Bright Young Things discussion

Lullaby (1937)

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephermeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's sensual ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreadful cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but not from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of sweetness show
Eye and knocking heart may bless.
Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness see you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

I love this poem.

No matter how flawed, human love and affection is seen to be valuable and sustainable in a world (context WWII) torn apart. Hope in a world of hopelessness. - Auden's homosexuality extends, but does not define, the message of this poem.

To achieve greatness art must transcend petty labels and definitions. In AA they teach to focus on how we are similar instead of how we are different - not just as "people" but as individuals. Art, great art anyway, is always universal in its appeal.

I thought this was in a pre-WWII period and thought it looked more like the Spanish Civil War. However, I didn't know if he had acutally gone there. So I turned to Wikipedia.

In 1935 he went to Berlin. In 1936 he was in Iceland with Louis MacNiece. In 1937 he went to Spain. Ostensibly to be an ambulance driver but he turned (or was turned) to broadcast propaganda. He was there about seven weeks. His political idealism came up against reality. And subsequently went to the Sino-Japanese War with Isherwood.

I don't know what the situation was in Iceland, but throughout Europe in the late '30s hopelessness was pretty much everywhere. And he went to some of the high spots.

Berlin with the decadence that abounded at the time. A couple of wars. I think he was living in hopelessness.

Just wanted to point out what was going on at the time and that he was putting himself into the middle of it. He was in his late 20s at this point.

Poems XXX (elsewhere entitled 'Petition')

Sir, no man’s enemy, forgiving all
But will his negative inversion, be prodigal:
Send to us power and light, a sovereign touch
Curing the intolerable neural itch,
The exhaustion of weaning, the liar’s quinsy,
And the distortions of ingrown virginity.
Prohibit sharply the rehearsed response
And gradually correct the coward’s stance;
Cover in time with beams those in retreat
That, spotted, they turn though the reverse were great;
Publish each healer that in city lives
Or country houses at the end of drives;
Harrow the house of the dead; look shining at
New styles of architecture, a change of heart.


This is a difficult and elusive poem which forces us to read and re-read with increased attentiveness - it cannot be absorbed passively. I think it's possibly meant as a prayer for moral renewal.

The first few lines address a God like 'Sir'. The next few lines are akin to a medical diagnosis of the worlds ills - the neural itch sounds like a psychological illness - a moral illness. It's rather diagnostic and almost give a perscription for curing these ills.

The ending of the poem focuses on renewal - all is not lost. The world can change.

The word 'harrow' in the second last line is interesting. In the Harrowing of Hell myth God rescues Adam, Abraham & other biblical patriarchs from hell. The criticism here links the world at that time the poem was written to a house of the dead saying that modern civilisation must be abandoned and a new world view established. - OR to harrow means to plough so this could mean to plough the dead old world of moral decay back into the earth and begin again afresh.

This is a very modernist poem dealing with the disenchantment of the time and looking for a new world view. The half-rhymes and the forcing of a traditional sonnet form to fit a new and innovative moral agenda fits the modernist bill.

It's a great poem.