September 1, 1939 by W. H. Auden (Analysis)

 

September 1, 1939

by W. H. Auden

(Analysis) 

September 1, 1939 is a poem by W. H. Auden written on the occasion of the outbreak of The Second World War. It was first published in The New Republic, 18 October 1939, and was first published in book form in Auden’s collection Another Time (1940).

The poet says that he is uncertain and afraid at his residence as the decade has been dishonest and his hopes have expired. The people of the world are full of fear and anger like him. The dictatorial attitude of psychopathic people has led to the unmentionable odour of death and common man’s private life is obsessed with this tragic vision. Why our culture has driven mad can be shown by accurate knowledge of the events from Martin Luther to the present age. What turns huge imago into a psychopathic god can be learnt from the historical events. Evil prevails into a cyclic motion from the doer to the done and from the done to the doer. Democracy has remained in the name only. Dictators all over the world have crushed the very concepts, the very soul of democracy. History repeats itself. As in the past, the present generation has accepted mismanagement, grief and dish pair as part of their life. High rising buildings declare the strength of the collective man. Arguments can be produced in favour or against any notion. But international wrong and imperialism are never far away. We try our best to be at home in adverse circumstances and try to ignore the hard realities of imperialism but we cannot do so, this is merely a dream. Only universal love, love of the whole mankind; and not the selfish love of the individual, Eros can serve this world. We try to be ethical every morning with full determination but the conservative dark prevails upon our wishes.

The poem has been written in the style of first person narrative and thus is helpful to trace the incidents, especially a major world influencing happening i.e. the Second World War. The poet narrates his first-hand experience. He does not separate himself and does not make himself aloof; rather feels the effect equally. The poet has not used Frost-like persona. The atmosphere of horror, uncertainly, dishonesty, cheating and tricks is reflected through the choice of diction, e.g., the poem contains words and phrases like ‘uncertain and afraid’, ‘the clever hopes’, ‘a low dishonest decade’, ‘anger and fear’, ‘unmentionable odour of death’, ‘an apathetic grave’, ‘habit forming pain’, ‘mismanagement and grief’, ‘imperialism face’, ‘international wrong’, ‘conservative dark’, ‘folded lie’, ‘romantic lie’, ‘humor’, ‘defenseless’, ‘stupor’, ‘beleaguered’, ‘negation and despair’. Auden has emphasized the effect of evil forces in epigrammatic, terse and direct meaning lines.

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return

The following lines again hammer the same feelings of the poet;

For the error bred in the bone

Of each woman and each man

Craves what it cannot have

No universal love

But to be loved alone

The evils leading to The Second World War made the authorities deaf and dumb to the common needs of ordinary people.

Who can reach the deaf

Who can speak for dumb?

Not to speak of an efficient international authority, even the state has lost control over the law-and-order situation. Anarchy has prevailed. But the poet has suggested a solution in this dismal situation also.

There is no such thing as the State

And no one exists alone;

Hunger allows no choice

To the citizen or the police;

We must love one another or die.

This leads to the poet’s philosophy to differentiate between Agape and Eros. Eros, selfish love, individual love leads to differentiate, division, separation, hatred, dislike among the nations of the world; which resulted into the World War. Universal love, Agape, is the only solution of this evil.

If on one side, the poem reflects the atmosphere of The Second World War, a particular incident in the history of the World – Hitler attacked Poland on Sept, 1, 1939 at the beginning of The Second World War, the World War II, the poem deals with the theme of universal love without which humanity has to suffer. Use of mixed themes can be noticed in other poems of Auden e.g., the poem on the death of W.B. Yeats also deals with the themes of hatred, personal prejudice, role of a poet in adverse circumstances, the contemporary politics, role of time or elegy on Yeats.

An echo of 1 September 1939 can be seen in the poem In Memory of W.B. Yeats

In the nightmare of the dark

All the dogs of Europe bark,

And living nations wait,

Each sequestered in its hate.

The above quoted lines not only express the terror and fear prevailing in the peoples of the World but also express his theme of Eros i.e., love of individual which is an evil leading to the war. The solution is universal love as is suggested in September 1, 1939. The poem In Memory of W.B. Yeats like September 1, 1939, contains the diction of death, war, fear, terror of which winter is the symbol. The very first stanza emphasizes the death and destruction.

The poem deliberately echoes the stanza form of W. B. Yeats’ Easter, 1916, another poem about an important historical event, and, like Yeats’ poem, Auden’s moves from a description of historical failures and frustrations to a possible transformation in the present or future.

Until the two final stanzas, the poem briefly describes the social and personal pathology that has brought about the outbreak of war: first the historical development of Germany “from Luther until now”, next the internal conflicts in every individual person that correspond to the external conflicts of the war. Much of the language and content of the poem echoes that of C. G. Jung in his book Psychology and Religion (1938).

The final two stanzas shift radically in tone and content, turning to the truth that the poet can tell, “We must love one another or die,” and to the presence in the world of “the Just” who exchange messages of hope. The poem ends with the hope that the poet, like “the Just”, can “show an affirming flame” in the midst of the disaster.

Even before printing the poem for the first time, Auden deleted two stanzas from the latter section, one of them proclaiming his faith in an inevitable “education of man” away from war and division. The two stanzas are printed in Edward Mendelson’s Early Auden (1981).

Soon after writing the poem, Auden began to turn away from it, apparently because he found it self-flattering to himself and to his readers. When he reprinted the poem in The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (1945) he omitted the famous stanza that ends “We must love one another or die.”

In the mid-1950s Auden began to refuse permission to editors who asked to reprint the poem in anthologies. In 1955 he allowed Oscar Williams to include it complete in The New Pocket Anthology of American Verse with the most famous line altered to read “We must love one another and die.” Later he allowed the poem to be reprinted only once, in a Penguin Books anthology Poetry of the Thirties (1964), with a note saying about this and four other early poems, “Mr. W. H. Auden considers these five poems to be trash which he is ashamed to have written.”

Despite Auden’s disapproval, the poem became famous and widely popular. E. M. Forster wrote “Because he once wrote ‘We must love one another or die’ he can command me to follow him” (Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951).

A close echo of the line “We must love one another or die”, spoken by Lyndon Johnson in a recording of one of his speeches, was used in the famous “Daisy” television campaign commercial in 1964 in which the image of a young girl picking petals from a daisy was replaced by image of a mushroom cloud.

In 2001, immediately after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the poem was read (with many lines omitted) on National Public Radio and was widely circulated and discussed for its relevance to recent events.

The invasion of Poland by the German-Nazi forces commenced on September 1, 1939 yet it was not the hallmark of W.H. Auden’s intention in his poem September 1, 1939. No, this work is far more than a description or criticism of the German-Nazi decision to invade an innocent country; this work, these words, this plea comes from the heart of a man who is living in a society filled with an oppressive nature towards those they deem less human or unfitting to society. Despite such risk of oppression Auden went ahead and published this gorgeous piece of poetry in 1940 with conscious thought to mask his true intentions because Auden was “homosexual”. By use of allusion, symbolism, and straight-out diction Auden suggests truly mind-expanding concepts and a criticism of something rather unexpected.

September 1, 1939 is split into nine, eleven lined, stanzas with no set rhyme scheme or exact meter. For the most part shifts occur randomly although one can group them to certain degrees though it would be best, in one’s opinion, to absorb the allusion-based meanings individually for yes, they are ever-so deep. The first two stanzas seem to make reference to the German invasion of Poland; the third and fourth stanzas take a shot at democratically industrialized man; stanzas five and six touch on the concept of sin; surprisingly the seventh, eighth and ninth stanzas bring out the strongest messages which are rather hopeful if not optimistic. Occasionally one meets rhymes but they are inconsistent in one’s eyes and not truly compelling if one suggested they pushed the overall meaning of the work.

W. H. Auden’s September 1, 1939 is an outpouring of disapproval and concern over the world’s current political state of affairs, as well as a personal manifesto of sorts. The speaker rails against all forms of authority he believes to be corrupt. The entire poem serves as a vehicle for the speaker to address the lies he perceives propagated by all types of government and law enforcement, ending with his wish to be a sign of hope and truth in the face of the despair a world with such grave failures demands. The speaker’s ideas, like those of the authority he denounces, seem at first glance noble and truthful, but upon further examination prove fraught with self-contradiction. Although he claims to be a rare bearer of bright truth in a world of dark, widespread lies, the speaker lies to himself and readers, the very public he is trying to protect. The speaker denounces the ruling elite and its power to twist the truth, but hypocritically takes on a role of corrupt poetic authority in order to do so.

Like those in power, the speaker possesses the ability to twist facts into a potentially convincing support of his case. The speaker complains that the government fools people into believing their working lives are “the ethical life” in the seventh stanza, insinuating that it is in fact full of false promises the state makes to the people and the latter in turn make to themselves. In the fifth stanza, he claims that all of our actions and possessions are to prevent us from realizing we are “children afraid of the night / who have never been happy or good”, without providing any more evidence or explanation. Like those in power, the speaker is relating his completely subjective message, potentially damaging message to the public as a form of absolute truth.