we might suspect, children’s puppets.
Dogs occur, as do other animals, with some frequency in Auden’s late poems. The appearance of animals at this stage emphasizes the concern he had long harbored, but which is now very much to the fore, with the celebration of the comfortable certainties of domestic life. Animals are part of that life, but they are more than mere furniture; they have their own lives to lead, and, unlike us, these lives are led in harmony with the world: they are “naturally good”—to use the phrase that Auden chose to describe healthy plants and animals. This idea of the natural goodness is also strikingly present in a scene from one of Iris Murdoch’s novels, The Philosopher’s Pupil, in which the characters attend a Quaker meeting and are all moved and morally affected by the insights of what is said by there—all except the small papillon dog, Zed, smuggled in by the boy who owns him: the dog, “being composed of pure goodness,” is unchanged.
Auden wrote “Talking to Dogs” in 1970. It is a musing on canine qualities that will strike an immediate chord with the dog owner who has turned, as all such must on occasion do, to the dog for support or encouragement. And dogs never let us down in that respect: they understand, even when they so patently are incapable of making sense of what we tell them. That is not the point, of course; telling a friend of one’s troubles does not require any critical evaluation by the friend—in such circumstances we are really talking to ourselves. Auden expresses this nicely:
Being quicker to sense unhappiness
Without having to be told the dreary
Details or who is to blame, in dark hours
Your silence may be of more help than many
Two-legged comforters …
A year later he wrote “Talking to Mice,” a poem that echoes that other great poem about mice, Robert Burns’s “Ode to a Mouse,” written in 1785. Burns reflects on a mouse that he, the plowman, has disturbed in his plowing of a field and makes the widely quoted observation that “the best-laid schemes of mice and men / gang aft agley (often go wrong)”—as they undoubtedly do, from the failure of a trivial social arrangement—a plan to meet for lunch, defeated by heavy traffic—to the spectacular disaster of a dysfunctional rocket launch. But it is other lines from this poem that lodge in my mind, lines of apology for what we do to the creatures around us: “I’m truly sorry man’s dominion / Has broken nature’s social union.” These lines often come back to me, reproachfully, each time I do something that abruptly brings to an end the life of some tiny creature: a snail inadvertently crushed to death underfoot, a spider deliberately washed down the drain by what must seem to it a tsunami of bathwater. We have to be indifferent to the death of insects and other creatures if we are to eat food from commercially produced crops, which rely on insecticides, let alone if we scale the food chain to eat bacon or fish. But we tuck away such knowledge and forget the horrors of the slaughterhouse, its blood and viscera and squealing, when we tackle with relish our chicken sandwich or our hamburger.
Auden’s “Talking to Mice” is not dissimilar to Burns’s poem in its concern with the relationship between man and mouse. Burns destroyed the mouse’s world when his plow cut through its tiny home; Auden, while able to live in good-neighborliness with two household mice, cannot permit a vastly enlarged family of mice to remain at liberty and resorts to a mousetrap to dispose of them, which it does, with success, fatally fooling the mice “who would never believe an unusual object pertaining to men could be there for a sinister purpose.” He had no talent for murder, he goes on to say, but why, then, should the mice be killed? The answer is one that harkens back to the way the State behaves: the mice have been killed
householders we had behaved exactly as every State does
when there is something It wants, and a minor one gets in the way.
Yes, of course that happens, and we can all find instances of it in our local lives. The modern world may be a slightly safer place for “minor ones”—the development of human rights over the past half-century has done a great deal to further that—but the inclinations of the State to which Auden refers are still there.
In this poem, as in so much of his work, the small leads to the bigger; in the quotidian detail we can see the shape of something much larger: a greater truth, a more profound insight.