Auden's poem

What a poem.

Auden; September 1, 1939
 sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
 Waves of anger and fear
 Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
 Obsessing our private lives;The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night
.Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare, Imperialism's faceAnd the international wrong.Faces along the barCling to their average day:The lights must never go out,The music must always play,All the conventions conspireTo make this fort assumeThe furniture of home;Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood,Children afraid of the nightWho have never been happy or good.The windiest militant trash Important Persons shoutIs not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About DiaghilevIs true of the normal heart; For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have, Not universal loveBut to be loved alone.From the conservative darkInto the ethical lifeThe dense commuters come,Repeating their morning vow;'I will be true to the wife,I'll concentrate more on my work,'And helpless governors wakeTo resume their compulsory game: Who can release them now,Who can reach the dead,Who can speak for the dumb?All I have is a voiceTo undo the folded lie,The romantic lie in the brainOf the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of AuthorityWhose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone;Hunger allows no choiceTo the citizen or the police;We must love one another or die.Defenseless under the nightOur world in stupor lies;Yet, dotted everywhere,Ironic points of lightFlash out wherever the JustExchange their messages:May I, composed like themOf Eros and of dust,Beleaguered by the sameNegation and despair,Show an affirming flame.

Do u enjoy this poem?
What would take u there?  Maybe if u were in there, unravelling his contradictions and sorting the rhetoric from the moral pronouncements. (Those to whom evil is done...)

But what's going on that u were challenging yourself on such brutally obvious standards (love each other or die).

I haven't read this poem before (shock!) And now I find it became an author's-grave-turning hit in the days after sept.11. (Horror!)

I enjoy the poem for the way the simple life of people is put up against the calamity and distress of his predicament - and ours, eternally.

Hang on. Skyscrapers? Is he dead even? Seems he could still be kicking. Ring him! Allege that as a child u were afraid of the night and that in God's eyes we are neither happy nor good. That should put the fire up his conservative dark.

Buckle-blog.blogspot.com

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