Private Stuff and Public Spirit
We in us find the eagle and the dove.
—JOHN DONNE, “THE CANONIZATION”
We see us as we truly behave.
—JOHN ASHBERY, “SOME TREES”
WHEN DOES LOVE poetry say “we”? Not as often as you would think. In what sense is love poetry mindful of the social world, even civic-minded? More often than you would think. This chapter looks at some of the ways the “we” of love poetry expands to perform a civil or didactic function, and it connects this function to the puzzle of love’s number, tense, and grammar, which constitutes the subject matter of many love poems. Plato argued that eros could be a rung on the ladder to other forms of love. Love’s number may involve not only addition but also an exponential process, in sublimation “mounting upwards from one to two, and from two to all fair forms.”1 But a great deal of thinking since has set romantic love at odds, not only with truth and reason, but with social and ethical thinking. Later philosophers saw romantic love as exclusive and private, indifferent or even hostile to the world beyond itself and inscrutable to that world.
Poetry has also explored these tensions and antagonisms between lovers and the rest of us and asked how the experience of lovers might be reconciled to broader moral and civic values. On the one hand, lovers are subject to human laws and patterns of behavior and desire, to the general “we” that is all of us, and these laws and patterns are often evoked in love’s appeals and seductions. On the other hand, lovers often see themselves as exceptional, transcending or defying the common lot through love’s powerful union and offering alternative modes of being together that provide correction to a world of strife. This hyperbolic theme resonates throughout John Donne’s love poetry. One hears it, for instance, in the insistent, mobile pronoun “we” of “The Anniversary,” as subject, as object, as possessive adjective; declarative, interrogative, and imperative, part of humanity and yet exceptional.
But we no more than all the rest.
Here upon earth we’re Kings, and none but we
Can be such Kings, nor of such subjects be;
Who is so safe as we? where none can do
Treason to us, except one of us two.
True and false fears let us refrain,
Let us love nobly, and live, and add again
Years and years unto years, till we attain
To write threescore: this is the second of our reign.
Inward-turning as it may be, love poetry in all periods has often provided a mirror for the social world, whether as an idealized model of intersubjectivity or as a troubled symptom or reflection of social domination, fragmentation, or polarity. In lyric poetry the “we” of lovers, exclusive to the extreme, sometimes turns to widen its circle, forming relations with a specific community, with invisible listeners, or with an unrealized, indeterminate future community. The epithalamium is the most obvious and deliberate form of this social turn in love poetry, reflecting the way the institution of marriage reconciles the tension between the erotic and the civic. But the pattern can be seen even in lyrics of unsanctioned or unhappy love.
Lyric poetry, which takes romantic and erotic love as one of its quintessential subjects, has endured some of the same criticisms hurled at lovers. “The lunatic, the lover and the poet / are of imagination all compact.”2 As the genre most associated with the private life, lyric poetry is often seen as insular, hermetic, irrational, bound to pleasure and illusion, irrelevant and even subversive to moral and social consciousness, certainly a world unto itself. The “you” of love poetry feels exclusive even when the particular beloved is unidentified, and the “we” that arises in the love relation, if it does (Petrarchan love poets sigh alone), seems to have little room for public spirit, justice, or even brotherly love, locked as it is in erotic mystery, secrecy, obsessive intimacy, ecstasy, or dejection. The reader must either enter into the madness of love, identifying with the speaker, or wonder at its absurdity. Nowhere so much as in love poetry is the ideal of a first-person plural so fully imagined, its paradoxes so intensely contemplated. Love makes its own community, but it is troubling for civil community, seeming both exclusive and unrealistic. Auden’s “we” in the early love poetry is fraught within and without. And yet the speaker in love poetry sometimes steps back from his enthrallment to take on the voice of a wise spectator, who seeks not to court or swoon but to understand love and to guide its impulses to social good.3 These two units, the “we” of lovers and the “we” of sober reflection and civil community, may mirror or follow each other, compete, overlap, or merge in the course of the poem. Love poetry’s shifts between an intimate “we” and a philosophical “we” involve the audience in a nuanced relationship with the utterance, as Eliot makes clear in “The Three Voices of Poetry.” He includes love lyric in the second voice, of poems addressed to other people, not only because it is addressed to a beloved but because it contains a hint of oratory.
Poetic address can be considered as practice or paradigm, then, for social and ethical engagement. But the social connections are not only symbolic ones. Referentially ambiguous deictic words—“here” and “now” and a range of pronouns—can function on different planes of the poem; they can be internal to the story (diegetic) or to the poet’s commentary reaching outside the bounds of the story and its interlocutors (nondiegetic). These levels of reference are never very tightly distinguishable in poetry as compared with prose. Poetry moves freely among discursive orientations and shifts its objects of address and implied reference from one framework to another.4 The tonalities and dispositions of lovers toward their beloveds introduce relations of domination or recognition of the other that are relevant to human relations more generally, and the drama of the poem engages us in these dynamics. The shifting registers of a poem create layers of private and public address as it moves (sometimes seamlessly or ambiguously, sometimes abruptly) out of story or character into the scene of writing, or as it turns to philosophical reflection, which may serve the dramatic context but also lift out of it to involve the reader more directly. The “we” of lovers thus posits a more inclusive community, to which they belong and return, even when they seem to turn away. The pronoun can call the reader into an imaginary unit with the poet, a moment of mutuality and consent, even when the poem may be creating a divide between “us” (the loving pair) and “the world”; or it can release speaker and reader from the exclusive zone of lovers into human connection on a wider scale.5 Though the lover’s praise or desire may remain in the I/You interaction, his experience can be set in relation to general truths. But the pronouns can work in the opposite way as well, as the lover invokes general truth in his appeal to a beloved. In the use of general propositions, the line between seduction and civil purpose is not always clear. Shakespeare’s first sonnet begins “From fairest creatures we desire increase.”6 The sonnet seems at once an act of persuasion and a reflection on human nature. This “we” is not intimate but inclusive. When the poet draws on a general “we” to argue a specific case to an intimate, the reader is pulled in, considering how this general truth applies in the instance of loving address.
If there be nothing new, but that which is
Hath been before, how are our brains beguil’d,
Which labouring for invention bear amiss
The second burthen of a former child.
Oh that record could with a backward look,
Even of five hundred courses of the sun,
Show me your image in some antique book,
Since mind at first in character was done,
That I might see what the old world could say
To this composed wonder of your frame;
Whether we are mended, or where better they,
Or whether revolution be the same.7
As Helen Vendler explains it, “speaking as we, he is a mind, speaking as I he is a lover.”8 While the lovers feel exclusive and unique to each other, they are subject to general laws and belong to wider communities. This “we” is also generational, comparing its view to the backward gaze of a “they” the poet cannot conjure. Such shifts remind us that love exists in a world of many overlapping human groups and that love poetry draws out a variety of tones and dispositions as it invokes and presents the conditions of love. Shakespeare’s sonnets were on Auden’s mind throughout his career, and this ambiguity in the voice, between lover and wise spectator, likely provided a model of how to integrate, or at least entangle, private and public speech. Shakespeare also offered Auden a model for moving between an ideal of union and a reality of separateness. Shakespeare uses the first-person plural more often than his Petrarchan predecessors do, but when speaking of lovers, “we” usually bears the burden of division, presence called up through absence. “Let me confess that we two must be twain, / Although our undivided loves are one” begins sonnet 36.9 And the “we, our” that dominates the octave, as Vendler points out, is supplanted by “I, thou” in the sestet.10 In sonnet 39, the speaker is resigned to this separation, which he understands in terms of number: “Even for this, let us divided live, / And our dear love lose name of single one.”11 These sonnets are rife with compensatory paradoxes of inverted temporality and active embrace of what is already accomplished. Here, “let us divided live” proposes a state already established as a human condition.
The Dialogue of One
One of the arguments of this book is that “we” is a problematic pronoun as it designates the puzzle of a plural unit; love poetry presents this psychological and spiritual paradox with particular intensity. As Marianne Moore writes in “Marriage,” “everything to do with love is mystery”; lovers are “opposed each to the other, not to unity.” Lovers are one and yet two, unique and yet joined, part of the common but apart from it. Love’s number varies in lyric tradition—it may be singular, as in Sidney, double, as in Shakespeare, or even triple, as in Barrett Browning, where God is witness. It may be a decimal, as in Frost’s “Meeting and Passing”: “less than two / But more than one as yet.” But Frost has also imagined love as a trio: “We must be something. / We’ve said we two. Let’s change that to we three.”12 Poetry parses this indeterminacy in the pronoun in order to imagine a variety of active and elastic human relations. Love poetry is the subgenre in which ideas of unity in human connection, both domination and intersubjectivity, have been most often explored. When lovers talk, they talk about love, and an obsessive counting often arises in the meditation of love’s unit. Poetry is full of monads, dyads, even triads, as it calculates love’s sum. John Donne’s love poetry (“The Canonization,” “Lecture on a Shadow,” or “The Anniversary,” for instance) provides some of the most interesting uses of the first-person plural, both in its shifts between lover and wise counselor and in its pondering of love’s number and grammar. Is love’s “we” one or two? Is it more than the sum of its parts? Does ecstatic feeling between lovers introduce infinity into love’s counting? Does consciousness of time or the social environment fracture and obstruct love’s ideal, or do these conditions give romantic love its distinction? The answers to these questions might map onto a history of love poetry, though various forms and formulas are recurrent. Love poetry ponders these enigmas and explores their permutations in every age, reflecting and even following shifting philosophical, religious, and cultural traditions.13 Denis de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World, C. S. Lewis’s The Allegory of Love, Anders Nygren’s Eros and Agape, among others, have given us histories of the Western idea of romantic love and traced its philosophical and literary traditions, revivals, and modifications. Auden was drawn to this history, read and reviewed these books, which helped him shape his conception of love in the modern world.
In connection with the amorous counting in love poetry there is a grammatical testing and modeling of the structure of intimate relation. Western love poetry, from Song of Solomon to the present, often employs chiasmus and other binding and reciprocal syntax as it structures romantic connection, and the first-person plural takes up various grammatical positions in this process. The most intense states of erotic and spiritual union provoke silence rather than talk. Lips that meet do not speak. Souls that unite need no language but silence. But love’s unit is also predicated on difference, and love poetry constantly reasserts the space it seeks to overcome. Absence, temporal and spatial, rather than presence; other minds, rather than one mind; time, rather than the eternal present tense, provoke poetic address, which is why love poetry so often hypothesizes separation or imagines the beloved asleep. Yet the temporality of love propels itself toward an imaginary “we” and toward a layered “here” and “now” in which relations are proposed, remembered, or invented. This dynamic is mapped onto the grammar and syntax of love’s declarations.
The poet may speak of shared feelings or actions, using “we” as a grammatical subject or “our” as a possessive. He may imagine a joint voicing, preserving difference in duet (Frost’s “Today will be the day of what we both said”).14 Or he may place their unit in an objective position as “us,” as a target of the lovers’ own or an outsider’s contemplation or agency. The speaker may seek reciprocity (“each other”) or reflexivity (“ourselves”). Or the speaker may hail the pair with invitation or imperative (“let us”). As love poetry probes the paradoxes, pains, and pleasures of love’s unit, it moves around in this grammatical field in order to define the space of betweenness and to view it inside and out. The grammar of love reflects how love’s “we” is seen: as a genderless “neutral thing,” a doubling, a fusion, a polarity, a magnetic intersubjectivity of I and Thou, an infinite intimacy beyond time and space, a newly established entity where nothing was before, an “us” that “we” might contemplate in wonder, or a shadow figure—a trace of what once was or an illusion dispelled.
In exploring these variables in number and grammar, Western love poetry has often been the exemplary or allegorical figure for other kinds of desire and relation with another—human, divine, social, and even textual. The grammar of love poetry may also turn outward explicitly, in exclusion or inclusion. The speaker may take an antagonistic stand presenting “us” (private, ideal, sacred) against a hostile “them” (public, imperfect, profane) that threatens love’s unity and harmony with its strife and division. Or, in the case of epithalamium and other poems of forming bonds, the speaker may welcome the world and expand love’s unit, making the lovers an anchor of communal joy or continuity, the intimate “we” resounding in a choral “we” of active community. Patterns of exclusion and inclusion may involve an exchange of one focus of love, eros, for another, communitas, as the speaker turns from the scene of his private affection to take up civic and didactic work. There are myriad ways in which the reader is pulled into the love lyric and its relational unit—through identification with the speaker or addressee, as an overhearing witness or bystander (vicarious, judging, even voyeuristic), or simply as someone subject to the same human conditions (desire, time, history, power, art, society) that arise in the discourse of love, where “we” is no longer the exclusive unit of lovers but a term that includes interlocking groups or “us all.” “We” involves a complex layering that connects to the reader in ways that are not just metaphoric; “we” relations in love lyric are elastic, and this flexibility reinforces the capacity of the genre not only to model but to activate or awaken other social relations.
Terrifying Mottoes and the Language of Love
“Some say it makes the world go round / And some say that’s absurd,” Auden wrote in “O Tell Me the Truth about Love” (SP 69). He was interested in love poetry throughout his career, as both reader and author. He certainly learned from the social- and time-burdened love lyrics of his immediate predecessors. Modern poetry is full of such shadow-haunted, time-burdened meditations on love, presenting a fractured, socially burdened “we,” more memory than desire, and often dominated by the past tense. George Meredith’s Modern Love developed this new kind of love poetry, warping Renaissance conventions, and we find it also in Hardy, Eliot, Millay, Frost, Larkin, and many others. “We” is not an ideal, worked toward or elusive, but an illusion coming apart, a morbid afterglow based on mutual disillusion and knowledge of failure. The pattern love makes here does not transfigure but reflects the world of social division, falsehood, and ephemeral connection. And the failure of love’s “we” becomes a symptom and mirror of a broader social failure. But in his reflections on intimacy, Auden took up the long story of love in the Western world, from Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnet conventions to the tragic romance of Tristan and Isolde and the predations of Don Juan. The civil and ethical thrust of this tradition, its contribution to communitas, is not straightforward. But in reviewing Love in the Western World in 1941, in the midst of war, Auden argues that eros is not the opposite of agape; the relation is not dualistic but “dialectical.” “For Eros, surely, is ‘amor sementa in voi d’ogni vertute, e d’ogni operazion che merta pene’ . . . a conversion, not an addition, the Law fulfilled, not the Law destroyed” (Prose II 139–40). Auden writes the review in a time when he is both deeply in love and deeply worried about the fate of the world, given the rise of fascism’s “collective Eros.” Much of Auden’s love poetry was written in the shadow of social crisis and war, and it bears the burden of guilt as well as secrecy. Love can seem a stealthy indulgence before the spectacle of public suffering. His early love poetry sometimes sets itself against external forces or sees the failure of love in terms of a repressive and polluted environment. The push-pull of private desire and public obligation shapes the poems in various ways, as the language of love degenerates into lies or competes with the slogans, benign or hostile, of public life. Auden’s epithalamia are especially aware of the divisive world that surrounds the embracing lovers. They send out loving vows in defiance of the “terrifying mottoes” that threaten human community (SP 35). When Auden committed himself to Chester Kallman, he also turned love into an ethical endeavor and potential social good, wanting to align erotic energy with rather than against the social surround, by making a pattern of their love. The “we” formed in “the arbitrary circle of a vow” (SP 122) becomes a template for community, a space where “private stuff” might be reconciled to “public spirit,” allowing love, and by extension love poetry, a moral or civil function.
In October 1939 Auden wrote a rare poem of ecstatic union between lovers. It’s a beautiful poem but seldom cited, perhaps because it does not appear in Selected Poems, or perhaps because it is uncharacteristically joyous and untroubled. As with much of Auden’s love poetry, it avoids identifying the gender of the lovers.15 Auden called the poem “Song” and placed it near the middle of what many consider his most accomplished volume, Another Time. That volume’s dedicatory poem to Chester Kallman reminds us “every eye must weep alone.” But there are no tears in “Song,” no loneliness, and no borders.
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. (CP 265)
Auden’s poem establishes a special present tense for erotic love and a space at once intimate and expansive, stretching out to gather up a world. “Whole” modifies a temporal unit, “day,” but time is given a spatial breadth with “great.” The lovers’ “tiny world” becomes a wide totality. Though this is not an epithalamium, its “happy miles” suggest Spenser’s confidence that “the woods shall to me answer and my Eccho ring.”16 The ease between lovers radiates out into the world and brings it back so that “the tiny world of lovers’ arms” is continuous with the universe; body and landscape are one being, animated with desire. Marvell’s “The Garden” echoes through the poem. The next stanza reverses direction, “the learned shade” bringing the wisdom and calm of time, perhaps, without its ravages. With “silence” it “invade[s]” the “breathing wood” of the lovers’ world, but these are benign features, falling “greenly” and stirring “their secret to a smile.” The lyric “now” at the center of the middle stanza suggests the bliss of consummated love. The poet of “borders” discovers a boundless feeling in this lovers’ embrace. Limbs, brows, a smile forget their separate bodies. Perhaps for this reason (rather than merely for gender secrecy) the poem is without pronouns at first, the voice speaking from both inside the experience and outside it, praising the fulfillment. “A light of recognition” turns a verb of their mutual acknowledgment into a noun of condition, requiring no agency of You or I. The praise itself takes on an erotic charge, a bursting forth of language after the “dry dumb past” and even the blissful silence. The third stanza shifts from indolent ease to an exclamation of joy. Erotic “seas of shipwreck” paradoxically bear them “home,” from a green shade to a “fire of praising.” The exclamation “Restored! Returned!” continues the trope of reciprocity and of departure and return, the anonymous “lost” castaways redeemed and “home at last.” Only in the penultimate line does the first-person plural appear, but its late introduction suggests a unity achieved and recognized in the embrace, the enjambment creating emphasis, the inversion converting love’s reciprocity to a time-trumping effect: “and we / Our life-day long shall part no more.” The inversion of the familiar idiom “live long day” may qualify the temporality of love (this is an eternal moment, not an eternity of moments), but most importantly the happiness seems to break over the borders of time. Aspiration and achievement are one; no “I” and “You” remain, only love’s “we.” The song, its fifteen lines overrunning the sonnet’s “narrow strictness,” establishes the feeling of holism and boundless union by melding words through assonance and alliteration, and finding rhymes inside of lines, or in half-rhymes, rather than creating a pattern of sharp closing oppositions and antitheses.
Auden seems in “Warm are the still and lucky miles” to have stepped away from the social and political concerns of his recent poetry, indulging in a moment of private bliss. But his thinking about romantic love has a communal reach. Here, the generalizing images at the end, of “the lost” ones (presumably including the lovers in their earlier lives) and the “the dry dumb past,” seem to extend out from the private moment, inviting all, not just each other but the world, to “See!” the pattern of their love. Rather than simply creating “private spheres out of public chaos,” the poem suggests how private union might extend its redemptive and harmonizing influence by sheer force of feeling. “Warm are the still and lucky miles” is a rare moment of ecstatic ease in modern poetry, and especially in Auden’s love poetry. None of Auden’s didactic abstraction “invades” this inviolable “song.” As he would write in “Heavy Date” during the same month: “When two lovers meet, then / There’s an end to writing / Thought and Analytics” (CP 260). Auden would soon turn philosophical and indeed analytical about his relationship to Kallman as the “life-day long” of their blissful union proved fleeting in duration if boundless in consequence.
As we’ve seen, love shapes the grammar and syntax as well as number of its pronouns, whether it is a reciprocal chiasm or, as in Donne, a “new soul” emerging as a predicate.17 The lovers’ “we” in Auden’s poetry returned to a fraught relation of you and I, even as their relationship continued to be a moral compass for Auden, informing his wider ethical vision with a “we” that generalizes from his urges and failures. The poem “Every eye must weep alone” (EA 456) begins in a struggle to overthrow the ego and its desires (“I Will”). The declaration “I Am become I Love” (in which love becomes a predicate object) projects itself as a line that “all I’s” might utter, but in the context of the dedication it is Auden speaking for himself, not for the two as a unit. Indeed, he acknowledges: “I Have Not I Am Loved.” Narcissus remains ungratified, his love unreciprocated. There is no meeting the world in each other’s eyes in this repetition of I’s. The “we” that might arise when “all I’s can meet and grow” is ostensive. Auden represents the experience of love as a self-discovery through self-forgetting. As he writes in “Heavy Date”: “I have / Found myself in You” (CP 260). But if Auden’s work chooses the I/You relation, with all its tensions, over narcissistic gratification, this very recognition of the other becomes a basis for reconciling romantic love with ethical and social awareness.
Most of Auden’s early poetry “about love” is nothing like “Warm are the still and lucky miles.” Love is uneasy; there is no ecstatic “we.” The tense is generally past and passive. Love’s adversaries are everywhere; “I” and “you” find each other mostly at odds, and the repressive forces of the external world create division within the self and between lovers. Auden embodies love’s tensions and evasions in stoical and sardonic tonalities and figures of incongruity. These are indeed voices of “the lost,” recalling Meredith’s and Hardy’s elegiac love lyrics. The “birds up above” may converse “so sweetly on reciprocal love,” awakening human desire, but the division between lovers is often “ten thousand miles deep” (CP 142–43). “Love,” it seems, is an individual feeling of desire and its fulfillment or frustration, not something ecstatic or even shared. Even when love is imagined in a positive light, it tends to focus on personal gratification rather than mutuality. “Lover, sulk no more,” Auden sings in “Underneath the abject willow,” “come, / . . . Into your satisfaction” (SP 45). The imperative mood gives the poem didactic force. Where Auden uses the first-person plural in his early love poetry it tends to signify a past or evoke a memory rather than declare a fulfilling “now.” The “we” may know itself only in loss. “The Letter” of 1927 (“From the very first coming down,” SP 4) provides a striking contrast to “Warm are the still and lucky miles.” Here, love does not reshape the world; instead, the world distorts love. The antipastoral poem marks out division not only in space and time references but also in the poem’s form. “You” and “I” in this address are set on separate lines, with a landscape already marked by the ups and downs of erotic hope and disappointment. The “country god” Pan, frozen into a stone statue, inspires only passive voice and double negatives, certainly no “fire of praising.” “We” arises only once in twenty-eight lines, and in reference to an impotent spectatorship that could as well apply to the reader who is following the account as to the couple whose experience the poem relays. All other pronouns drop out in the declensions, as if the course of love comes to pass by necessity rather than choice and is easily anticipated: “shall see, shall pass, as we have seen.” “Pass” becomes “passed” two lines later, a word that hangs ambiguously between the former lovers (who “pass” each other emotionally) and the world around them. It’s an enervated version of Petrarchan conflict. “As we have seen” speaks not as a lover in the recollection but impersonally, as a mind in a cool formal analysis, for which the lovers are exhibits and witnesses rather than grieving participants. Yet the mood is less of wisdom than regret.
In another early poem, “Taller to-day” (SP 5–6), “we” arises in the first line: “we remember similar evenings.” The companions are jolted to childhood but separate childhoods, before any “we” had formed. The moment of union is already displaced, immediately shadowed by the past and by anxieties about the future. A qualified “We” is reasserted after “But” in the third stanza: “But happy now, though no nearer each other, / We see farms . . .” “Nearer” than when? When they were children and separate? The middle clause enacts what it says, keeping the distance between lovers; they share a view but not a view of each other. The final stanza inserts another “but” that would hold “this peace” as exceptional, transient, and far from ecstatic. This stanza also removes all pronouns and frames assertions in double negatives: “not this peace / No bird can contradict.” Tenses undermine union. It is hard to invest much confidence in the “something fulfilled” of “this hour” (hinting at, without securing, this our). Whatever that “something” might be and whether that “something” is “loved or endured,” it is far from rapturous. Feeling “endured” (not “enduring”) is externalized, just as “something fulfilled” here suggests prophecy realized rather than a consummation achieved. “The Adversary,” Auden’s name for all the forces of division, social and psychological, set against love, is still at large “on lonely roads.”
The sense that love arises within a public, social order marked by exclusions and antagonisms that obstruct personal bonds pervades all these poems, none so clearly as “The chimneys are smoking” (EA 116–18). The 1932 poem presents two related tensions that will continue to inform Auden’s love poetry for several decades: first, the longing for lasting union and the inevitability of loss and separation; second, the conflict between private satisfactions and public imperatives. He feels the demands of the public sphere from which he is at once alienated as well as hostile to its repression, and toward which he is compelled by an authentic sense of obligation. In “The chimneys are smoking,” Auden tries to address the first problem by solving the second. That is, he tries to overcome the loss that shadows his intimacy by exchanging that local and tentative “we” for political camaraderie, acknowledging the social imperative instead of feeling its constraints. Altruism and communal solidarity have a compensatory quality here. As Edward Mendelson has argued, the awkwardness and obscurity of the poem in places is a sign of Auden’s doubts about the argument he is making, as if willed rhetoric could override cognitive dissonance and doubt.18 The shifts in the use of the first-person plural are particularly symptomatic of this problem.
“The chimneys are smoking” begins with the absence of a lover and a self-distancing tone: “my magnet, my pomp, my beauty . . . / To-day is parted from me / And I stand on our world alone.” The exceptional quality of the beloved and their brief “embrace” and consequent impact of the loss is the first impression—sea, Europe, hometown, the imperatives of nature and of politics are weaker than the compass of feeling ordered around this magnet of love. But it is the disorder of the outer world that seems to have brought about the romantic rupture. The purpose of the poem is not now, after “our hour of unity,” forever to “stand alone,” but instead to stand together with others, to reconnect with larger groups, distant and proximate—from the human to the local community. Love is referred to a broader social struggle. The public duty will take more than the words of the “communist” (later changed to “political”) orator to fulfill. The orator arrives “like a sea god” at the poem’s opening, but the speaker must work out a new perspective for himself. “I stand on our world alone” hovers between two meanings of “our,” one private, one public. The “we” of the third stanza is punningly mathematical in its idea of redistribution, referring to the fragmented and unstable society in a “contest . . . for the carried thing / Divided in secret among us, a portion to each.” But the poem then narrows back to a limited first-person plural, first as object, “that power that gave us our lives,” then as subject, “we found when we met,” remembering the lovers’ embrace that puts the jigsaw together: “Out of the complex to be reassembled / Pieces that fit.” This past moment of unity is returned to a natural law of gaps and separations, figured in the landscape. But a principle of universality keeps them united in a shared human condition; the “we” has shifted again, absorbing the unique, intimate pair into the general human condition:
We ride a turning globe, we stand on a star;
It has thrust us together; it is stronger than we.
In it our separate sorrows are a single hope . . . (EA 118)
In “dreams” they sustain “linked arms” (not an “embrace” that creates an exclusive private world of “we,” as lovers, but a show of brotherly solidarity). The “we” here is becoming inclusive, turning vaguely toward an image of social unity: “These millions in whom already the wish to be one/ . . . is stealthily moving.” A local political alliance has become a cause. Auden keeps pressing out the private, broken “we” into a new “dance” of social roles and relations among “the boatmen, virgins, camera-men and us.” This utopian image of a private love enveloped in a universal love remains a remote ideal at best. The “we” of love’s fulfilling moments does not endure by dissolving into the “sundering streams” between nature and mass humanity. Nor does the poem’s embrace of fellow man in mutual subjection to nature’s changes resolve the tension between private desire and public good.
Auden’s conflicted allegiances to these two forms of “we” continue. He does not persist in his fantasy of “The chimneys are smoking” that brotherly love or class alliances can provide an alternative to inevitably fracturing interpersonal connection. Humanity, “the millions . . . [that has] the wish to be one,” an agglomerating mass that has been “thrust . . . up together,” cannot compensate for the failure of the erotic life any more than the erotic life can successfully turn its back on “the millions.”
The style of “The chimneys are smoking” carries over from Poems. By contrast, Auden’s love poetry in the mid-1930s clarifies syntax and relies less on the ambiguity of the early poetry’s peculiar language to create its erotic unease and anxious movement between personal and public concerns. However, the situation of the “we” is no less fraught. In many of these poems a tension arises between the poet as impassioned lover and the poet as wise spectator. His stance as both erotic partner and worldly advisor has many literary antecedents and may also reflect Auden’s desire for much younger men. Auden’s poems sometimes suggest the Platonic model of pederasty in which the relationship between the erastes (the older male lover) and the eromenes (younger male lover) is both erotic and educational. But the effect of the didactic turn is often to expand or make ambiguous the audience for the poem. Here, wisdom reaches beyond the intimate scene toward the reader as audience. The most extreme case of this complexity of audience is “Lullaby,” notably lacking in the first-person plural, where the addressee is sleeping and thus clearly not the primary audience for the poem, which quickly turns general and philosophical. The love sonnets of 1933 present the allegorical struggles of the Petrarchan tradition in which “Love” becomes a force outside individual will, a magnetism but not a mutuality, an allegorical third party, “He,” rather than “us,” arising between two people. In these sonnets “Love” seems to be the chief troublemaker: “He means to do no mischief but he would” (EA 146). The desiring poet is at odds with the wise spectator who has a sober understanding of this force and speaks not simply of the beloved but of a broadly humanistic “we” that includes all men. Instead of presenting the struggle between reason and passion as his own, he presents it as a pedagogical exhibit, his erotic purpose transformed into a didactic one. Reciprocity is explicitly forestalled in the address to a sleeping beloved though the push-pull of desire, and prohibition heightens erotic feeling: “Turn not towards me lest I turn to you” (EA 146). With the chiasm (a favored figure in love poetry of all eras) in these opening lines from the beseeching lover, Auden enters the closed loop of denial and yearning. Yet as the poem continues, the scene of the address figures their inequality, and the wise spectator takes over: “Love knows he argues with himself in vain.” In the initial fantasy that “the stars watch us,” “us” may be dramatically specific to the lovers, but the pronoun becomes impersonal and aphoristic in the sestet (“how easily may we do good / To those we have no wish to see again”). The speaker has taken the impersonal position of the stars even as he acknowledges their disinterest. He knows “Love”[’s] ways, making his assertions more proleptic than dramatic or in the moment. These pronoun shifts map Auden’s divided role as desiring lover (on the side of eros) and sober teacher (reflecting on moral action). In other poems, tension and resistance arise to dramatize the meditation. This older and wiser lover knows the idealizing tendencies of lovers and the truth of the world that belies their vows. In “Turn not towards me lest I turn to you,” the basis of their mutuality and erotic union seems to be a dangerous inclination to experience love as autonomous and forgetful of the needs of the world (“love’s preposterous guarantee . . . that there are no poor”). He brings the suffering social world into the bedroom, undermining the prerogatives of personal desire. The prolepsis opens and closes the sonnet, and the octave piles on negations and cancellations, keeping the social world before them rather than at bay. It is surprising to find a volta in “Yes,” but it’s the “yes” of unsettling suspension and denial rather than consummation. The volta seems to stand in for dialogue: “Yes, sleep.” The speaker cannot, torn as he is between passion and wisdom.
Many other love poems from the thirties are narratives of disappointment in which the fragmentation of the public world infects the lovers’ union. In “Fleeing the short-haired mad executives” (EA 149), Auden finally uses a “we” that refers to erotic relation and describes a mutual flight from the external public life. But the relationship is again unconsummated, at least in an emotional sense: “the rich interior still / Unknown.” In “Dear, though the night is gone” (EA 161), the metaphor of love as a room continues, but it is now an exposed public space. The strong opening line suggests an aubade in sustained union, but the rest of the poem brings back a different night than the fulfilling one we expect him to describe. Paradoxically, it was night that separated them, not day, a night of troubled dreams in which all lovers’ beds collect in the unromantic space of a “room / Cavernous, lofty as / A railway terminus,” that is, a hollow public space of departures. Auden again shows his skill in imagining human relationships in spatial terms (“squares and oblongs”), finding geometry to match the grammar of love. Later Auden will look for circles, but here love is all angles. The pronoun “we” arises within a “far corner” of this “gloom” but offers no hiding place. In an aubade one expects an intimate space interrupted by a noisy world, but here the priorities are inverted. The emphasized erotic “we” of the second stanza (“our whisper,” “we kissed”) arises not within a bower but within a wider crowd of damaged lovers, a world that is “hostile.” “Arms round each other’s neck” suggests embrace but also hints at a violence infecting their union. Inevitably, then, the “we” of the middle stanza comes apart, leaving I and You again on separate lines. It’s hard to tell where the dream ends. The poem does not close off the dream but lets it haunt the waking so that “dream” and “wish” are at odds. The final stanza creates a displacement; where reciprocal love (confession and submission) is wanted we get a skewed relation: “you . . . confessed another love,” and “I, submissive, felt / Unwanted.” Spatial boundaries of dream and waking, private and public, are confused. The slant rhymes and ending question—that nearly forgets its beginning—reinforce the unease. The story of the erotic “we” in these love poems of the early thirties is that of a common fate, an “ordinary swoon” subject to “human love,” which tends toward hollow romantic idealism, lies, and infidelities.
Auden’s suspicions about erotic “ease” become particularly clear in “Easily, my dear,” soon after called “A Bride in the 30’s” (CP 128–30). The sexual term “lucky,” which Auden would use unironically five years later in “Warm are the still and lucky miles,” here sets lovers’ luck darkly against the “unlucky” landscape both rural and urban, crushed under the rising threat of fascism. “A Bride in the 30’s” lays a corrective groundwork for the epithalamia of the war years, in which erotic life forms a foundation for social amelioration, or at least social hope. Auden addresses a beloved, giving drama and immediacy to the utterance, but the poem is pedagogical rather than amorous as it moves out from the intimate “we” to a broader alarm over fascism’s “terrifying mottoes” that are seizing the world’s attention.
“Easily” is repeated three times in the first lines of the poem, a sure sign that the ease won’t be sustained. Auden already questions the “ease” of erotic and poetic connection by using the adverbial form of the word. There is something facile and complacent about lovers’ contentment. Newly joined lovers think they are healthy and sealed off from the world, though the poem will go on, through the motif of a photograph album, to expose their proximity to mounting public evils. The camera eye widens love’s narrow perspective; the “grouped invalids,” and the “single assassins” who manipulate them, though overlooked in the honeymoon, peer out from the retrospective album pictures. The first-person plural enters the poem most explicitly under the burden of this awakening, where the incongruous “our first meeting” ends a catalog of troubling public images—“sterile farms,” “the policed unlucky cities.” Public orators on both sides—Hitler, Mussolini, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Van der Lubbe—distort the language of love with their propaganda and characterize the broader environment of hatred and violent order in which personal love arises. Rather than simply consolidate love’s private haven, the speaker becomes didactic: love must be marshaled to a new purpose by a new moral imperative. “A Bride in the 30’s” is a carpe diem poem urging “love, except at our proposal, / will do no trick at his disposal.” “Trick” suggests sexual availability, but here directed, as with the trickster, toward social transformation. Love must give up “ease” since there is work to do: love, “through our private stuff must work / His public spirit.” Auden turns away from the honeymoon memories and retrospective witness, addressed to the beloved, and offers future-oriented imperatives. “The heart,” generalized and separated now from the erotic hopes of the lovers, “repeats” an imperative, turning a “we” to imperative “you” that includes both the speaker and the beloved, and indeed seems to hail to the wider community. By yoking the interpersonal (the colloquial phrase “private stuff” diminishing and concealing love’s drives) to the more formal “public spirit” that all can approve, Auden seeks a way to turn the erotic toward the communal, without a naïve conflation of the two.
The added title for “Easily, my dear,” “A Bride in the 30’s,” identifies the photograph album as a honeymoon souvenir. Through marriage, the couple is already entering the civil sphere. This is something new in Auden’s poetry and marks the relation of erotic love to social love as a continuum rather than a conflict or alternative. In “Easily, my dear,” this continuum is discovered rather than assumed from the beginning. Love is no longer in or of the shadows, nor does it dwell apart, in a space outside history and strife. It takes strength from community and gives back its peace as a resource for hope and survival in historical crisis. Marriage is one place where private stuff meets public spirit and submits the interpersonal relationship to the public domain.
The Vow as Speech Act and Poetic Figure
The love poetry I have discussed so far is concerned with the past and the present. Where it imagines the future, it tends to be directed away from personal attachment to social hope. But vows are inherently future-directed; they establish potentiality as obligation, and Auden associates them with poetry. “Words are for those with promises to keep” (SP 203). As performatives, vows (J.L.Austin’s chief example) are not true or false. Promises create bonds rather than acknowledge them. One may stand alone in love, but a promise made out of love, when the speaker is sincere and the hearer is receptive, makes a bond between people even if the vow is not reciprocated. Auden’s long-term interest in vows is clear from his quotation of Hannah Arendt in his essay “Brothers & Others”: “The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future, is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises. Both faculties depend upon plurality, on the presence and acting of others, for no man can forgive himself and no one can be bound by a promise made only to himself” (DH 218).19 Promises introduce a principle of coherence into an otherwise uncertain future. Promises also require witnesses, listeners, even if the only listeners are the speakers themselves. In this sense vows are gestures toward community. For Auden, a healthy human plurality involves a network of bonds, and marriage is the figure of their formation.
Auden’s wartime marriage poems, “Epithalamion” (1939) for Borgese and Mann, and “In Sickness and in Health” (1940), emphasize the social and political significance of personal vows. The first is an occasional and perhaps commissioned poem, written for friends; the second, though unspecified as to gender, was motivated by the poet’s commitment to Kallman, which he saw as a marriage. In both poems Auden draws from his own sense that the “we” formed in interpersonal commitment can be a foundation for social hope, thus swerving from earlier models of interpersonal strain or sacrifice of the private life to the public life. Auden’s charge to love, that it not only acknowledge but also redeem the public world, produces some of his most inflated rhetoric, if also some of his most interesting layering of the plural first person.
Auden had written an epithalamium for his friend Cecil Day-Lewis in 1928,20 but its tone and tenor serve as a contrast to his wartime marriage poems in that he still views love as a suspension of social concerns, even a turning away. From his early days in poetry Auden had written occasional verse, recruited by friends to offer epideictic toasts. Presumably this poem was read at Day-Lewis’s wedding so that the community it gathers is a literal presence, not just an imagined one, its “we” an assembled group. He did not include this “Epithalamium” in any of his books, though he retained the phrase “taller to-day” as the first words of another early poem. “Epithalamium”—its title identifying with a long English tradition—first appeared in print in a memoir by Day-Lewis’s son Sean Day-Lewis, Cecil Day-Lewis: An English Literary Life (1980). This early marriage poem is a kind of proletarian pastoral, with stanzas of eight lines, some rhymed and some uncoupled, hinting throughout at Spenserian conventions. While it may not be worth preserving as part of an Auden canon, it provides an interesting prelude to his later work in the genre, especially in its group orientation. The poet stands as a presiding witness and participant in the communal ceremony. The poem acknowledges the forms “unfamiliar” to those gathered, a group of “all of us who know” and sympathize with “workers” and “victims” of social oppression. Auden rhetorically gathers the community and serves as the agent of love’s public spirit, the catalyst of its communal work. He speaks for the group in first-person plural, representing a politically minded community conscious of the labor to be done beyond the nuptial scene. He addresses the couple, “we speak to you,” first pausing to remind the lovers of the troubled world beyond, asking them “now” to “stand . . . still” and survey it “like the sparrowhawk.” The poet dispels the threat of fragmentation in love, then releases the pair from that trouble into the sensuous, pastoral now of their union. In this poem, marriage, though it gathers community, is not a foundation of social justice but a suspension of its responsibilities, except to “be quick” and engender a future. Auden’s other early excursion into wedding verse is “Prothalamion,” with six-line stanzas in couplets and toasting refrain, which he also removed from his canon. This is one of several marriage masques in Auden’s poetry. Originally a bawdy parody following the vicar’s sermon in The Dog Beneath the Skin, the poem appears in his Collected Shorter Poems very differently, without the demagogue’s voice, as a celebration of premarital carnival spirit, a tribute to tolerance under the sign of permissiveness. But neither of these exercises, written between the wars, anticipates the somewhat grim wartime wedding poems he would write, when he was offering vows of his own.
Auden’s relationship with Chester Kallman changed his attitude toward love and consequently the kind of poetry he wrote about love. That difficult relationship became the touchstone of his ethical vision. The marriage poem for Day-Lewis saw that union as a pause from leftist political action, which was the real center of belonging and purpose. But having abandoned by 1940 any sense that the poet has an activist role to play, Auden turns to interpersonal commitment and formal vows as a foundation and example for human community. Marriage offered a challenge to the nihilism and destruction prevailing in the public world. Love is now less a selfish or merely personal indulgence, a distraction from the work of social change, than a civil intervention. Auden’s reflections on his emotional ties to Kallman provide an occasion to develop an idea of community already forming in “Out on the Lawn.” In this light, promises made to a lover, whether kept or broken, are never a strictly personal matter; their force is not limited or bound to individual constancy. Like art, marriage displays a benign order and posits a future for it.
Auden writes these marriage poems at a time when he is also acknowledging the unknown, both in the world of events and in the mind of the beloved. “Narcissus disbelieves in the unknown” (CP 310), he writes in “Alone” (1940), not only because he thinks he knows everything, but also because he is only interested in himself. To turn to the other is by definition to turn to the unknown. Auden testifies to this again and again, in “If I Could Tell You,” “Leap Before You Look,” and other love poems of that year. He creates counterpoint as he sets his strict, predictable lyric forms against the acknowledgment of existential uncertainty and of the ultimate mystery of the other. The paradoxes of recognized difference and desire for union close “Alone”: “every lover has a wish to make / Some other kind of otherness his own” (CP 311). Love is the interplay of desire for possession and acceptance of the other as a distinct subject. As he had learned from Marianne Moore, marriage is a paradox and an “enterprise,” not a completed single event.
Central in the application of eros to the work of ethical community is the vow; it is the foundation of Auden’s new vision of love and a swerve from earlier cynicism about human promises. Vows made freely in the knowledge of human frailty and in the face of historical ruin bespeak an existential leap of faith. Vows posit a future and affirm there is another way than destruction. In his early relationship to Kallman, Auden understood the vow as an exchange, but Kallman’s infidelity would make him see the vow more in terms later described by Emanuel Levinas: responsibility to the Other as a one-directional movement from an I to a You.21 The “we” created by a vow is not so much a reciprocal voicing of commitment as a surrendering of selfish will to an ethical bond, a bond of obligation rather than requital. A vow requires the recognition of another’s subjective being and the receptive hearing of that other.
Auden’s interest in vows long predates these marriage poems, and his ideas about vows developed gradually. Vows expand the self but can also be inflationary: “I am your vow,” proclaims the disembodied conscience of “Spain” (SP 56). Private vows between lovers are mostly broken. Indeed, Auden’s early poetry seems skeptical about all vows, focusing more on their breaking than on their making. In “A Bride in the 30’s,” Auden associates vows with propaganda in explicit parallel to romantic courtship (“Hitler and Mussolini in their wooing poses,” CP 129). Other references to the vow bring up thoughtless youth’s glib idealism (“Climbing with you was easy as a vow,” EA 149), cynical seduction (“I’ll love you till the ocean / Is folded and hung up to dry,” SP 66), naïve commitment to authority (“the bars of love are so strong, their conspiracies / Weak like the vows of drunkards,” EA 216), fallible resolution (“I will be true to my wife,” SP 97), or weakness of resolve in the face of external threat (“Were the vows you swore me deceiving, deceiving? / No, I promised to love you, dear / But I must be leaving,” SP 28). In the world of the early poems, humans seldom realize their vows. But for later Auden this fact of human lapse does not cancel the ethical and social importance of the vow. In the wedding poem Auden redeems the vow as a speech act. The “now” of the vow (importantly different from the “now” of erotic high noon in its relation to others) participates in ritual time, and its value transcends the inevitable betrayals of historical time. The marriage vow is a present-tense civil and spiritual act with meaning beyond the moment of swearing and the local and individual commitment it pronounces, and even beyond its test of fidelity. In the wedding poems the vow often modulates into performative modes such as prayer and benediction, further propelling the imagination toward the future. In the turn from breaking to making vows, Auden recenters his ethical vision. Even when honored in the breach, vows made freely make something happen. They have an illocutionary and even a perlocutionary force that reverberates into the life of the community. The word “lie” (punning or not) comes up often in Auden’s writing, and poems might make us more aware of lies. But updating Sidney, Auden said a poem, unlike a historical person, “cannot lie,” and so it is with the performance of vows, in poems, and in wedding ceremonies where “meaning and being are identical” (DH 68). An insincere vow is not a vow; a broken vow does not negate the meaning of the vow.
Wedding vows, like marriage itself, traditionally direct erotic energy that might be socially antagonistic into socially productive union. But writing at the beginning of World War II, Auden is especially aware of the breakdown of community and the antagonisms going on within and between nations. Marriage has a symbolic function for a world in crisis; it ritualizes a counterspace of love and peace. It models an amenable society even as an ominous reality lies all about. It gathers and orders humanity against the evidence of conflict and fragmentation. Auden at one time said that homosexuality was a narcissistic shortcut to sociality. But the marriage poems perhaps helped him place his relation to Kallman in a broader community of committed lovers. As such, he plays an ambiguous role in these poems, as someone both administering and, implicitly or explicitly, taking a vow.
Auden’s “Epithalamion: For Giuseppe Antonio Borgese and Elisabeth Mann (Nov. 23, 1939),” written just two months after Britain declared war on Germany, attempts to see marriage as a foundational symbol of international peace.22 This is not at all surprising. Likely, most wedding ceremonies in these months made the civil union a counterpoint to international strife, especially when the unions involved Europeans. In this case the Borgese/Mann union defies the antagonism of the “hostile kingdoms” (hostile to the Allies, that is) Italy and Germany. While Mussolini and Hitler spread hatred and violence, this marital union is a “seed” of “human unity,” both figuratively and prospectively in the procreative authority of marriage. In performing their promises to each other the couple are “vowing to redeem the state.” The line is awkward, but not unsubtle, suggesting how private commitments can create public good rather than deferring it.
There is no interpersonal address in the Borgese/Mann “Epithalamion.” Auden is the presiding counselor, the wise spectator, not the lover. He has exchanged the intimacy of love poetry for a ceremonial platform. The poem turns first to dead artists and then, as the wise spectator, to “every girl and boy.” Though the catalog of visual, literary, and musical artists in the second part of the poem might be considered relevant to a literary union like this one (Borgese was a writer and journalist, Mann the daughter of Thomas Mann), these figures shift our attention away from, rather than simply extending, the occasion of the marital union. In this wider community of artists and youth, Auden can be a full participant, not just a wedding guest or agent for a future state. “Kindly [according to nature, with goodwill] to each other turn,” he instructs, administering the vows and conscious of the turns of inclusion and exclusion between the couple and the community characteristic of the genre of the epithalamium. But the poem does not go with them into an intimate space of love; the “we” remains public and general. Auden likely recognized its weaknesses since he chose not to include it in any collections after Another Time. As a poem to be read on the occasion of the marriage but written with a broader didactic purpose in mind, it has an awkwardly layered sense of audience and performance. One wonders what the newlyweds felt about having their celebration turned into a map of “modern policy.” In shifting in the second half to the world of art from the world of the state, Auden makes a place for himself in the work of social correction, but “the heaven of the Great,” the Parnassus of immortal artists, seems a limited basis for prayers and praises that might “redeem the state,” or so Auden would have it. The congregation now gathered seems less a wedding group than an audience for an opera, as German and Italian artists become the real family of Mann and Borgese, and as Hölderlin, Wagner, Dante, Leonardo arrive, invited as the unacknowledged legislators of the world to displace Hitler and Mussolini. Here is where Auden focuses his first-person plural: “Looking down upon us all” from their immortal station, these greats convene a “we” less of local community or romantic love than of audience and abstract humanity to which their monumental works are addressed. The performative aspect of vows degrades into speechmaking and didacticism, into what Auden would soon condemn: “glittering generalities” (SP 120). His next epithalamium, “In Sickness and in Health” (SP 120–23), continues to present the vow as a pattern of love in a world subdued by hate. But perhaps since the proposed vow is his as speaker, the lovers retain their erotic being for each other rather than fulfilling a duty on behalf of the state. By affirming the commitment to “one dear” in the context of a performance of vows, Auden presents community not as a collective entity, a faceless, narcissistic “we” or a vague generational humanity, but as a vital network of affiliations and individual bonds.
“In Sickness and in Health” is, of course, not a real vow. It is a poem, what John R. Searle would call a “parasitic form of communication.”23 Thus in this poem, more than in previous epithalamia, the nuptial vow is connected to the work of art. In imitating a speech act, in creating a fictional ceremony, the poem not only explores the meaning of a vow but also engages the reader as a distant participant or witness, extending the force of the vow and the outline of its “arbitrary circle” beyond the unique circle of love and its witnesses, beyond the particular speaker and local hearer. The poem might be said to represent the possibility of vows and the potential community shaped by sincere promises. And the poem offers this possibility against the “noise” of the “terrifying mottoes” that teach the public a life-denying fear and caution. Unlike a vow, which imagines a future, a motto is static, an axiom that can descend to the level of a slogan; more threat than commitment. When a motto takes the imperative form it is addressed to everyone and no one; it is not a fundamentally ethical gesture. “In Sickness and in Health” is especially conscious of its speech acts and draws attention to them not only in the rhetorical modes it explores but also in its imagery and themes. The opening stanzas show Auden in his full poetic powers, with tightly woven metaphors and allusions, alliterative and assonantal musicality, elegant stanzas—all in counterpoint to the entropic and destructive world the poem describes. Art, like the marriage vow, is an “arbitrary circle” cut out of chaos and noise, and a raid on the “inarticulate.” Though the poem does not describe a public ceremony, it becomes its own occasion, making the reader as well as Love witness to the vow.
The opening word establishes the poem as an address to a specific beloved, “Dear,” and initiates a dramatic bond. Auden had begun an earlier love poem with “Dear” (“Dear though the night is gone”) in an urgent and anxious telling of a dream of betrayal and abandonment. This “Dear” dispels that earlier darkness and turns instead toward commitment and faith, toward the utterance of a vow. But this drive must make its way through dramatically imagined obstacles external and internal. In particular, the poem performs the struggle to protect the vow from a world not only of “glittering generalities” but of “noise,” “shuffle,” “roar,” “howling,” and “loud foreign language.” Auden often associated articulate language with man’s moral distinction, especially his ability to make commitments to others. “Words are for those with promises to keep” (SP 203).
The traditional epithalamium delays the nuptial union in a rhythm of exclusions and inclusions, which gives culminating force to the vow. Threatened or endangered love sets up a drama of idealism. Auden’s poem follows this convention; here the vow is repeatedly put off with warnings and conditions. In stanza 2 he writes (whether addressing himself or the beloved is unclear): “O, promise nothing, nothing, till you know” (later Auden changed “O” to “No,” perhaps to emphasize the resistance or to nullify the romantic tonality; and such changes make clear how King Lear haunts this poem of vows and promises, as does Othello). He is still warding off dangers in stanza 4: “Let none say / I Love until aware.” But this second exclusion is also an inclusion since the warning is directed impersonally, to anyone. At the end of the poem the speaker confirms that a vow is taking place, a “round O of faithfulness we swear.” But the steps for performing a vow organize the poem throughout.
Though modeled to some extent on Spenser’s “Epithalamium,” this is not Spenser’s pastoral world of echoing song, at least until the echoic effects of “rejoice” are sounded in its second half. And even then the rejoicing seems rather dour. Here the echoes suggest other, more troubling literary allusions, all admitting impediments to love. Dangers from abroad reverberate against love’s hushed “benevolence of fingering lips.” What the lovers can “distinctly hear” is the violence of contemporary history, a darker version of Marvell’s “wingèd chariot” of Time. Auden evokes Petrarchan tradition with the image of the world mirrored in the “love lorn eyes,” but the mirror is “warped” and the eloquence undercut with the terse account of what those eyes reflect, a Marvellian displacement: “A land of condors, sick cattle, and dead flies.” Shakespeare echoes throughout the poem as well. The “Black Dog” may refer to fascist thugs, but it also reminds us of Iago’s abusive language at the beginning of Othello, language aimed at obstructing a marriage. Stanza 2 calls up King Lear (a story of lies, false promises, and silence) with its double “nothing, nothing,” especially in the context of the “round O’s” and redundant “empty nought” arising further on to evoke and threaten the ties of love. Stanza 4’s “O let none say I Love until aware” alludes to Shakespeare’s sonnet 116, which will not “admit impediments” but certainly acknowledges them. The vow emerges stronger rhetorically for all it must resist. It performs hyperbolically, naming impediments in order to surmount them, and later even calling for temptation to test its strength.
Auden adopts a modern version of hyperbole from Kierkegaard: “the Absurd” is the illogical voice of faith essential to the vow. Human “love” is prompted and backed by a spiritual imperative that presides in this union. But does the speaker in “In Sickness and in Health” perform the vow, receive the vow, or administer the vow? Likely all of these roles are relevant since the “we” in this poem is multilayered and elastic. The vow is a line of defense, not a pastoral interlude as in the poem for Day-Lewis. It requires both realism and absurd faith. The lovers must “distinctly hear” the horrible noise of the world; at the same time they must remain deaf to its “language of revolt,” which threatens love’s drive toward union. But who are “we” in “we are the deaf”? The lovers take their place with others who would say “I Love” against the negations of the brutal and faithless world.
If noise is one dominant metaphor challenging the vow, “sickness” is another, and not only in the title’s evocation of Christian vows. Lovers join most often when they are in robust health, but disease and entropy surround them in the first part of “In Sickness and in Health” in the “sick cattle,” the “thermal wastes,” the “contagious” negativity, and its “code of famine.” Not only do these forces undo love’s order, they “degrade” it, replacing it with tyranny’s destructive codes. Against this dis-ease a great effort is required to “nurse” humanity, to protect “one ruining [that is, mortal, as well as adored] speck” in the beloved’s form. Thus Auden makes “Love” not only a private gratification but also a healing counterforce to social sickness even as the vow speaks over the “terrifying mottoes” and hostile noise of the world. And this makes the lovers’ commitment a civil amelioration, a way of healing the world without displacing their erotic intimacy with public service. Love does its social work in “nocturnal and mysterious” ways. In creating “the arbitrary circle of a vow” (however oblong in practice), the lovers do not exclude the world but instead make a pattern of their love.
The vow as speech act allows Auden to reconcile a passionate assertion of individual feeling to the needs of a larger community. In this it contrasts with fascism, which leaps upon the “individual back” and devours the private life. But Auden moves away in stanza 2 from the urgent address to a particular “Dear.” In order to shift from the historical world that threatens “Love’s imagination” to the sacred perspective that sanctifies the vow, he begins to depersonalize the poem. “Dear” is replaced with “dear heart,” which may come from Thomas Wyatt (“Dear heart, how like you this?”), hinting at love’s “continual change” (“They Flee from Me”). “Dear heart” may also suggest the possibility that Auden, like many a Petrarchan lover, is addressing himself, his own heart, or at least moving inward in meditation and then outward to a wider audience. The poem becomes increasingly didactic in its tonalities, as philosophical statement and mythic paradigm overtake the emotionally engaged, dramatic utterance of the first four stanzas. The performance of the vow recedes into explanation and illustration in stanza 5, focusing on failures of the past rather than newly formed or potential union. This didactic mode has its own mimetic eloquence, where Auden registers the state of Tristan and Isolde, the “two waterfalls” of romantic (but not dialogical) lovers, in the exalted, echoic effects of the line. Don Juan, “haunting the urinals,” represents the opposite extreme of the same narcissistic pattern, a desolate figure of unhealthy love; the suddenly debased rhetoric and imagery, after the exalted formality the poem has established, reflects the degraded condition of his erotic drive. The collective narcissism that seems to have overtaken the world also perverts ardor as “the lovers of themselves collect” in the faceless fascist order. Auden defends against these fates as he anticipates the lovers’ vows.
When Auden returns to a direct address to his “Beloved” in stanza 8, he brings the reader back out of impersonal reflection to the active performance of a vow that the poem imitates. But in addressing his “dear,” Auden identifies the lovers as typically human, not exceptional. “We are always in the wrong.” How might such imperfect voices offer a pattern of health to a sick society? The world’s malice that was surveyed in stanzas 1–7 is now “our malice,” at least potentially. (Auden in the 1940s seldom foregoes an opportunity to remind the reader of original sin.) This acknowledgment concludes the “passionate negation” that has mounted to make this a very gloomy wedding ceremony. And it’s hard to see how such “private stuff,” so burdened with guilt, can have much “public spirit.”
At this impasse the poem shifts ground, calling on its listeners to “rejoice” after all the warnings and delays. But the rejoicing must find some other basis for hope than the erotic lovers, who are not exceptional but flawed humans. It is time to focus on the possible, backed by spiritual actuality, rather than the actual lives of lovers and poets who are “always in the wrong.” Grace is required, and a dialogical relation outside the scope of human interaction. The focus of address shifts away from the voice of the individual lover to his love, and a disembodied “love” speaks out, the difference marked in italics in stanza 9. The poet will later “pray” to this presence, but first the voice “preempts” the poet and replaces his negative and “makeshift” thoughts with rhetorical questions that assert a greater creative power underwriting the circle of the vow along with art’s own arbitrary circle. The italicized stanza 9 inverts the opening stanzas of the poem, the “nothing, nothing” of imminent ruin belied by a fiat lux, a world made out of nothing. This stanza redirects the energy of the poem toward rejoicing and allows the poet to refocus his attentions from fear to love, and from man’s inherent malice to a particular devotion to “one dear face.”
The disembodied voice behind the italicized words of stanza 9 is that of “Love.” Auden is explicit in this deferral and shift in reference, as the lover returns to address his dear: “Rejoice, dear love, in Love’s peremptory word.” Auden’s repetition here equivocates as to the source and authority of human feeling, suggesting, as Shakespeare does in sonnet 116, that a metaphysical principle, not an external agent, guides errant human desire. Auden clearly wants to blend eros and agape here.24 It is not simply that unsteady human love needs the higher blessing as a support and guide. Love’s “peremptory word” suggests that the capacity to love has an incarnative quality, though its divine source is unknowable and even tautological; the very will to promise is provoked by grace within us, preempting our doubting, isolating narcissism. Auden’s “now” in this poem connects historical time with ritual time, but the movement is not only vertical. Since the poem begins with a wide perspective on the crisis in Europe, the “circle” of the vow can be understood horizontally, not only to exclude the disease of modern history but also to extend to a peaceful future community. By layering local time and space with broader references (a common feature of epithalamia), Auden conditions the meaning of “we” in the poem. To whom is the command given to “Describe round our chaotic malice now, / The arbitrary circle of a vow”? Where is the perimeter of this circle? Is Auden addressing “dear love” or “Love” here? And is “Love” the fusion of You and I, an intervening grace, a third thing made by the loving connection, or all of these? Auden pulls many entities together in “All chance, all love, all logic, you and I, / Exist by grace of the Absurd.” He is scrutinizing the meaning of “you and I” throughout. “And” is a sign of both distinction and union. It can be read as a conjunction that follows from the three “all’s”, so that the phrase “you and I” is equivalent to “all peoples” or as a conjunction that binds “you” and “I” into a singular you-and-I, which, as a loving unit, is separated from everyone and everything else, including “you” and “I” as distinct individuals.
As we have seen, “In Sickness and in Health” has both a narrative and a propositional aspect and modulates between an exclusive (personal) and inclusive (impersonal) use of the first-person plural as it works through intimate and didactic forms of address, which come together toward the end of the poem. As with Spenser’s epithalamium, this marriage poem has worked its way through a ceremony (his own nuptials), using the devices of prospect and prolepsis to give layered space and time to the moment. As in a Renaissance epithalamium, the poem has repeatedly warded off what might threaten the union. It gathers and excludes in order to forge a harmonious community in which the marriage can succeed. Auden hints at consummation toward the end of the poem as he directs his lover to “lay your solitude beside my own.” Auden structures the prayer, which covers the last four stanzas, in a sequence of “lest’s” that ward off evil. Though the body is the focus, the rhetoric of prayer is marked in the elevated “Thy,” addressed not to the beloved but to a spiritual, perhaps divine presence. Hence in the line “this round O of faithfulness we swear” the poem insists on the first-person plural, which is both specific to the newly united lovers and general to all who believe with them in the future that promises affirm. The pronoun arises insistently now, “we . . . lovers” committing themselves before “all.”
Kallman’s infidelity would soon confirm that “solitude” even in love, though Auden considered himself married for the rest of his life. The rededication of “In Sickness and Health” to Maurice and Gwen Mandelbaum in 1942 makes this in a way a poem of remarriage. Remarriage, as Stanley Cavell imagines it, puts aside romantic idealism and works from acknowledgment of the limits, not only of one’s personal capacities but also of one’s ability to know the mind of the beloved. For Auden this remarriage would involve a shift from desire for possession to recognition of the other. As Kallman left “to find his own life,”25 Auden came to understand the place of “I” in love’s work: “The singular is not Love’s enemy; / Love’s possibilities of realisation / Require an Otherness that can say I” (CP 384). Ultimately one does not marry “Love” (the site where “we” arises) but an individual beloved. The beloved is a very different kind of unknown from an abstract cipher like “Love,” or even from the “nocturnal and mysterious” mood of sex. Perhaps this is also why Auden changed the ending to “In Sickness and in Health.” In keeping with other late changes, his personal life is removed and he presents himself as Everyman, his “voluntary way” becoming an “ordinary way.”
“In Sickness and in Health” is certainly dramatic, in the way of a good epithalamium. It works through gestures of warding off threats and bringing in community to define and protect the circle of love. And the many vocatives underscore the sense of action in the poem, which is gathering and excluding, slowing down narrative and pointing to the future, giving a sense of the now but locating it in multiple localities and temporalities. The poem’s Shakespearean noughts fend off what they invoke, affirm with skepticism, like the best kind of faith. We accept the vocatives and hyperboles because, as in Shakespeare, the high ritual of the union calls for them, and the ideals describe Love without idealizing individual lovers. And yet the didactic elements of the poem overwhelm this dramatic ceremony. Especially as the poem turns to prayer and the lovers become instruments of the abstract work of Love, it is hard to believe in the presence of the beloved or the vitality of the vow. The future the poem imagines seems impersonal. The poems Auden would write immediately after “In Sickness and in Health” turn again from the general crisis to address the beloved with the knowledge of their share in its hazards. The unknown as a condition of love is better captured in a later poem of 1940, “Leap Before you Look,” in which ambiguities and qualifications abound within the vow. The poet acknowledges “A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep / Sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear: / Although I love you, you will have to leap; / Our dream of safety has to disappear.”26
Auden would revisit the subject of marriage vows just two years later in the lyrics he assigned to Ferdinand and Miranda in The Sea and the Mirror.27 He returns to the themes and many of the structural elements of “In Sickness and in Health.” Again, love’s promise is “immured” within a world of strife, and the lovers are deaf to the foreign language of revolt. But the dramatic form of the sequence and the innocent personae of the lovers allow Auden to bracket out, for the lovers’ lyrics, all the negating and skeptical voices of their elders. The poem can enter more fully into the lyric “now” of young lovers making their vows, because the perspective is theirs, and the qualifications to their idealism are part of the wider dramatic framework rather than registered from within. Auden was reading C. S. Lewis’s The Allegory of Love in 1941–42, and he included it on his syllabus at the University of Michigan. Ferdinand and Miranda may be read as allegorical figures in this light.
Ferdinand’s lyric address begins with the concept of the Other within marriage.28 Auden plays with the love lyric’s grammar and number to enhance the paradoxes common in the tradition. “You” are not only “unique” but also “secret,” a “Dear Other[ness]” “retained” and complementary to the speaking “I.” The language shifts in the second quatrain toward “me” and “I,” but only to conclude the octave with a union: “two wonders as one vow / Pre-empting all, here, there, for ever, long ago.” Here, the preemption comes not from a supernatural force but from the unit established in the vow itself. When Auden takes on the voice of Ferdinand, “You” and “I” are “unique” but not solitary. No external preemptive word is required. The vow itself is the voice of Love that “pre-empts” history and locates the lovers in their timeless ideal. Here, Auden imagines the reciprocity in the first-person plural. The sonnet closes in a doubling language of binding relation, mixing subject and object positions, in which the “we” of love is both the larger community and the beloveds: “Pleading with ours for us, another tenderness / That neither without either could or would possess.” “Ours” might simply be a reference to relatives who hold sway over the union. Syntactically, “ours” refers back to the analogy “as world is offered world,” suggesting that “ours” indicates “our world,” though the shuttling lines are, perhaps intentionally, difficult to parse as they work to fuse two subjects and move between levels of belonging. Arthur Kirsch notes that in a letter to Isherwood, Auden says this sonnet “describes fucking in completely abstract words” (SM xxiii), but this reductive account seems designed to amuse Isherwood rather than to describe the poem’s disposition. Auden gives a better account of the poem’s power in the manuscript draft where he explains, “mutuality of love begets love.” In this sense the poem recalls “Warm are the still and lucky miles” of just a few years before.
Auden follows Shakespeare’s The Tempest in recognizing that the intrusions of another plot, one of violence and division, always threatens the matrimonial scene. The italicized voice of the singular, figured as Antonio, casts a shadow on each human connection in the sequence of poems. Auden would later write of The Tempest: “Ferdinand and Miranda, who seem as virginal and innocent as any fairy story lovers, are first treated to a moral lecture on the danger of anticipating their marriage vows, and the theme of the masque itself is a plot by Venus to get them to do so. The masque is not allowed to finish, but is broken off suddenly by Prospero, who mutters of another plot. . . . As an entertainment for a wedding couple, the masque can scarcely be said to have been a success” (DH 526). There is no masque in The Sea and the Mirror, so the individual songs retain the subjective integrity of their perspectives. Miranda does not address Ferdinand, though as Arthur Kirsch has noted, her speech immediately follows Ferdinand’s in the Buffalo draft. Auden’s decision to space them so widely apart perhaps suggests the reality of their difference from each other and the less than utopian world they must live in.
But a positive reading of Auden’s restructuring is also possible. If Antonio’s dissonance and selfish atomism opens and closes chapter 2 of The Sea and the Mirror, Ferdinand and Miranda are its bookends, framing the narrative with their love and harmony. Miranda’s eleven-syllable villanelle (SM 25–26) contributes another highly ordered and recursive language of “integrated love,” as Auden referred to it in the Buffalo draft. Antonio’s possessive, self-regarding (but ultimately self-loathing) “alone” ends each song in dissonance and disjunction. But Miranda’s praise of a “Dear One” answers back that in love, “mirrors are lonely” and that “mine” is surrender, not possession. Love shatters narcissism even as it expands the self into the other. For Miranda, in her admirable innocence and purity, love’s number is not one or zero, or us against them, but both one and many, the lovers “in a circle dancing,” the lively circle of a vow, that can extend itself to the community. Antonio’s “figure,” his negative O in the Dance of Death, does not cancel her promising circle of infinity.
The Living Room
Auden would continue to reflect on the bonds of love throughout his career, but the intimate “we” feeling that arose in “Warm are the still and lucky miles,” which is voiced by Ferdinand and Miranda, is rarely expressed again. In the Dantesque “Canzone” (CP 328–30), with its end words that alternate “love,” “will,” “world,” “day,” and “know” as the competing forces of human experience, the “we” refers almost entirely to universals (“We are created from and with the world,” etc.), not to personal bonds. The “beloved” turns out to be “Dear fellow-creature,” hardly a unique being. In later Auden an intimate “we” gives way to a more ethically than erotically inflected interpersonal “I” feeling and “You” feeling. Having read Martin Buber, and in light of the crisis arising from Kallman’s infidelity, Auden meditated at length on these pronouns in “Dichtung und Wahrheit” (1959). But it’s a prose meditation in lieu of a poem, the voice of the wise spectator and his philosophic we, more than the lover with his raptures or entreaties, and far from the lyric idealism of his Shakespearean lovers for whom words do seem to “verify themselves” (CP 660).
Years later Auden’s focus is the “living-room,” a place of commonality, pointedly not the bedroom, not the place of “gratified desire.” Here, Auden does propose a space where I and You might become “we.” In “The Common Life” (CP 713–15), Auden wanders “about the house” (as he would call the volume of poems that contains it) that he sometimes shared with Kallman, the poem’s dedicatee. “We, the inconstant ones” (a self-canceling “we”) of “In Praise of Limestone”—both humanity in general and those two who share this domestic space despite infidelities—sustain something in this common room. The bond is more communal than erotic, the “You” become a “Thou, rather.” It is not a space of vows but one where “I may enter / without knocking, leave without a bow.” Though it is a “catholic” area in the secular sense, open to all, it remains a place of “protestant being” where “I” exists and can rebel. “There’s no We at an instant, / only Thou and I.” The first-person plural arises not out of their reciprocity or even faith in a common tradition but as they seem rational to others (“Sherlock Holmes,” for instance). “A quick glance / at book-titles would tell him / that we belong to the clerisy and spend much / on our food.” Soon enough Auden has moved to third person, as if inquiring of his life from Holmes’s objective point of view, the wise spectator. But this is not the only point of view that counts for Auden. He inquires, neutrally, as to “what draws singular lives together in the first place.” The poem examines a long marriage, though not the endurance of vows. And the first-person plural arises without reservation here in “our common room.” A common room is not just a space for two—it is an emblem of community in discourse. Late in life, this is really what marriage means for Auden, as another “Epithalamium” makes clear. Playing witty master of ceremonies at the wedding of his niece, Rita Auden, he speaks for the community, not for the lovers (“we wish you”; “we’re here to say so”). But while the poem gives Hymen his due and warns against the green-eyed monster, it is the wish to “common your lives” and turn “we” into a verb, that marks the significance of the ceremony for him.