Wystan Hugh Auden

By W.H. Auden

New Year Letter

Gavin

800 heroic couplets written off the cuff for a friend. Pompous, showy, and forced: I love his idiocies, I love his verse footnotes, which are as long as the original poem again and arraying all his beetling, piecemeal research into his age at least: cell biology, crank psychoanalysis, early sociology, Nietzsche, Nietzsche, all the arts and sciences nominally in his pocket. Anyway half of the idiocy is forced on him by the genre, epic verse, which always sounds damn silly to me (not that I mind silliness in my high art, but I do mind people being silly and not admitting it):

  

  Tonight a scrambling decade ends, 
And strangers, enemies and friends
Stand once more puzzled underneath
The signpost on the barren heath
Where the rough mountain track divides... 

A weary Asia out of sight 
Is tugging gently at the night, 
Uncovering a restless race; 
Clocks shoo the childhood from its face, 
And accurate machines begin 
To concentrate its adults in 
A narrow day to exercise 
Their gifts in some cramped enterprise. 
How few pretend to like it: O, 
Three quarters of these people know 
Instinctively what ought to be 
The nature of society 
And how they'd live there if they could. 
If it were easy to be good, 
And cheap, and plain as evil, how 
We all would be its members now... 

How grandly would our virtues bloom 
In a more conscionable dust 
Where Freedom dwells because it must, 
Necessity because it can, 
And men confederate in Man.

But wishes are not horses, this 
Annus is not mirabilis; 
Day breaks upon the world we know 
Of war and wastefulness and woe... 

The New Year brings an earth afraid, 
Democracy a ready-made 
And noisy tradesman's slogan, and 
The poor betrayed into the hand 

Of lackeys with ideas, and truth
Whipped by their elders out of youth, 
The peaceful fainting in their tracks 
With martyrs' tombstones on their backs, 
And culture on all fours to greet A butch and criminal elite, 
While in the vale of silly sheep 
Rheumatic old patricians weep... 


One critic, screwing up all his strength, called Auden's bad style, which NYL is supposed to be an instance of, "snide bright jargon", which is a perfect compliment! (if you don't view limpid repetition of what every other sensitive outsider has said before you as poetry's point.) I've not read it alone on New Year's Eve like you ought to, but I will.

New Year Letter By W.H. Auden

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