September 1, 1939

W.H. Auden was a fantastic poet. His works span the early 20th century and explore many of the themes that puzzled the thought of the international world during a time which was plagued by war. As Auden became a man, his mindset changed from one that believed in socialism to one that believed in Jesus Christ and His teachings about the nature of mankind.
In none of his poems is his struggle and eventual breaking free from secular thought more evident than in his work entitled September 1, 1939. In this poem, Auden, a man in his early thirties and having recently moved to the United States, reveals the thoughts that he experienced as he learned that Adolf Hitler's armies had invaded Poland, triggering what would become known as World War II.
I have always enjoyed reading the words of Auden as one can watch him literally climb over the fence from secular thought to Christian. Please read and enjoy this poem.

I 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 & 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 enlightment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement & 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 face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman & each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the consertative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I will concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To 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 voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
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.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros & of dust,
Beleaguerd by the same
Negation & despair,
Show an affirming flame.


-- Post From My iPhone