CERTIFICATE

Dr. Ashok Kumar Mohapatra

Professor in English
Department of English
Sambalpur Univresity

This is to certify that Shri Ajaya Kumar Panda bearing Regd. No.

08/2006/English, Ph.D of Sambalpur University has submitted his Ph.D thesis entitled “Style

as Meaning: A Stylistic Analysis of W.H.Auden’s Poems”, which he wrote under my

guidance. The work is the result of his sincere effort and it is original to the best of my

knowledge and belief.

Ashok Kumar Mohapatra

Professor
Deptt.of English
Sambalpur University
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I thank Professor Dr. Ashok Kumar Mohapatra for his invaluable guidance on almost

everything. I benefitted enormously from his nurturing comments and directives without

which this thesis would not have been completed. The idea of writing a nuclear chapter about

style and stylistic analysis of W H Auden’s poems was entirely his. I am also indebted to him

for his bearing with me throughout and I wish only that there were more space to go into

more details about his help and perseverance.

I am also grateful to the Librarian of English and Foreign Language University,

Hyderabad for his kind help and cooperation in collecting study material for the purpose of

giving this thesis of mine a final shape.

My thanks go also to those who kindled in me the ambition and love of learning and

studying since my childhood and to those who boosted and helped me throughout.

Finally, my gratitude goes to my long-suffering wife Geetanjali for supporting me at

every stage of my work.

Ajaya Kumar Panda

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents Page

Certificate i

Acknowledgment ii

Chapter I:
Style and Meaning in Stylistic Analysis 1-27

1.1. Introduction 1

1.2. Style 1

1.3. Stylistics 8

1.4. Approaches to Stylistic Analysis 11

1.5. Levels of Stylistic Analysis 13

1.6. Elements in Stylistic Analysis 15

1.6.1. Lexico- Syntactic Pattern 15

1.6.2. Lexico Syntactic Choices 16

1.6.3. Phonological Devices 18

1.6.4. Graphological Devices 19

1.6.5. Morphological Devices 19

1.7. Stylistic Analysis and Literary Criticism 20

1.8. Pedagogical Application of Stylistics: Theoretical Issue 23

1.9. Methodology 25

1.10. Plan for the Chapters 27

Chapter II:
Major Aspects of Auden’s Poetry 28 - 68

2.1. A Brief Introduction of W.H. Auden 28

2.2. Literature Review of Auden’s Poems 29

2.3. Themes of Auden’s Poetry 33

2.3.1. Theme of war ` 35

2.3.2. Rejection of Convention 37

2.3.3. Human Suffering 38

2.3.4. Religious Themes 41

2.3.5. Auden’s Love for Art 45

2.3.6. Significance of Love 46

2.3.7. Loss of Human Values 50

2.3.8. Theme of Death 50

2.4. The Style of Auden 53

2.4.1. Components of Auden’s Style 55

2.4.1.1. Diction 55

2.4.1.2. Imagery 56

2.4.1.3. Symbols 61

2.4.1.4. Rhetorical Devices 64

2.4.1.5. Traditional Verse from-Meters/Subjects, People and Places 64

2.4.1.6. Allegorical Devices 66

2.4.1.7. Use of Adjectives 66

2.5. Conclusion 67
Chapter III:
Lexis As Style 69 - 105

3.1. Introduction 69

3.2. An Overview on the Lexis as Style in Poems by W.H.Auden 72

3.2.1. The Use of Adjectives 73

3.2.2. Use of Archaic Words 73

3.2.3. Use of Rhetorical Device 74

3.3. Lexical Analysis of Auden’s Poems 75

3.3.1. O Where Are You Going? 75

3.3.2. Who’s Who 80

3.3.3. Funeral Blues 85

3.3.4. Mundus et Infans 89

3.3.5. As I Walked out One Evening 94

3.3.6. Canzone 100

Chapter IV:
Sound Pattern As Style 106 - 157
4.1. Introduction 106

4.2. An Overview on the Sound Pattern as Style in Poem by W.H. Auden 118

4.3. Analysis of Sound Pattern 124

4.3.1.O Where are You Going? 124

4.3.2. On This Island 126

4.3.3. Musee des Beaux Arts 129

4.3.4. The cross Roads 133

4.3.5. Refugee Blues 136

4.3.6. If I Could Tell You 141

4.3.7 The More Loving One 146

4.3.8. River Profile 150

Chapter V:

Syntax As Style 158 - 206

5.1 Introduction 158

5.2 Syntactical Analysis 165

5.2.1 That Night When Joy Began 165

5.2.2 Spain -1937 170

5.2.3 In Memory of W.B. Yeats 179

5.2.4 The Unknown Citizen 185

5.2.5 If I Could Tell You 192

5.2.6 The Shield of Achilles 197

Conclusion 207
Select Bibliography 208 – 222

Style and Meaning in Stylistic Analysis

1.1 Introduction
Despite centuries of valiant intellectual effort, style has remained an elusive concept.

It is, as Enkvist puts it, “as common as it is elusive. Most of us speak about it even lovingly,

though few of us are willing to say precisely what it means”(1973:11). Every age, and every

school of criticism, has tried to understand and define the problem of style within its own

parameters, ranging from viewing it as the moulding of the message, to identifying it with th

e author, to rejecting it in part and in toto, to regarding it as a choice and a substantial

determiner and component of meaning, but as Chatman and Levin point out, it has been

“impossible to define in a way that would command it Universal assent”(1967:337).

1.2 Style
Some of the earliest significant treatment of style occurs in the discussion of classical rhetoric

in writings of Aristotle and Quintilian. This tradition views style as persuasion, as a set of

devices to be used according to the occasion and the subject of discourse to produce the right

kind of effect on the listener or the reader. Another classical assumption regarding style is

that it is an ornament of dress of thought. The theoretical assumption underlying this view is

that form and content are separable, and that style consists in giving a pre-existing thought,

an elegant verbal shape. This split between form and content was opposed by people like

Coleridge who held the view that in a work of art both form and content were fused into an

invisible organic unity. Another view which has exercised a strong influence on the modern

mind is the theory of style as meaning advanced by W. K. Wimsatt. For him style is a

function of the selection and arrangement of words, and since words are units of meaning,

style and meaning become inseparable. According to Wimsatt style is “the furthest

elaboration of the one concept that is the centre” (1967:235).

The problem with all these traditional definitions of style is that they are either too

diffused or vague and consequently of not much practical use in the study of style. Further,

all these definitions, in relation to classical notion of style, underscore conformity with

established principles of genre, modes of narration, imagery, phonic patterns and so on. We

know of Attic, Doric, Ionic literary styles of literary communication in classical Greek

literature in the western tradition and Gandhara, Lati, Panchala styles of literary

communication in the ancient Sanskrit tradition. These designate style as a taxonomic

category of collective norm, in conformity with which literary compositions were to be

carried out.

However, style as a concept of the distinctiveness of expression, unique creative

power of an individual is a relatively modern. Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, the

18th century French naturalist and mathematician is one of the earliest proponents of style in
its modern sense when he said before the Académie Française in 1753 in his Discours sur le

style ("Discourse on Style") that “the style is the man himself" ("le style c'est l'homme

même"). He said that style consisting in one’s writing expresses the writer’s individuality of

thinking and expression, and his soul and taste as well. In the modern sense style becomes

less a taxonomic, and normative idea entailing conformity and more an idea of an

individual’s distinctiveness in conceptualizing and executing an art form that involves

deviation from the norm.

It is the distinctiveness of language and culture and a synchronic study of them which

became the focus of Structuralism. In tandem with structuralist theories of language and

culture more adequate models of linguistic description, and analytical tools of structure were

developed by structural linguistics, with greater attempt made to place the study of style in a

more objective basis through the use of certain analytical techniques. In this new approach

the influence exercised by the textual criticism of I.A. Richards and New Criticism of

Ransom, Empson, Allen Tate and Cleanth Brooks have been of paramount importance. The

New critics believed that a poem should be interpreted only in terms of its formal features,

the verbal clues that the text provides. It is in its insistence on the primacy of the text, on a

close reading of the linguistic features, that New Criticism anticipated the scientific nature of

modern stylistics and paved the way for its emergence. The most significant thing about

modern stylistics is that the new, analytical methods of linguistics have been adopted with a

view to provide a precise and adequate description of the language of a given text. The

discipline of stylistics assumes that style is a function of the textual features. What a reader

senses as style is the effect created by the linguistic structures used by the writer and their

deployment within the work. Therefore, an analysis of formal features will yield interesting

facts about a writer’s style. It is in the analysis of the formal features of the text that

linguistics comes to the help of stylistics. To understand what a writer is doing with language,

we need a description of the system itself by reference to which we may identify and
understand an individual’s use of language. Linguistics provides stylistics with the theoretical

framework and analytical tools it needs for studying a writer’s style. The application of

linguistics to stylistic studies is stressed by Sol Saporta when he says that “stylistics is in

some way dependant on linguistics, since style can not be clearly defined without reference to

grammar” (1960:93). Literature, whatever it may be, is language first; therefore the methods

of linguistics may be advantageously used to understand the formal patterning of language.

Though stylistics helps to arrive at an objective description of the literary use of

language, it can not be said that stylistics has solved all the problems of literary analysis. Far

from it, for there are still many unsolved problems. No universally acceptable definition of

style has yet been evolved and in actual practice objectivity is sometimes compromised for

the sake of interpretation. While all this is true, it can not be denied that stylistics has

provided the student of literature with the theoretical framework and analytical tools he needs

for studying a writer’s style.

Stylistics came to be accepted as a discipline in its own right more or less after the

publication of the book Style in Language (1960). New definitions of style have been

formulated which are formal in nature and permit an objective analysis of textual features. Of

all the modern approaches to the study of style, the theory of style as choice has made a far-

reaching impact in the field of stylistics. The problem of style and the logic of applying

Transformational Generative Grammar (T.G.G.) to the study of style have been succinctly

stated by Richard Ohmann. He writes, “The idea of style implies that words on a page might

have been different or differently arranged without a corresponding difference in substance.

Another writer would have said it another way. For the idea of style to apply, in short, writing

must involve choice of verbal formulation”(1970:264). Using the model developed by

Chomsky, wherein a sentence is captured at two levels, namely the deep structure and the

surface structure, it has been suggested that a writer’s style is constituted by the optional
transformations he consistently and characteristically favours. Richard Ohmann also views

style in more or less similar terms, but he has added a dimension of philosophical depth by

defining style as “epistemic choice” (1972:43). Patterns of language reflect pattern of

thought; stylistic preferences are cognitive preferences. A writer’s style will, therefore, reflect

his attitudes and ideas the way he seeks to order and organize experience. Ohmann’s stylistic

study of Shaw is a pioneering effort in this direction. Through his study of Shaw and

Victorian prose writers, Ohmann has found in the notion of optional transformation an

effective way to formalize the notion of style as choice.

Along with the notion of style as choice, the theory of style as deviation is one of the

most popular approaches to the study of style. An author’s style is said to be deviant when it

differs from the ordinary use of language in certain ways. A message is considered deviant

when it violates the rules of language or when it shows features not found else where. In

poetry, linguistic deviation is the most significant part of the message, which the reader

interprets by measuring (it) against the expected patterns of language. Dylan Thomas’s “a

grief ago”(1972:49) is a classical example of deviation. Here a noun denoting a psychological

condition is filled in a slot which is normally occupied by a temporal world.

The concept of style as deviation from the norm is similar to the concept of

foregrounding developed by Jan Mukarovsky in famous essay “Standard Language and

Poetic Language” (1970:40). By foregrounding he means deviation from linguistic or other

socially accepted norms. According to him “poetic language is an aesthetically purposeful

distortion of standard language”. The violation of the norm of the standard, its systematic

violation, is what makes possible the poetic utilization of language, without this there would

be no poetry” (Ibid: 42). He goes on to say, “the function of poetic language consists in the

maximum of foregrounding of the utterance” (Ibid: 42). The difficulty with this approach,

however, is that it is impossible to establish in quantitative terms the precise boundaries

between what is normal and what is deviant. The probability of establishing norms, which are

final and irrevocable, in a natural language seems dim, because as language keeps on

changing, what is a norm in one century and one period may cease to be a norm in another

century and another period.

The theory of style as poetic function or convergence of textual pattern has stemmed

in large part from Roman Jacobson’s famous dictum given in his closing statement of the

1958 Indiana Conference on style. “The poetic function projects the principles of equivalence

from the axis of selection into the axis of combination”(1960:358). The statement implies that

poetic language systematically exploits in its syntagmatic chain the properties that belong to

the members of a paradigmatic group. That is, the literary artist exploits the principles of

equivalence in sound, syntactic position and meaning in his selection of words at different

levels at different places in the syntagmatic chain.

Samuel Levin’s work “Linguistic Structures in Poetry”, in which he makes an attempt

to characterize the peculiar unity of language, is based on Jacobson’s comment. Using the

framework of Transformational Generative Grammar, Levin asserted that the concept of

coupling is crucial to poetic language. By coupling he means “the convergence of a pair of

semantically related elements and a pair of syntagmatic patterns” (1970:13). In his discussion

of extracts from Pope and of a Shakespearean sonnet, Levin demonstrates how the pattern of

semantically related words occurring in similar syntactic position is consistently repeated to

achieve poetic unity.

The notion of style being largely dependent on textual cohesion is found in the work

of M.A.K. Halliday and Geoffrey Leech. Halliday has characterized cohesion as a grouping

of descriptive categories organized around the lexical and grammatical means of unifying a

literary text through a network of sequential relationship. Geoffrey Leech’s analysis of Dylan

Thomas’s “This bread I break” emphasizes cohesion—the lexical and grammatical means
which the poet draws from standard language to unify the poem. Another significant

contribution of this school to the study of style is the note on lexical sets and collocations.

According to Spencer and Gregory, “the notion of “collocation” is set up to account for the

tendency of certain items of language to occur close to each other. Foe example, the item

‘economy’ is likely to occur in the same linguistic environment as items such as ‘affairs’,

‘policy’, ‘plan’, ‘programme’, ‘disaster’”(1970:78). They define a lexical set as a grouping of

items which have a similar range of collocation. This is an important concept in the study of

style because the creative writer often achieves some of his effects through the interaction

between usual and unusual collocations, and through the creation of new and therefore

stylistically significant collocations. Spencer and Gregory quote examples from Dylan

Thomas, such as, “a grief ago”, “all the Sun long” and “the heart print of man” as instances of

new collocation.

The statistical approach to the study of style is based on the assumption that “style is a

probabilistic concept” (1969:10). This theory which is derived from the information theory

and modern mathematics considers each linguistic unit as a sign, and on the basis of a

mathematical count based on a sample text predicts the probability of occurrence of a

linguistic item in the whole text. Statistical studies have proved most helpful and rewarding

in determining the question of unknown or disputed authorship. In her book “Style and

Proportion”, Josphine Miles, who was the first to use the counting technique on an extensive

scale, used the concept of the relative proportion of nouns, verbs and adjectives in a test for

characterizing style.

In the book Linguistic Perspectives on Literature edited by Ching, Haley and Lunsford,

(1980:85) we find there is grouping of the articles regarding style:

1) Style as choice: those that emphasize content as a constant and form as a variable

which alters only the effects and not the essence of ‘content’
 2) Style as meaning: those that emphasize the contributions of ‘form’ to ‘content’ or

which believe that ‘form’ changes or even creates ‘content’.

3) Style as tension between meaning and form: those that emphasize the special meaning

or effect of style arising as a new synthesis from the dialect of “form/content”

interaction.

Thus we see that different scholars have defined the term ‘Style’ differently in their

own way. So it is difficult to arrive at a conclusion for a common definition. Therefore, it

would be wise on our part to use several theories and concepts, in so far as they suit our

purpose. Now I will move on to discuss stylistics and different approaches to stylistic

analysis.

1.3 Stylistics

Many attempts have been made by different scholars to define stylistics. To Freeman

(1971:1) “stylistics is a sub-discipline which started in the second half of the 20th century”. It

can be seen as a logical extension of moves within literary criticism early in the 20th century

to concentrate on studying texts, rather than authors.

To Leech and Short (1981:13) “Stylistics is simply defined as the (linguistic) study of

style, is rarely undertaken for its own sake, simply as an exercise in describing what use is

made of language”. They are also of the view that we normally study style because we want

to explain something, and in general, literary stylistics has, implicitly or explicitly, the goal of

explaining the relation between language and artistic function.

Short and Candlin are of the view that “stylistics is a linguistic approach to the study

of the literary texts. It thus embodies one essential part of the general course - philosophy;

that of combining language and literary study” (1989:183).

 Widdowson defines stylistics as “the study of literary discourse from a linguistic

orientation” (1975:3). He holds the view that what distinguishes stylistics from literary

criticism on the one hand and linguistics on the other is that it is a means of linking the two.

He also proposes that stylistics occupies the middle ground between linguistics and literary

criticism and its function is to mediate between the two. In this role, its concerns necessarily

overlap with those of the two disciplines.

Carter is of the same view with Widdowson. He also believes that “stylistics is

essentially a bridge discipline between linguistics and literature and there are always

arguments about the design of the bridge, its purpose, the nature of the materials and about

the side it should be built from” (1988:161).

Stylistics, the study of the devices in languages (such as rhetorical figures and

syntactical patterns) is considered to produce expressive or literary style. Stylistics is,

therefore, a field or study that combines both literary criticism on the one hand and linguistics

on the other as its morphological make-up suggests: the “style” component relating it to

literary criticism and the ‘istics’ component to linguistics. Widdowson (1975:3) claims that

stylistics can serve as a means whereby literature and language as subjects can, by a process

of gradual approximation, move towards both linguistics and literary criticism, and also a

means whereby these disciplines can be pedagogically treated to yield different subjects.

He further suggests that stylistics can provide for the progression of a pupil from

either language or literature towards either literary criticism or linguistics. Carter (1988: 4)

proposes that practical stylistics is a process of literary text analysis which starts from a basic

assumption that the primary interpretative procedures used in the reading of a literary text are

linguistic procedures. He added that stylistics analysis can provide the means whereby the
study of literature can relate a piece of literary writing to his own experience of language and

so can extend that experience.

Carter (1988:10) sub-categorized it into 5 sections:

1. Linguistic Stylistics– In several respects, linguistic stylistics is the purest form of

stylistics in that its practitioners attempt to derive from the study of style and language

variation some refinement of models for the analysis of language and thus contribute

to the development of linguistic theory.

2. Literary Stylistics– A distinguishing feature here is the provision of a basis for

fuller understanding, appreciation and interpretation of avowedly literary texts.

Although a precision of analysis mode available by stylistic methods offers a

challenge to established methods of close reading or practical criticism of texts, the

procedures of literary stylistics remain traditional in character in spite of

developments in literary theory which challenge assumptions about the

role of language in depicting literary realities.

3. Style and Discourse – Work in stylistics within this category acknowledges that

style is not an exclusively literary phenomenon and addresses itself to the description

and characterization of stylistic effects in a wide range of discourse types. Fowler

(1986) calls it ‘linguistic criticism’.

4. Pedagogical Stylistics – There are a number of issues deriving from deep-rooted

divisions between linguistic and literary critics but which still require to be

considered; which emerge in the context of debates concerning the pedagogical

relevance of stylistics.
 5. Stylistics and the foreign language learner – Perhaps because questions of language

and learning are more widely addressed in the domain of foreign language learning

than in the no less important area of mother tongue language development, issues of

pedagogy in relation to stylistics, literature and language study can be more easily

surveyed. However, there is a growing recognition that integration of language and

literature can be of mutual benefit in the context of foreign or second language

education and that a situation of literary education; conducted by exposure to a canon

of texts in English literature mainly through a method of lecture may be in need of

modification on a number of counts.

1.4 Approaches to Stylistic Analysis

There are different approaches to the analysis of styles of texts i.e there are various

ways/perspectives from which we can account for the analysis of texts. Lawal (1997) in his

own view identifies these factors as “approaches” while Babajide (2000) on his own part

defines them as “concepts”. The two of them however give similar points:

1. Style as personality/individuality – Style is a relational term: we talk about ‘the

style of x’ referring through “style” to characteristics of language use, and correlating

these with some extralinguistic x… Leech and Short believe that “traditionally, an

intimate connection has been seen between style and an author’s personality”

(1981:11). Deriving largely from “idiolect” – this largely prove that every individual

or person is unique in one way or the other.

2. Style as Choice from Variants – This approach is backed with the fact that every

phenomenon has many possible alternatives that form the variants. It constitutes

selection from a total linguistic repertoire. Each individual has the right to choose

from the available possibilities that which is appropriate and fits in to his work. This
approach is usually prominent in paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations among

linguistic elements.

3. Style as deviation from the norm – Language is a behavior governed by rules and

norms. When something is done in a quite different way from how it is usually done,

then that is said to be a deviation from the norm. This is achieved by reconstruction

from the structural resource of language to extend the frontiers of current usages. This

concept is most common at both the lexical and the syntactic level and used mostly

for effective communication.

4. Style as situation or relationship between message and medium – Language use

does not occur in a vacuum, the message and medium are always of importance. The

medium can be formal or informal, spoken or written and so on. Different language

use is determined by the different context of operation. In other words, there are

variations in language use. For example, the kind of language used in the court room

will be different from the one used in the classroom and so on. By and large it is

obvious that the concept of medium and message is indispensable in stylistics.

5. Style as a temporal phenomenon – According to Babajide (2000) style changes as

nothing in life is static abreast of time. Therefore style can be referred to as being old

or new, in or out of vogue, modern or ancient. There are features for certain periods,

thus language style changes according to time, and style is recognized by the

predominant features of the period. In the language world, there are Chaucerian and

classical time, differentiated by features. Old English, Middle English and Modern

English periods, Elizabethan, Victorian and Renaissance age with peculiar features

(literary and linguistic).

 Using any of these approaches explained above, stylistic analysis could be conducted

by means of the levels of analysis. I, therefore, explain briefly the levels of stylistic analysis

and the elements under them.

1.5 Levels of Stylistic Analysis

The levels of stylistics analysis are identified as:

1. Graphology- According to Crystal and Davy, as cited in Alabi (2007: 170),

“Graphology is the analogous study of a languages writing system or orthography as

seen in the various kinds of handwriting or topography” (1969:18). Leech believes

that graphology transcends orthography. “It refers to the whole writing system:

punctuation and paragraphing as well as spacing” (1969:39). Alabi (2007:170) added

that a graphological discussion of style among other features entails the foregrounding

of quotation marks, ellipses periods, hyphens, contracted forms, special structures, the

full stop, the colon, the comma, the semicolon, the question mark, the dash, lower

case letters, gothic and bold prints, capitalization, small print, spacing, italics etc.

2. Phonology – Ofuya is of the view that “phonology describes the ways in which

speech sounds are organized in English into a system” (2007:14). Lodge believes that

“phonology is the study of linguistic systems, specifically the way in which sound

represents differences of meaning in a language” (2009:8). Phonology in stylistics

usually deals with analyzing sound patterns in a piece, the systemic use of sounds to

form words and utterances in language. Phonological devices are obtained through the

repetition exhibited, for example, in rhyme, elements of alliteration, consonance,

assonance and phonaesthesia etc.

3. Morphology – Mark and Kirsten say “Morphology refers to the mental system

involved in word formation or to the branch of linguistics that deals with words, their

internal structure, and how they are formed” (2005:1). Morphological level of

analysis is concerned with word formation processes subjected to specific conditions

 and rules of the processes of affixation – the prefix, suffix and the root words,

coining, back formation etc.

4. Lexico-Syntax – This is a word formed by the combination of two different words

“Lexis” and “syntax”. Lexis is the total vocabularies that make up a language or the

body of words known and used by a particular person. Syntax, according to

Tallerman, means “Sentence construction: how words group together to make phrases

and sentences” (1998:1). It is also used to mean the study of the syntactic properties

of languages; in this sense it is used in the same way as we use ‘stylistics’ to mean the

study of literary style. Lexico-Syntactic patterns may be obtained through various

means which include unusual or inverted word order, omission of words and

repetition. Lexico-Syntactic choices are obtained through devices such as piling of

usual collocates, unusual collocates, archaic words, particular parts of speech,

metaphor, simile, oxymoron etc.

1.6 Elements in Stylistic Analysis

The elements under each of the levels of analysis mentioned above are discussed

briefly below:

1.6.1 Lexico-Syntactic Patterns

Lexici-syntatic patterns include:

1. Anastrophe – Alabi says “anastrophe is the inversion of the natural or usual word

order” (2007:163). The use of anastrophe secures emphasis and focuses the

readers’/hearers’ attention.

2. Parenthesis – According to Alabi, “it entails the insertion of some verbal unit (extra

information, and after thought or a comment) in a position that interrupts the normal

syntactical glow of the sentence” (2007:163).

 3. Ellipsis – Alabi cites that “Ellipsis entails the deliberate omission of a word or

words, which are readily implied by the content: It is used to create brevity

reemphasis or ambiguity” (2007:163).

4. Asyndeton – This is the deliberate omission of conjunctions between a series of

related clauses. Asyndeton produces a hurried rhythm in the sentence. Corbett cites

Aristotle’s observation that “asyndeton was especially appropriate for the conclusion

of a discourse, because there, perhaps more than in other places in the discourse, we

may want to produce the emotional reaction that can be stirred by, among other

means, rhythm” (1971:470).

5. Anaphora – Alabi cites that “it entails the repetition of the same word or phrase at

the beginnings of successive stages of the chosen pattern” (2007:164). The repetition

of the words helps to establish a marked rhythm in the sequence of clauses, this

scheme is usually reserved for those passages where the author wants to produce a

strong emotional effects.

6. Epizeuxis – According to Alabi, epizeuxis repeats a word or phrase without any

break at all (2007:165).

1.6.2 Lexico-Syntactic Choices

Lexico- syntactic choices include:

7. Pun- Alabi says that “Pun is the genetic name for the figures which play on words”

(2007:167). It is a figurative expression in which a speaker plays on a word or phrase

to suggest double meanings. A speaker may also play on two or more semantically

different but orthographically or phonologically similar words to construct a thought –

provoking statement. It is often employed to display linguistic process or verbal

dexterity and ultimately entertain the audience.

8. Anthimeria – In the words of Alabi “this is the substitution of one part of speech for

another i.e. employing a part of speech in a sentence or a group of words instead of

another”(2007:168).

9. Periphrasis (antonomasia) – Alabi (2007:168) says ‘This is the substitution of a

descriptive word or a phrase for a proper name or of a proper name for a quality

associated with the name’. It can also be described as an expression in which a

celebrated person, event or place is used to represent another person, place or event as

a result of a similar quality present in them.

10. Hyperbole – Alabi cites, “this is the use of exaggerated words, a figurative

expression in which a fact or a situation is blown out of proportion” (2007:168). It is

an overstatement of a fact in the course of emphasizing it or as a result of over

enthusiasm for it. Hyperbole gives emphasis or produces humour.

11. Personification – This invests abstractions or inanimate object with human

qualities. In other words, a quality associated with man is given to a nonliving

phenomenon thereby making it look like a person. It is also called prosopoeia and

personification stirs the emotion.

12. Paradox – Alabi says, “This is a seemingly contradictory statement, which

happens to be true” (2007:168). Paradox is a kind of expanded oxymoron. It is also an

expression which is obviously absurd or unreasonable but will become logical or

reasonable on a closer look or a deeper thought.

13. Synecdoche – Alabi (2007:167) believes that this is the employment of a part of

the referent to stand for the whole or vice versa.

14. Oxymoron – According to Alabi (2007:168), “This is a figure of speech in which

two contradicting words are placed side by side in a statement thereby making it

sound self contradicting. In other words oxymoron yokes two terms which are

ordinarily contradictory”.
 15. Simile and Metaphor – Alabi (2007:167) believes that both the metaphor and the

simile are related to the topic of similarity, for although the comparison is made

between two words of unlike nature. Metaphor gives clearness and liveliness to

words.

16. Archaic or difficult words – Alabi (2007:166) says “This is used to show level of

education or social accomplishment, they are attention focusing.”

17. Synonyms, hyponyms are part of lexical means of achieving cohesion in

discourse. They are means of unifying the discourse.

18. Parts of Speech – The deliberate preponderant choice of particular parts of speech

in discourse sometimes give precise and accurate descriptions, precision and intensify

meaning. They are means of achieving cohesion in discourse.

1.6.3 Phonological Devices

Phonological devices include:

19. Rhyme elements – According to Abrams, the Standard English rhyme “consists in

rhyming words, of the last stressed vowel and of all the speech sounds following that

vowel” (1981:163). End rhymes occur at the end of a verse-line while internal rhymes

occur within a verse-line.

20. Alliteration – This is generally taken to be the repetition of the initial consonant in

two or more adjacent words.

21. Consonance – Consonance is a half rhyme in which final consonants are

repeated but with different preceding vowels.

22. Assonance –Assonance is also a half rhyme realized by repeating the same

(stressed) vowel but with different final consonant in a sequence of nearby words.
 23. Phonaesthesia (secondary onomatopoeia) are those sounds, which are felt to be

appropriate to the meaning of their words. The repetition of sounds of words helps in

linking related words to reinforce meaning. It provides tone and musical colour and it

aids memorability

1.6.4 Graphological Devices

Graphological devices include:

24. Punctuation – These are marks used in writing that divide sentences and phrases.

It is also the system of using the punctuation marks.

25. Paragraphing – Paragraph involve a section of a piece of writing, usually

consisting of several sentences dealing with a single subject. The first sentence of a

paragraph starts on a new line.

1.6.5 Morphological devices

Morphological devices include:

26. Compounding – In the works of Osundare (1983:28), cited in Alabi (2007:166),

he asserts that “Soyinka employs compounds in a way that boosts the baffling

compactness of his work”. What Soyinka collapses into compounds i.e. simple

compounds (Unhyphenated or hyphenated) or multiple compounds are shown to be

potentially longer expressions and structures.

27. Affixes – This is a process of forming new words by putting certain morphemes

before some words, while adding certain morphemes after some others i.e. prefix and

suffix respectively. We have two popular types of morphological operations

(affixation) in English which are inflection and derivational. Inflected forms of

English words are variants of one and the same word. Inflecting a word does not
 necessarily cause it to change its category. A derivational suffix is a morpheme that

usually changes the class of a word to which it is added.

28. Coinages – These are words created from existing word. It is a process of forming

new words through the already existing ones.

The above discussed elements will form the basis of the analysis in the next chapters.

Now I will move on to discuss the relation between stylistic analysis and literary criticism.

1.7 Stylistic Analysis and Literary Criticism

Peter Verdonk (2002:6) in the analysis of the headline found that style does not arise

out of a vacuum but that its production, purpose, and effect are deeply embedded in the

particular context in which both the writer and the reader of the headline play their distinctive

roles. He also says that we should distinguish between two types of context: linguistic and

non-linguistic context. Linguistic context refers to the surrounding features of language inside

a text, like the typography, sounds, words, phrases, and sentences, which are relevant to the

interpretation of other such linguistic elements. Furthermore, he believes that the non-

linguistic context is a much more complex notion since it may include any number of text-

external features influencing the language and style of a text. Analysis in stylistics, therefore

involves a range of general language qualities, which include diction, sentence patterns,

structure and variety, paragraph structure, imagery, repetition, emphasis, arrangement of

ideas and other cohesive devices. Stylistics, Literary Criticism and Practical Criticism have

certain things in common. Stylistics studies and describes the formal features of the text, that

is, the levels of expression vis-à-vis the content, thus bringing out their functional

significance for the interpretation of the work. The stylistician may rely on his intuition and

interpretative skills just as the literary critic, but the former tries to keep at bay, vague and

impressionistic judgment (Chukwuma Nnadi2010: 35).According to what is mentioned

above, it can be concluded that both subjective and objective evidences are used by the
stylistician. Subjective evidence relates to the stylistician’s intuitions and interpretive skills

(in this aspect, as mentioned above, there is a similarity between a literary critic and

stylistician).Objective evidence comes from investigating the form of the language in a text

and here there is no room for intuition and this objective evidence can be considered a basis

which prevents from vague and incorrect interpretations .Here, the confusion between the

terms linguistic stylistics and literary stylistics should be removed. A definition of these terms

provided by Chukwuma Nnadi can remove this confusion:

Stylistics is the scientific study of style. Any such study that leans heavily on external

correlates with none or just a smattering of attention to the ‘rules guiding the

operation of the language’ can be regarded as literary stylistics. The converse of this

premise (i.e. a study that relies heavily on the rules guiding the operation of the

language in the explication of a literary text) is what we regard here as linguistic

stylistics.(2010:36)

Therefore, we have two types of stylistics: literary and linguistic stylistics. To make a

judgment about something, we need different evidences. As far as a literary text is concerned,

two evidences, internal and external evidence, can help us to come to an appropriate

interpretation of a text. Therefore, to interpret a text stylistically both external and internal

evidence are needed. According to the definition provided above by Chukwuma Nnadi, the

literary stylistics can take the form of external evidence and the linguistics study can take the

form of internal evidence .In sum, both literary and linguistic stylistics should be considered

for the process of stylistic analysis to come to a stylistically appropriate interpretation.

Furthermore, Enkvist (1973: 92) observes that linguistic stylistics differs from literary

criticism where brilliant intuitions and elegant, often metaphoric, verbalizations of subjective

responses are at a premium.

 Stanley E. Fish’s article “What is Stylistics and why are they Saying such Terrible

Things about it?” in Essays in Modern Stylistics (1981) says:

Stylistics was born of a reaction to the subjectivity and imprecision of literary studies.

For the appreciative raptures of the impressionistic critic, stylisticians purport to

substitute precise and rigorous linguistic descriptions, and to proceed from those

descriptions to interpretations for which they claim a measure of objectivity.

Stylistics, in short, is an attempt to put criticism on a scientific basis. (33)

Generally speaking, both linguistic stylistics and literary criticism are concerned with

the quest for matter and manner in a literary work of art. Like literary criticism, stylistics is

interested in the message of the work, and how effectively it is delivered. Both linguistic

stylistics and literary criticism rigorously analyze and synthesize a work of art with a

common aim of presenting both the merits and the demerits of the work, and in so doing,

elucidate the work. In spite of such common factor existing between linguistic stylistics and

literary criticism, one finds that there lies a difference in their modus operandi, and

consequently a difference in their evaluations. Whereas linguistic stylistics begins and

concludes its analysis and synthesis from the literary text itself, rigorously examining how a

special configuration of language has been used in the realization of a particular subject

matter, quantifying all the linguistic means (including imagery) that coalesced to achieve a

special aesthetic purpose; literary criticism does not suffer that restriction to the work of art

under analysis. In its own analysis, it intermittently works on the text, but occasionally

wanders off and brings in extra-linguistic, extra-textual material (may be from philosophy,

psychology, biography, social history, etc.) to bear on the work. The result is that, whereas

linguistic stylistics comes up with a somewhat objective evaluation, based on realistic

criteria; literary criticism comes up with that which is generally imaginative, speculative,

subjective, and impressionistic ( Chukwuma Nnadi 2010:30).

 Finally, here lies the major difference between linguistic stylistics and literary

criticism – a point more lucidly corroborated by Leech and Short (1995) while discussing

“Style, Text and Frequency”:

Aesthetic terms used in the discussion of style (urbane, curt, exuberant, florid, lucid,

plain, vigorous, etc.) are not directly referable to any observable linguistic features of

texts, and one of the long-term aims of stylistics must be to see how far such

descriptions can be justified in terms of descriptions of a more linguistic kind. The

more a critic wishes to substantiate what he says about style, the more he will need to

point to the linguistic evidence of texts; and linguistic evidence, to be firm, must be

couched in terms of numerical frequency…. So, quantitative stylistics on the one

hand… may provide confirmation for the ‘hunches’ or insights we have about style.

On the other, it may bring to light significant features of style which would otherwise

have been overloaded, and so lead to further insights; but only in a limited sense does

it provide an objective measurement of style. Moreover, the role of quantification

depends on how necessary it is to prove one’s point… intuition has a respectable

place both in linguistics and criticism. ( 46-47)

1.8 Pedagogical Application of Stylistics: Theoretical Issues

The aim of the application of stylistics, the language-based approach, in teaching

literary texts for the non-native students is multiple. A central issue is to help students to

develop their response to these texts, for response is the cornerstone of making anything at all

from them. This target is put forwards by stylisticians like Widdowson, Brumfit, Carter,

Short, Trengove Candlin and others. It is by developing the students' abilities to respond

effectively that they can have a genuine access to what they read and will be able to enjoy it

and gain knowledge and experience from it.

 Another principal objective of teaching literary texts is to develop the students'

literary competence to assist them in achieving more positive response to, and effective

interaction with texts.

The third vital goal of this kind of teaching is to develop the students' skills and

capacities of experiencing the world created by and within the literary text. It is a

development of all kinds of their potential abilities necessary for them to read, understand

and respond to literary works via language.

The fourth aim is to further and sharpen the students' awareness of the stylistic

patterning of language, which they will put to extended use in non-literary texts. This will be

helpful in the gradual and simultaneous elimination of their prejudices against non-literary

language and of their elevation of literary language. It is a fact that the non-native students

rate literary language highly more than the native students. The result of that is the inevitable

demotion and misconception of the non-literary by regarding it as incompatible with the

literary. This, what may be called Polarisation Fallacy, has proved to be insufficient, as many

contemporary stylisticians like Fish, Leech, Nash, Carter, Fowler, Short and several others

have confirmed. Unfortunately, this fallacy has so far been given a short shrift in non-native

students' classes. I, therefore, would urge teachers of literary stylistics overseas to give it

more attention than they are doing now. Its potential peril is the widening of the gap between

the literary and the non-literary by making them rivals, which harms the process of teaching

and response .

The fifth and last, but by no means the least, objective of teaching English literary

material in terms of a stylistic approach is the tightening of links between students and

literature, making reading literary texts their unwavering practice, or, as Brumfit and Carter

(1986: introd. ) put it, making them into serious readers. And that is a very important aim, for

without having serious readers, literary texts will be thrown into the dark. We do not want
them to be transformed into dull textbooks, serving a cheap, commercial academic end of

granting school and university qualifications. So what we must do, as Brumfit declares, is to

try to make students retain a close constant contact with literature, which goes beyond the

academic purposes and school and university days (In Brumfit and Carter, op. cit. 237,260).

1.9 Methodology

The difficulty with all the trends outlined above, as with the traditional approaches to

the study of style, is that they focus on one aspect while neglecting the other. The difficulty

with the theory of style as choice is that it has no method for handling lexical choices and the

symbolic dimension of language. When style becomes a matter of choice, it restricts the

readers from getting maximum pleasure out of the work. The poem becomes a rigid fact

thrown at the readers. Reader’s participation is negligible in case of “style as choice” as there

is a clear demarcation between syntax and semantics. The problem with the “style as

deviation” theory is that it is capable of explaining only one aspect of style. In case of “style

as tension” between meaning and form, an alien world is created beyond the reach of

maximum readers. In short, each theory has its own advantages and disadvantages. However,

the available theoretical apparatus does help one to gain new insights into the study and

interpretation of literary texts. Therefore, in the fluid state of the present day stylistics the

right thing, perhaps, would be to make a pragmatic approach to the stylistic analysis in hand.

Although this introductory chapter offers taxonomic and theoretical information about

stylistics that does not mean that all the categorical features of syntax, lexis and phonetics

with regard to Auden’s poems have to be described. Stylistics is interpretive, not descriptive.

As the title makes it amply clear, style is an interpretive clue, which can be followed at

various levels of language. The task in hand is to interpret Auden’s poems and mediate

between linguistic analysis and literary interpretation. In pursuance of this objective, I have

chosen to take those poems of Auden that are significant both from the critical point of view
as well as stylistic point of view. For example, poems containing significant syntactic

features that seem to contain interpretive clues have been chosen for syntactic analysis.

Similarly, the poems for lexical analysis and phonetic analysis have been chosen because

these have relatively important lexical and phonetic features.

For analysis care has also been taken to choose poems that represent different phases

of Auden’s poetry, given the fact that his career spanned a little less than half a century

(1927-1973) Since the objective of the dissertation is to interpret and also evaluate Auden’s

poetry, it becomes imperative that the poems that are stylistically significant ought to be

representatives of his literary themes, stanza forms, meter etc. However, much is missed in

the process. Out of 400 poems, which Auden wrote, not to mention his operas and plays, I

have only taken 20, which is a very small sample of a huge corpus. And yet, sampling is all

about choosing a few objects as data out of so many for analysis, and it is a standard principle

of the process of knowledge production. I have been thoughtfully selective about my data,

adopting the criteria I mentioned just now.

In order to keep in diachronic perspective the rich poetic output of Auden I have

sequenced the poems for analysis in chronological order. Such ordering helps one understand

the broad patterns of change in the poetic forms and themes of Auden. Thus, the analysis that

follows has been based on a close reading of the text, without any reference to extraneous

factors such as the poet’s biography or background.

1.10. Plan for the Chapters

The prominent linguistic items of the poems have been examined under the heads of

Lexis, Syntax and Sound Pattern (Phonetics). The poems that have been chosen for stylistic

analysis under the heads of Lexis, Syntax and Sound pattern are well thought out.
 In this work of mine, I have divided the whole thesis into five chapters. Chapter I is

an introduction to style and stylistics. It has been entitled “Style and Meaning in Stylistic

Analysis”.

Chapter II bears the title “Major Aspects of Auden’s Poetry”. Here, with a brief

introduction to Auden and review of related literature, I shall move on to highlight the major

themes of Auden’s poetry.

In Chapter III, “Lexis as Style”, I shall analyze the lexis of six poems of Auden. Here

I shall show how lexis structures poetic meaning.

Chapter IV, under the title “Sound Pattern as Style”, is based on sound patterns and
how different supra- segmental sound features of metrical arrangements, line formations, and
rhythm inform the structural meaning.

Bearing the title “Syntax as Style”, Chapter V focuses on the phrasal and clausal aspects of
Auden’s poetry and analyses features of syntactic inversion, parallelism and deviation in so
far as these contribute to and explicate meaning of the poems.

***
Major Aspects of Auden’s Poetry

2.1 A Brief Introduction of W. H. Auden

Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) is one of the important poets in the 20th century.

He was the third son born on the 21st February, 1907, in York, the north of England. His

father was a physician and his mother a nurse. Both his parents were High Church Anglicans,

which had a great impact on Auden's beliefs in his later years. It can be said that Auden was

more like his father in his early stages, while he became more permanently like his mother.

Influenced and encouraged by his parents, Auden began his widely reading, which further

enhanced his interest in music - music with words. He referred science to poetry in his

childhood. However, when entering Oxford, he became zestful with the Anglo-Saxon poetry

and medieval poetry, so he felt that he should devote himself to poetry creation. After

graduation he went to Berlin to study the German literature. Back to Britain in 1930, he

began to teach at a middle school for five years. Though he was engaged in political and

social activities in the later 1930s, poetic creation never gets away from him. In 1937, he

visited Spain to support the antifascists where he wrote his famous poem “Spain”. During

1938, he travelled in China with Christopher Isherwood and witnessed the cruelty of the war,

which urged him to create a sonnet sequence “In Time of War”. They returned via the United

States where Auden made decision to live in after this experience. In 1939, he immigrated to

the United States. In 1940, he reconverted to Christianity and joined the Anglican

Communion. He became a naturalized American in 1946. During his stay in America, he had

taught in many universities and was even elected Professor of poetry at Oxford for five years

(1956-1960). He died in Vienna on September 29th, 1973 and buried in the churchyard in

Kirchstetten, a small village in Austria. There was a plaque in the Poet's corner of

Westminster Abbey which also commemorated his life.

 As an important Anglo-American poet, Auden has a high reputation and great

influence on English poetry. Edward Mendelson describes him as "the most inclusive poet of

the twentieth century, its most technically skilled, and its most truthful" (1981: xxiii). Along

with his marvelous poetic creation, Auden finally turns himself as another excellent poet

following the generation of W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot. He is a prolific writer who publishes

in succession more than 10 volumes during his lifetime, which includes 12 collections of

short poems, ballads and songs, and 6 of long poems. His works involve many subjects such

as popular culture, current event and vernacular speech. Besides, he was also a great

playwright, librettist, editor, translator and essayist. The Times declared in 1973:

W. H. Auden, for long the enfant terrible of English poetry ... emerges finally as its

undisputed master. .. it was Auden above all who showed how the full range of

traditional forms could be received in the service of the kind of moral and social

realism that a world in crisis demanded, in this way he was in the vanguard of a

versatile and publicly accessible art (Carpenter, 1981: 454).

2.2 Literature Review of Auden's Poems

Auden is regarded as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. As a versatile and

creative poet, Auden always arouses interests of critics. Therefore, many scholars and critics

in western countries have studied him from different aspects. At the beginning of Auden's

poetry career he was given a lot of praise which was not relevant to the true nature of his

poetry; and he was "hailed as chief of peers of a group with a political plan, as a poetic

redeemer who could find and lead the way out of the 'Waste Land'" (Spears, 1964: 1). When

The Orators was published in 1932, many critics thought highly of it. However, when they

found that Auden was not what they wanted him to be, they began to criticize him harshly,

and they did more harshly when he immigrated to the United States and started to write

religious poetry. Critics often accused Auden of betraying his origins and regarded him as a
"Lost Leader" during the late Thirties and the Forties. His later work was also criticized

bitterly.

During the 1930s, critics evaluated his work and the intention conveyed by his work.

For the aesthetical-orientated critics, they discussed the techniques, the forms and the attitude

of his works. They discussed whether Auden's new poem could represent a new spirit that

could lead them out of the "Waste Land". For the political-orientated critics, they thought his

poems were revolutionary which represented the communism. For example, after Auden

published Poems in 1930, his detachment, clinical attitude and arbitrary qualities of his

poems aroused interests and then gained favorable criticism from the reviewers. They saluted

Auden as the forerunner of a long-awaited poetry which might surpass the unsatisfying views

of T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence, and the forerunner of a new psychological and political

mood. In spite of this, instead of commenting Auden and his works individually, critics

evaluated the Auden group as a whole which included Christopher Isherwood, Stephen

Spender, C. D. Lewis and so on. In 1932, the publication of The Orators consolidated

Auden's position as the new voice of that age. Radical, fiercely satirical, The Orators

represented whatever the political colour of the reviews. The Times commended that it "will

repay study as well for its original treatment of language as for its courageous - though often

bitter and cynical indictment of contemporary conditions" (Haffenden, 1983: 7). Left-wing

critics and propagandists had reasons to cast their hopes in Auden.

The year of 1939 was a turning point for Auden who decided to immigrate to the

United States and close his English chapter, which caused a great repercussion in Britain.

People did not comment him and his work of this period objectively due to the patriotism.

Therefore, critics not only regarded that Auden's new work were not as good as the old ones,

but criticized his personality and his beliefs. For instance, when the book Another Time came

out in 1939, it was criticized harshly. John Lehmann believes that Auden has removed
himself from "the possibility of writing the poetry of this war we are waiting for; as it is,

there seems to me a danger that a certain vagueness of phrase and a kind of beneficent

aloofness that is disturbing in much of Auden's recent work may increase" (Haffenden, 1983:

35), and Julian Symons felt pity that Auden had lost his gift with his disinvolvement.

Moreover, after Auden's immigration, his spiritual belief also changed, so critics began to

study his development and his ideologies. They considered that Auden shifted his beliefs

rapidly, irresponsibly and regarded his career as an inverted development. In 1941, Randall

Jarrell "revealed" the truth that Auden's ideologies was "more than a series of rationalization

of his own psychological peculiarities" (Spears, 1964:3), and through his analysis, the texture

of Auden's later verse was a constant degeneration of the earliest. Consequently, with Jarrel's

impact, there were more substantial indictments charged Auden untrustworthily. This trend

accumulated and reached the highest point in Joseph Warren Beach's The Making of the

Auden s Canon, a book in which he explained Auden's revisions of his early poems in terms

of changes of his ideas and beliefs.

However, as time went on, people gradually realized that Auden's later work actually

was worthy of reading. Some critics started to estimate the value of Auden again. In 1951,

Richard Hoggart, a famous British critic, wrote Auden: An introductory Essay, a book of the

first full-length study of Auden's work. Although his view of Auden's career was affected by

the hostile critics, he was the first person to give a neutral comment on Auden's immigration

and his later works. Later on, the books that claimed the right comments of Auden appeared

more. The critics tried to establish the central importance of Auden's poetry after his

immigration. Francois Duchene, in his book The Case of the Helmeted Airman, concluded by

praising "the powerful relevance of the comic vision and the scope of Auden's achievement in

re-rooting it in a new environment" (Haffenden, 1983: 54). Till recent years, more and more

monographs have appeared. For example, in 1981, Humphrey Carpenter wrote a book named
W. H. Auden: A Biography, which introduced the life and the creation background of Auden.

In 1998, John Fuller wrote another book W. H. Auden: A Commentary which gave detailed

explanations related to Auden. These books help a lot to understand the life, poetry and other

aspects of W. H. Auden. This is the whole study on W. H. Auden.

Nevertheless, the study of Auden's poetry from the angle of stylistics has been rarely

touched upon. There was no monograph about the style study on Auden's poetry at first.

Many critics introducing Auden and his poetry only mentioned his techniques and rhetoric

devices. Randall Jarrell's early essay on the development of Auden's style from 1930 to 1941,

Changes of Auden 's Attitude and Rhetoric in Auden's poetry was written in 1945. The second

half of this easy traced the shift in style which accompanied the change of Auden's

ideologies. Jarrell's summary of Auden's early style is quite valuable for he lists twenty-six

characteristics of Auden's poetic language, such as frequent omission of articles,

demonstrative adjectives, subjects and so on, which gives an accurate account of some of

Auden's early poems. Hoggart's Auden: An Introduction Essay discussed Auden's styles and

techniques in one chapter which was written in 1951. In that chapter, Hoggart analyzed some

general characteristics and meters of Auden's poetry. In 1979, Ronald Carter wrote his

dissertation-Towards a theory of discourse stylistics, which was a study of some applications

of linguistic theory to the analysis of poetry, with particular reference to W. H. Auden. This is

the first dissertation which studies Auden's poetry from the perspective of discourse stylistics

that the author of this paper could look for. In 2004, Christopher Lawson from Lancaster

University wrote his dissertation-Cognitive Stylistics: the Use of Cognitive Metaphor Theory

within W. H. Auden's As I Walked Out One Evening, which was devoted to the analysis of

Auden's poem “As I Walked Out One Evening” from the aspect of cognitive stylistics. In the

same year, in the book The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden, Peter Porter also

discussed Auden's language and style.

 To sum up, due to many scholars' arduous work, the study of Auden in Europe gets

considerable achievements. However, there is still room for further study, such as cognitive

study on Auden's poems and so on. Therefore, this dissertation tries to study Auden's poems

in the stylistic perspective in order to supply a further explanation of his poetry.

2.3 Themes of Auden’s Poetry

W. H. Auden has been responsible for writing poetry that had more of the decade of

the 1930s, and it reflected through his poetry exactly what he saw around him. The poetry of

Auden elaborates on the travails and tribulations of the ordinary man. His poems reflected

people and their responses to the existing political scenario, their helplessness due to the

political conditions that they were ruled by and how it affected them. This totally refutes the

fact that he used poetry to promote his leftist leanings, though he did voice his leftist beliefs

through his poetry to a certain extent to reflect on the thought process of man. In fact, he

never used his poetry to engage in extolling the leftist theories, but it bordered on the

characters in the poems that had leftist inclinations. Nevertheless, his poetry did reflect his

perceptions on the ideologies of communism especially in the poetry written after 1928. It

was on a visit to Germany in 1928 which brought vast changes in his thinking, and his

thought process were more concerned with the psychological aspect of man combined with

the political influences of man. It is also believed that his poetry has also been a platform

from which he questioned the social order, the existing political ideologies and the modernity

in man. In fact he portrayed humanism in his poetry and this was the underlying ethos of the

poetry of his times. Besides humanism, his poetry dealt more with the mind of man,

especially man in that particular period in which social, political, economic and emotional

upheavals the country was passing through. For example in “Petition” he invokes for a
change of heart and also in “Miss Gee” he is satirically introducing to us his convictions on

the psychology of man.In “Petition” he says:

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, (line 1-4)

In “Miss Gee” he elaborates on the condition of man and uses the illness of the

modern era, i.e. cancer, to explain how the mind can become cancerous. What is extremely

endearing in the poem is the way Miss Gee is presented in the early stanzas. The poem begins

on a very charming note when Miss Gee is introduced and which goes on to become satirical

as we find the tragedy of an illness creep into the life of Miss Gee. The poet has used the

symbol of a lady to represent the society and the illness to be the illness that the society is

being afflicted with. Auden’s poetry showed intensity in the thought processes of man than in

the political conditions of the country. His political reflections were more to do with what it

did to the psychological aspect of man and its effect on mankind. Most of Auden’s poetry in

the initial stages reflects the psychological aspect of man, and not the political ideologies or

the general political environment that existed then. But the language that Auden used in the

poems was definitely politically motivated. When his first collection of poems was published

in 1930, it was after much editing, rejections and additions that it did get to see the light of

the day. And the second edition, after even more editing and changes, was published in 1933.

But once it was published, it established Auden to be one of the greatest poets in English

Literature. The beauty of the language and the novelty of design of the poems were unique at

that time and it brought a freshness to the world of literature in general and poetry in

particular.
2.3.1 Theme of War

One of the most popular themes of W. H. Auden’s poetry is war which was very

relevant at that time. Since war was the result of political upheavals around the world, the

poems too reflected on war with political undertones. It is very clear that Auden did not

reflect his own political leanings but he used the theme to reflect the condition of man in a

highly politicized society which was reeling in misery and strife due to war. His role as a

critic who took a very controversial viewpoint of war was evident in most of his poems,

especially in the beginning of his poetic years. His earlier poems spoke of the various wars

like the World Wars I and II, Spanish Civil War, and Communist revolution in Russia and the

tragic outcomes of wars. According to him, war gives birth to ills in the society and

sufferings for mankind, as he has reflected in poems like “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”, “Spain

1937” and “September 1, 1939”. His poems reveal the glory of the past in contrast to the

misery of the contemporary society and make these wars responsible for this deterioration in

society. “September 1, 1939” written on the eve of the World War II is all about the hostility

and the resentment towards war. The poem is an angry condemnation of the war and its

effects. The title itself is a satirical attack on the compromise that so shamefully brought

about harsh conditions of misery for the people. When he says, “Lost in the haunted wood,

Children afraid of the night”, he is voicing his own fears of the impending darkness of the

war. In “The Shield of Achilles” he exposes the desolation and the misery of the modern man

and compares it to the Greek civilization of the glorious past. He laments the disintegration of

moral values and the complete absence of religious beliefs in the society through poems like

“The Shield of Achilles”. Auden found a perfect platform to speak against war and its

repercussions in his poems and his poems reflected on the various wars that were fought then,

especially on the World War II. The dark cloud of the Second World War was hovering over

some of the great nations of Europe and the atmosphere was gearing up to face the great

tragedy that was to strike mankind around the world. Greatly influenced by Homer’s The
Iliad, the poem speaks of the world in which there is more of spirituality than the hatred of

war. It was at this time that he was writing the poem, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” an elegy to

the great poet W. B.Yeats whose influence is felt in almost all of Auden’s poems. Auden

didn’t let go of the opportunity to speak of the prevailing political situations around the

world. The poem itself is a reflection of one of the most famous poems by Yeats, “Easter

1911”. As he speaks of the greatness of Yeats as a poet and person, he also makes his cry

louder about the impending darkness that is to engulf Europe soon:

In the nightmare of the dark

All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate; (part III line 5-8)

His rather critical views on the rising political ideologies like Nazism and Fascism and the

dictatorship of Hitler were expressed in the poem in a rather disturbing way because it speaks

of the death of another contemporary poet. It also hits out at the chaotic political situation that

is the warning for the coming war. The rising insecurities of the impending war, the nation’s

vying with hatred towards each other to gain control and the loss of kinship among the people

brought a lot of pain and anguish to the poet. All this found expression in other war poems

like “Spain 1937”. The poem “Spain 1937”, speaks of the Spanish Civil war as a struggle that

swings between the past and the present and the varying political ideologies. The abundance

of the past and the destruction of that abundance in the present are set in a poem, which

includes the poet too, in all its condemnations of the condition. The poem transcends in time

not only from the beautiful description of Spain and the civilization that existed there to the

ugly and horrific changes brought about by the civil war but how those changes could be

overcome to regain the glory of the past in the future. The three stages of time, past, present
and future are amalgamated in the poem beautifully. The reader is inspired to take lessons

from the past in the present to beautify the future when the poet says:

On that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot

Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe;
On that tableland scored by rivers,
Our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our fever (line 65-68)

All his war poems, or poems written during the period of war, spoke not of the

physical aspect of war but what it did to societies at large and man existing in those societies.

W.H. Auden’s poetry was a reflection of his high intellect, his philosophical vision and his

language that bordered on satire and irony. The element of wit gave his poems a lightness

which otherwise would have been very boring to read, considering that he spoke of very

serious topics like politics, war and his expression of the social order that existed then. The

social awareness was not limited just to America or Europe but all around the world. The fact

that he wrote about the strife that was taking place in Spain and Germany is a proof of this

awareness and expression. The sense of modernity was evident in almost all the poets of the

thirties and their conscious attempt to be modern was significantly seen in their imagery that

was projected in their works. The imagery was almost always from the modern lifestyle

which they saw around them and which included machinery, politics and its effect on life,

drudgery in the society and the strife of man in trying to make life better.

2.3.2 Rejection of Convention

The next theme that Auden’s poems reflect is the rejection of convention in any

form. He gives importance to individuals as personalities and not as a part of society

especially in the thinking process and forming of ideologies. In the poem “In Praise of

Limestone”, the poet comes out very strongly against conforming to society and falling in
line to expectations. A satire on the same issue is also seen in “The Unknown Citizen”, where

he used irony and satire to describe the position of the establishments in relation to the

citizens of a nation. We also see glimpses of the silence in which the societies go about their

lives with no questions asked when they are reduced to mere alpha-numerical identities as in

“The Unknown Citizen”. He analyses the so called ailing society and at times also suggests

ways and means to overcome the challenges caused due to the ailments. His poems were in a

true sense “modern” in nature and reflected the society as it existed at the time writing and

hence this made his poetry very contemporary. The modernism in the poem is evident from

the mood of the poems as it reflected the mood of the time that it was written in, in particular

the mood that existed in the pre-war period. If the pre-war period in Auden’s poetry reflected

the mood of anguish and anxiety, the post- war period was elaborated with a tinge of satire

and irony as the world of the modern man became dependent on consumerism, lack of

spirituality and an alpha –numeric existence.

2.3.3 Human Suffering

Human suffering has always been a common theme found in almost all of Auden’s

poems. There may not be a single work of Auden that does not highlight the various forms of

suffering that man is subjected to. In “As I Walked Out One Evening”, though the underlying

theme is that of love, it is also the futility of life, of the uncertainties of life and the misery

that is a part of life especially in the post-war period, when a radical change came to be

visible in the social order in general and more particularly in the lifestyle. Above all, the

poem is a reminder of the passage of time and what changes occur in life, causing suffering,

as time goes by:

But all the clocks in the city

Began to whirr and chime:

 'O let not Time deceive you,

You cannot conquer Time. (line 21-24)

Human suffering has always been a topic of discussion for most creative people

whether they are writers, poets or painters. Various painters have highlighted different

aspects of human suffering and one such painter was Brueghel, an Italian painter, belonging

to the 16th century. Auden was greatly influenced by the painter’s most popular work on

human suffering and was so inspired by it that he based his poem “Musee Des Beaux Art”

which turned out to be one of the most beautiful, and probably, his best poem. Auden

personifies human suffering in the poem and gives it a cycle of birth and death, making it a

part of life.

According to Auden, every form of human suffering had a particular human

position which was very rightly elaborated in the paintings created by the Old Masters.

Auden was of the belief that every human suffering was an experience in life and that these

experiences also included love, joy and fear. That Auden believed in this theory is fairly well

explained in the following lines:

The Old Masters; how well, they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

(line 2-4 )

The poem speaks of life as it goes on while the people living the life are filled with

misery and suffering. Auden believes human suffering to be a strange phenomenon in which

emotions like sympathy and empathy are evoked. Auden’s poems always had a word or two

for those who were weak and infirm, suffering the vagaries of life. That’s why while he

speaks of the continuous flow of regular life is more secure in America, he also speaks of the
misery and suffering of the people of Haiti. This way he ensures that the misery of the less

fortunate is not forgotten by those living a more comfortable life:

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

Human suffering has also been made to look comic and something in which Auden

found the comic element. Auden’s comic relief was a great reprieve from the tragic refrain

found in his poems on human suffering. Some of the more popular poems of Auden that

reflect on the satirical overtones of human suffering include “Petition” and “The Unknown

Citizen”. In “The Unknown Citizen”, the poet satirically questions in the final closing line:

Was he free? Was he happy?.... (line-27)

Probably Auden felt that the suffering was brought about by man himself and thus

the alleviation of human suffering too would be possible by man himself. Only man with his

intelligence and ability could reform a society ridden with misery. According to Auden, man

can do it only with a deep and unfailing faith in God. It was probably this faith that was given

release in some of the poems that were spiritually inclined like “Petition” in which he

addresses God as ‘Sir’, striking ironic overtones:

Sir, no man’s enemy, forgiving all

But will his negative inversion, be prodigal:

Send to us power and light………….. (line 1-3)

 Auden’s poetry is known for the three stages that it can be divided into and in each of

these stages focus was always on man and the various experiences of life that man suffered

throughout life.

Most of his poems have reflected on human misery caused by different factors

including war, hatred and death. In “Funeral Blues”, for example, he cries of the loss of a

special person. The entire poem is a grieving cry of the loss due to death; and the sufferings

man experiences are due the death of a close person. A sense of misery and grief is evoked

using symbols and images to exemplify the human suffering that man experiences and which,

according to Auden, is a significant aspect of life.

2.3.4 Religious Themes

It was around the year 1939-40 that there came other influences in the life of Auden

which reflected in his various works. These influences shaped his religious and humanistic

oulook. It became evident that his inclination towards Christianity was growing and his

poems were a result of this change which was probably caused due to the various upheavals

in his life. According to Richard Hoggart, “The most striking characteristic of the

considerable body of work which Auden has produced in America is that in all of it, whether

in poems, general essays, critical articles reviews of lecture and whatever his ostensible

subject, he discusses religious belief” (1951:23) Though prayers and his invocation to God

have always been a part of his poems, it was more prominent in his works that were written

after his relocation in America. Published around the year 1945 one of his most popular

religious poems, “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio”, reflects his Christian beliefs

quite vividly and strongly. It was written during the World War II, one of the most painful

times in the history of mankind. So, it was a relief for the poet to make a transition to religion

as a support against the hard times. Some of his other poems include “Nones”, published in
1951. The poem calls for people to respect the crucifixion of Christ. It is an appeal to the

people to refrain from the ills that society is ridden with:

…we have lost our public

The faceless many who always

Collect when any world is to be wrecked, (stanza 2 line 1-3)

This disillusionment of life inspired his future themes and his thoughts. It gradually

dragged Auden towards spiritual and religious sentiments which were seen as a very

important aspect of his poems in the later stages. We can see this sentiment flow quite easily

in his popular Christian poem “Song of the Devil". Religious sentiments have also been

voiced in various poems like in “September 1, 1939”, when he prays for benevolence and

blessing in the concluding lines of the poem: “Show an affirming flame”. His acceptance of

the presence of the God was also seen in some poems like “Petition”. The entire poem is like

a prayer that wants “a change of heart”, and prays for “Curing the intolerable neural itch”, an

appeal to God for release from “the exhaustion of weaning”, “the liar’s quinsy”, “and the

distortions of ingrown virginity”. The theme of religion was found in all his later works in all

forms, whether it was poetry, plays and essays reflected his opinions and feelings on religion.

According to Justin Raplogle, “Auden’s poetry of the 1940s shows clearly that he belongs in

the tradition followed by Christians who emphasized accepting life more than transcending

it”(1969:46). His introduction to Kierkegaard in the year 1938 had a profound influence on

his thinking and forming of views and opinions on Christianity. He was extremely positive

and optimistic in what he believed. His belief in Christianity, too, led him to form more

positive and optimistic views and opinions that were always reflected in his works. His poem

“For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio” is a lengthy appeal to the people to have faith

and not falter in times of travails:

 Let us therefore be contrite but without anxiety,
For Powers and Times are not gods but mortal gifts from God;
Let us acknowledge our defeats but without despair,
For all societies and epochs are transient details,
Transmitting an everlasting opportunity
That the Kingdom of Heaven may come, not in our present
And not in our future, but in the Fullness of Time.
Let us pray

Auden believed that the loss of faith in God, the loss of religious values and the loss of

Christian beliefs were responsible for the social upheavals that existed then. By turning to

religion, he found an avenue through which he could wean people towards the right path and

towards righteousness. “He”, says Golo Mann, “no longer expected politics to provide any

kind of salvation; disaster rather; and at the very best the avoidance of the worst disaster.

What is known as ‘history’ now seemed to him a fundamentally irrational, cruel, hopelessly

idiotic process. Instead of the spirit of universal love which is characteristic of the Left, there

came something which was close to global pessimism, modified by a deep sympathy for

individual people”(1974:9) . His poems in this period, popularly called “the American

period” of Auden, extolled the values of Christianity but never attempted to promote the

religion and never stressed the benefits of following Christianity. The poems were more a call

to people to follow God and to follow the right path and he connected Christian values to

goodness. His poems were more sympathetic in nature, unlike his earlier poems, in which the

anguish at the misery of mankind was evident. Having said that, it was also true that Auden’s

religious concerns were never to speak of God but of the reasons why man should be

religious. His poetry spoke of religion from a humanistic point of view, which said that by

following the path of god, man can overcome all the challenges in life and the upheavals that

life causes. We see this attitude towards religion in his later poems like “Nones” written

in1951, and in “The Shield of Achilles” and in “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio”.

Auden gained mental strength from his faith in God and expressed that in his poems. One of
his works that highlighted his religious views was Horae Canonicae, a series of religious

poems which also included Nones. The mood of the poems was more an acceptance of the

upheavals in life with the firm belief that the future is bright by accepting God and having

faith in the goodness of God.

A point to be noted here is that Auden’s religious faith was rekindled in the later

years as an adult; this prompted him to find solace from all the misery and strife that he saw

around him. It was rekindled because he had no religious views as a child and did not believe

in the existence of god. In fact, the various experiences in life probably brought about a

religious reconciliation in the poet and geared him towards religious sentiments. For Auden,

religions meant togetherness as all become one with God. This thought is eulogized in the

poem “New Year Letter” in which he says:

we need to love all since we are

Each a unique particular

Edward Mendelson views that “Auden took seriously his membership in the

Anglican Church and derived many of his moral and aesthetic ideas from Christian doctrines

developed over two millennia, but he valued his church and its doctrines only to the degree

that they helped to make it possible to love one’s neighbor as oneself”(2007:64)

2.3.5 Auden’s Love for Art

Art has been given due significance in most of W. H. Auden’s works and it has

found a voice in the reflection of Auden’s approach to art and his perception of art. The

implication of art is always questioned as have been the other themes in Auden’s works. The

social relevance of art, the creative aspect, and its philosophical connotations are all

questioned by Auden in his poems. For Auden, understanding art as a part of his

development as a poet and journalistic journeys was more important than using art to
eulogize the significance or beauty of nature, romance, and people. He found art to be a form

of creativity in which an artist had the freedom of expression and was able to be critical of the

happening events and the people around. His habit of questioning was found in the poem

“The New Year Letter”. According to the poet, it is the duty of the artists to question

anything that causes misery or anguish to man, and every artist should be ready to use the

vehicle of his or her art to question the social order, the social and moral values, and the

political order. Passive acceptance should not be the norm for any artist in any field of art- be

it literature, painting, or any other performing arts. Though Auden was greatly influence by

Freud, he was not fully favorable to the Freudian theory that art was always beneficial or

harmless:

To me Art’s subject is the human clay,

And landscape but a background to a torso. (Letter To Lord Byron)

Auden felt that art was related to religion as both respected righteousness and

followed the right path. Moreover, Auden was of the view that art was inborn and a gift of

god. So it was a path through which divinity can be attained. Auden’s views on art can be

explained by the fact that he did not view art as an end of a means, but a means by which a

configuring of an intense and profound psychological and emotional order can be attained.

Besides writing poetry and essays, Auden made foray into the world of art extended to

musical theatres and operas which were highly contemporary and modern. His artistic

explorations also include writing film scripts.

“Musee Des Beaux Arts” is one of Auden's celebrated short poems. Auden visited the

Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels in 1938 and wrote this poem in 1939. He was impressed to

see the paintings of Brueghal. The poet states at the outset of the poem that the old masters

were sensitively responsive to the suffering of human being. But at the same time they could

also understand the indifference shown to the suffering people. In another picture Christ was
crucified in some secluded untidy part of the world while the dogs continued their doggy life.

The poet wants to tell that the men who crucified Christ and the onlookers of the scene were

no better than animals, rather worse than animals. In fact, the paintings and the poet are

telling the same thing i.e. human indifference to individual suffering. The ploughman, the

sun, the sailors are all telling about the selfishness of human being.In other words, the people

show a stoical attitude to individual suffering. Each of Auden’s poems can be called a world

of art which he paints using the colors and images that he sees around him. The words used

by him are his tool or the brush with which he paints the images.

2.3.6 Significance of Love

In Auden's poetry the real subject is man engaged in human activity. Auden believes

that to love other human beings selflessly is a right social action and that it would create a

social life full of love leading to co-operation. But considering the kind of life that Auden had

in his childhood and adolescence, the social set-up, the war and the lack of proper family

bonding, it was natural that Auden had a highly skeptical view of love and its significance.

Love had different meanings at each stage of his life. Even though there is a

recurring reference to the emotion, the reference has had a different allusion each time to a

theme in his poems. The initial confusion and vagueness in the first few poems attains clarity

and becomes more concrete in his later works. But even in this concreteness there is

skepticism and a non- acceptance of romantic love. According to Stephen Spender,

“[Throughout] the whole development of his poetry (if one makes exception of the

undergraduate work) his theme had been love: not Romantic love but love as interpreter of

the world, love as individual need, and love as redeeming power in the life of society and of

the individual. At first there was the Lawrentian idea of unrepressed sexual fulfillment

through love; then that of the social revolution which would accomplish the change of heart

that would change society; then, finally, Christianity which looked more deeply into the heart
than any of these, offered man the chance of redeeming himself and the society, but also

without illusions showed him to himself as he really was with all the limitations of his

nature”(1973:4). His views were greatly influenced by Freud and in particular, Freud’s theory

on Sex.

Auden used the concept of love to spread the word about being socially compatible

and environmentally friendly. Moreover, Auden reflected on love that was impersonal and

impassive. Hence the rapture, ecstasy and emotional states of joy or sorrow are not so deeply

rooted in his works.

Auden’s poems do not reveal love in the formal meaning of the word as, romance,

but it means differently in each theme of the poems that he wrote. His different perceptions of

love is seen on the basis of the varying influences in his life, and one of the first influences

was that of Freud whose concept of love influenced his first few poems like “Miss Gee”. He

considered love and sex to be interconnected and believed that suppression of either could

prove catastrophic for the person:

Miss Gee knelt down in the side-aisle,

She knelt down on her knees;
“Lead me not into temptation
But make me a good girl, please.” (line 49-52)

This theory is well explained and exemplified in this little prayer in his poem “Miss

Gee” who becomes afflicted with cancer and, according to Auden, the affliction is a result of

her denial of sexual gratification. He compares unsatisfied love to be like that of childless

woman who is susceptible to cancer:

“Childless women get it.

And men when they retire;
It's as if there had to be some outlet
For their foiled creative fire.”(line 73-76)
Other references to libido or free expression of love are found in many poems of Auden.
Some of them are in “Petition”:
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. (line 3-6)

Auden’s “The Prologue” personifies the feeling of love as the sole force of life,

when he says:

O Love, the interest itself in thoughtless Heaven,

Make simpler daily and beating of man’s heart; within,

If his first phase was more a psychological influence, in the second stage it was the

philosophical. The Marxist philosophy greatly influenced his thinking and this influence also

reflected on his concept of love. He laid emphasis on the observation of the world and nature

around home, knowledge and environment and professed love through them. For him, Man

should love those around him and the nature to attain the perfection that man is capable of.

Most of these poems in this stage exhibited tendencies of Marxism but was not totally devoid

of the influence of Freud from the earlier stage. His philosophical viewpoint of love found it

to be selfless and a submission of the self and in words of Auden:

Yours is the choice to whom the gods awarded

The language of learning and the language of love
Croaked to move as a moneybag or a cancer
Or straight as a dove.

Auden considered love to be a highly philosophical emotion that needed to be viewed with

intelligence and learning.

 The third stage of Auden’s poetry can be attributed to a totally different kind of

influence, and it is the religious influence. The Christian Doctrine had a great effect on the

poet and he propagated the concept of universal love and brotherhood. For him, love was

divine and was designed by God. Referring to the universal love as ‘agape’, he has made the

references in a number of his poems of later stage like “A Summer Night” and “Friday’s

Child”. Greatly influenced by the existentialism theory of Kierkegaard, Auden in the third

stage wrote about the belief in the Almighty God and submission to God. His magnum opus

“Religious drama” is a perfect example of this religious thoughts and beliefs besides “The

Age of Anxiety”. His rekindling of his faith in Christianity was ushered in by poems like

“For the Time Being; A Christmas Oratorio” and “The Sea and the Mirror”. Through these

poems Auden arouses the religious sentiment in the reader successfully.

Thus Auden makes a transit from the Freudian or the Eros theory of love to the

Agape or the universal concept of love through the mind or intelligence of man while passing

through the philosophical concept of love.

2.3.7 Loss of Human Values

Poets and writers have always been responsible in holding a mirror to reflect on the

existing ill of society. Some of them have also been responsible for changes and reformation

to be affected. Thus, it’s the moral responsibility of these great literary men and women to

sue their literary talents in the best possible way to enhance the quality of life around them

and also bring changes in society. Auden, too, was extremely aware of the social conditions

both good and bad. As a contentious observer he tried to overcome the problems that existed

in the society then and voiced those conditions in his works. The evolution of a new society

that had modern outlooks and a materialistic preference was looked upon with disdain by the

poet. The loss of human values and the lack of love and brotherhood irked him to a great

extent. His “Lullaby” confronts the distrust and faithlessness that existed in the lovers of the
modern times. “Lullaby” is perhaps one of the most persuasive and highly relevant to the

times it was written in:

Lay your sleeping head, my love,

Human on my faithless arm; (line 1-2)

2.3.8 Theme of Death

Along with the ill of society and the consequent loss of human values and emotional

concerns, Auden was greatly perturbed by the thought of death and this is very evident in a

number of poems. One of the most prominent poems of the entire collection of Auden’s

works is “A Thought on Death”, a poem dedicated to the loss and grief caused by the death of

a loved one. The poem talks of the pain thus:

When life as opening buds is sweet,

And golden hopes the fancy greet,
And Youth prepares his joys to meet,
Alas! how hard it is to die! ( line 1-4)

The poem gives an insight into the mind of Auden and his thoughts on the ideas of death and

how death can affect the people left behind. It also tells you the thought of the person who is

dying and has not fulfilled his desires in life. At the same time Auden accepts that death is the

end of life and the most vital truth of life:

When trembling limbs refuse their weight,

And films, slow gathering, dim the sight,
And clouds obscure the mental light,
'Tis nature's precious boon to die. (line 17-20)

In his tribute “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” in which he grieves the death of the great

poet and dear friend W. B. Yeats, who died in the year 1939 in France. He was 74yrs old at

the time. Auden’s tribute to honor this great poet and mourn the death resulted in the poem
“In Memory of W.B. Yeats” In the poem, the poet laments that both man and nature do not

condole the death of this great poet and that life remains unaffected by the poet’s death. The

poem is written in the form of an elegy to help bring out the theme of death and glorify it.

Though death is glorified, the poet is not, and Auden leaves it to the imagination of the reader

to assume the capabilities and the greatness of the poet through his poem. Auden says that the

poet will continue to live on in his poetry that he has left behind. Even if the poet is forgotten,

which he will be in due course, his words and thoughts left behind in his poetry will continue

to remain immortal. So according to Auden, no death can deprive a person of fame, love and

recognition:

Time that is intolerant

Of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique, Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives; (part III, line 5-10)

Another elegy written by Auden, which deals with the theme of death, is “In Memory

of Sigmund Freud”. The poem is an expression of a person who had been a source of deep

inspiration and motivation in the life of the poet. Freud’s theory on human sexuality and the

profound influence that Freud had on the society in general is elucidated with great clarity in

the poem. It is important to note that Auden was not so greatly influenced to be over taken

completely but was quite balanced in influence as the poem shows. The reference to the dead

friend is more prominent than the references made to the kind of influence Freud had on

Auden:

He wasn't clever at all: he merely told

the unhappy Present to recite the Past
like a poetry lesson till sooner
or later it faltered at the line where
 long ago the accusations had begun,
and suddenly knew by whom it had been judged,
how rich life had been and how silly,
and was life-forgiven and more humble, (line 33-40)

Auden, by mourning the death of his contemporaries as well as his mentors, reveals his own

thoughts on the concept of death.

Though Auden has glorified death in poets who have lived a glorious life and have

died due to various reasons of which illnesses was a major reason, his own view of death was

not that of a glorified one. In fact Auden denounced war and hatred as it led to death and was

a cause of death which was the greatest tragedy of life.

One of the most significant poems in which he has used death as a theme and referred

to it very categorically is “Funeral Blues” in which the poet refers to the sense of loss that one

suffers when a loved one is claimed by death. The poet is almost shocked to learn of the

death of a loved one and says:

I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong (stanza 3 line 4)

Even though Auden had accepted the reality of death and had resigned to the fact that the

tragedy is bound to happen multiple times in one’s life, each time he lost a dear one or a

friend, he has mourned the death and found it hard to bear the loss:

When, one by one, those ties are torn,

And friend from friend is snatched forlorn,
And man is left alone to mourn,
Ah then, how easy 'tis to die! ( stanza 3 line 1-4) (A Thought on Death)

W.H. Auden was widely acclaimed for a wide variety of styles and techniques he used

in his writing. Each style and technique had a uniqueness which was appropriate to the kind
of poetry he wrote. This diversity was probably due to the various influences that marked his

themes and his thoughts. . One of the basic features of his works was that he was not averse

to experimenting with his writing. Hence modern as well as traditional forms of styles and

techniques can be found in his poems with innovations and creative makeovers.

2.4 The Style of Auden

Auden’s style can be categorized as belonging to three distinctive phases. They can be

categorized as:

a) The Early phase

b) The Middle phase

c) The Mature phase

In the earlier phase, Auden exhibited an unabashed style that was ambiguous and

indistinct, mainly because of his experimenting with styles. His experimentations as regards

the choice of genres included ballads, parodies, operas and even nursery rhymes.

His style in the earlier years basically was verse forms. Once he was sure of the form

he allowed his creativity to conform to that form. For example in “Canzone”, the poem is a 5-

lined verse form, into which he adds words and vocabulary that allow him to be more explicit

about his theme. His early period is characterized by unrhymed epigrams and meters of the

conversational mode. As is seen in his short poem “Dover” in which this form of

fragmentation of sentences was evident and which he improved on in his later poems:

Steep roads, a tunnel through the downs, are the approaches;

A ruined pharos overlooks the constructed bay;
The sea-front is almost elegant; all this show
 Has, somewhere inland, a vague and dirty root:
Nothing is made in this town. (line 1-5)

His style in the middle period was not very significant and it was the period in which

he was under the influence of Marxism but was not greatly inspired by it. This led him to

move away from the Marxist ideologies and to a more humanistic outlook leading him to

create poems in the later period that had more human values attached to it. It was during this

middle period that he wrote poems like “Another Time” and “Look Stranger”.

His poems and other works were of more significance in the later period after his

relocation to American. Light verse, meditative poetry, and modern trends were incorporated

into his poetry that Auden is known for. His poems of this later period were highly

characterized by the accomplished use of imagery, tone, diction and the lexical / syntactical

specifications were highly modern.

2.4.1 Components of Auden’s Style

2.4.1.1 Diction

Auden’s poetry moved away from the beaten track that was prevalent in the romantic

period of 19th and 20 th century poetry. People who were more used to the simple and easy

flow of words and language were not inclined to welcome the intellectual and highbrow tone

found in Auden’s poetry. His diction was found to be rather verbose and high sounding,

much like his themes which were more politically, psychologically, socially and

philosophically relevant to his times. His use of diction in his works was more thought

provoking for the reader than emotionally charged and affective. His diction being

conceptual, the reader was forced to use the intellect in trying to comprehend the meaning

that lay between the lines. Some of his unusual diction used includes ‘average disgrace’ in

“The Questioner Who Sits So Sly” (line 49) and ‘ingrown virginity’(line 6) and ‘negative
inversion’(line 2) in “Petition” to quote a few. Auden made thought provoking sentences out

of such diction and used them in his poems to create poetry of direct statements that was

calculatingly flat and less lilting and emotive. Some of his poems that reflect on the unusual

diction that he used include, “Petition”. In the poem the diction does not generate a feeling of

religious fervor in the reader but makes it very down to earth by using the word ‘spotted’ in

place of ‘located’, which is more appropriate for a poem of this level. Another poem that has

the unusual diction is Auden’s “The Diaspora” in which the message is compressed into a

sonnet - a message that is serious as well as satirical in essence. A perfect example of how

Auden uses the comic verse is “Mundus Et Infans”. His verbosity is taken to a very elevated

level when he says:

A pantheist not a solipsist, he co-operates

With a universe of large and noisy feeling–states

Without troubling to place

Them anywhere special, for, to his eyes, Funny face

Or Elephant as yet ( Mundus Et Infans, 17-21 )

His diction is particularly elevated in this poem because of his usage of words that

vary contextually. For example, words like ‘supply’, ‘delivery’, ‘raw materials’, ‘shortage’,

all are terms that can be used in a variety of other subjects making the diction in the poem

rich with jargon.

2.4.1.2 Imagery

The use of imagery in poetry has been very commonly seen and is used quite

significantly by Auden in his works. Generally poets make extensive use of imagery to

suggest the meaning of the message they want to convey directly through their poems.
Auden has made use of imagery in a number of his poems, and in each poem it evokes and

suggests feelings and emotions of the poet completely. According to Timothy Foote, “Ezra

Pound changed English poetry by badgering it to speak in sharp images, in direct familiar

tones. T. S. Eliot challenged it by showing that verse might use myth and nightmare to say

something complex about 20th century society. Auden was a brilliant colonizer of lands they

discovered; less remote but also less magical than Eliot; wiser and clearer-sighted than

Pound; younger and metrically more inventive, with more humor too….” (1973:113). Auden

has used imagery in a variety of ways and he has employed imagery as a tool to reflect his

thoughts on the enormity of disintegration of human society in the modern world as is seen

in:

Hearing of harvests rotting in the valleys,

Seeing at end of street the barren mountains,

Round corners coming suddenly on water,

Knowing them shipwrecked who were launched for islands, (Paysage Moralize 1-4)

For example, in an attempt to explain his feelings on the modern era and the age of spiritual

numbness he says, in his poem “Family Ghosts” written in 1929:

And all emotion to expression came

Recovering the archaic imagery: (stanza 6 line 1-2)

Auden also used imagery to express his opinion on the deadness of spirituality in the

modern age which he calls “spiritual Ice-age”. Commenting on this view point of Auden,

Cleanth Brooks writes “Auden’s surest triumph is the recovery of the Archaic imagery- fells,

scraps overhung by kestrels, the becks with their pot holes left by the receding glaciers of the

age of ice. His dominant contrast is the contract between the scene and the modern age of ice:
foundries with their fires cold, flooded coal mines, silted harbours – the debris of the new ice

age”(1970:64).

In the poem “1929”, Auden makes use of imagery to draw a picture of Easter and his

feelings of the scene that he sees around him:

It was Easter as I walked in the public gardens

Hearing the frogs exhaling from the pond,
Watching traffic of magnificent cloud
Moving without anxiety on open sky— ( Poem 1929, 1-4 )

The poem is a pointer to the changing society. It combines the modern development

with the traditional ambience of Easter, and Auden expresses this with a hint of ridicule when

he says “Hearing the frogs exhaling from the pond”. In the same poem, Auden says:

But thinking so I came at once

Where solitary man sat weeping on a bench,

Hanging his head down, with his mouth distorted

Helpless and ugly as an embryo chicken. (Poem 1929, 9-12)

The missing indefinite article “the” before the words ‘solitary man’ recognizes the

man in the universal sense and refers to the loneliness of mankind. The final line portrays

despair as well as an unpromising, pathetic beginning at the same time. The ‘embryo’

together with the adjectives ’ugly and helpless’ is an image of an unpromising, pathetic

beginning.

A number of psychological imagery is found in many of Auden’s poems as is seen in

the phrase ‘the liar’s quinsy’ (line 5) from his poem “Petition”.
 One can also find Auden’s poetry filled with imagery that has a panoramic view, with

symbols of social relevance:

Here on he cropped grass of the narrow ridge I stand,

A fathom of earth, alive in air,

Aloof as an admiral on the old rocks,

England below me…

The use of particular simile ‘admiral’ in the above poem “Look Stranger” written in

1936 is to ensure that the focus of the poem is not moved away from the idea to the

description of the scene. By using phrases like ‘A fathom of earth,’ also makes sure that the

imagery remains earthly and down to earth with no emotional arousals.

The imagery in the poem has been characterized by the various sounds of nature that

is reflected in the different lines of the poem:

May wander like a river

The swaying sound of the sea (Look Stranger 6-7)

Auden’s great gift of using imagery for expression of ideas that is his general perception is

further revealed in the lines from the poem written in the English period, “In Time of War:

XXV”:

…the hospitals alone remind us

Of the equality of man (stanza 2 line 3)

The following lines from the poem, written during the period he lived in America combines

his political ideologies with that of his love for nature and his regard for mankind:
 Earth’s mishaps are not fatal,

Fire is not quenched by the dark,

No one can bottle a Breeze,

No friction wears out Water.

The above lines use the four elements of nature to explain the fact that the ideologies of

Auden had been transformed and that he began considering the presence of the elements as

vital to life. Besides using dream imagery, panoramic imagery Auden also made extensive

use of imagery that was archetypal as well as functional.

Archetypal imagery is a recurring image of a type of character, a symbol, a plot and

even theme which has universal significance. Examples of archetypal imagery include the sea

as a source of life, the prophetic figure, a mystical journey etc.

A perfect example of archetypal imagery is seen in “As I Walked out One Evening” in which

the lines represent imagery that is at once allegorical as well as symbolic as a pun:

Into many a green valley

Drifts the appalling snow;

Time breaks the threaded dances

And the diver's brilliant bow

(As I walked out One Evening, 32-36)

The lines are archetypal because they speak of the power that Time has over nature and how

nature is likely to be withered away by time.

Auden’s use of functional imagery is more significant when the poet wants to show a

contrast between two ideas or values. One of the greatest benefits that literature has gained
from Auden is that a whole new world of expressions, words, and images have been

introduced and this was probably possible because of the different influences that Auden had

both in his personal life and his professional work. The following lines are an example of

Auden’s use of functional imagery:

We envy streams and houses that are sure:

But we are articled to error; we

Were never nude and calm like a great door,

And never will be perfect like the fountains; (In Time of War XXVII )

2.4.1.3 Symbols:

Symbols have been used by all poets old and new to explain their themes and to

enhance the richness of their poetry. Symbols in poetry have always aroused the reader’s

interest and with the use of symbols the poet is able to convey to the reader in an in-depth and

more explicit manner.

Auden has made extensive use of symbols in his poetry to get across his themes and

has been very successful in helping the reader understand his poetry. Nature and landscapes

have been used symbolically for the exploration of his themes. Stephen Spender views that

“He found symptoms everywhere. Symptomatic was his key word. But in his very strange

poetry he transmogrified these symptoms into figures in a landscape of mountains, passes,

streams, heroes, horses, eagles, feuds and runes of Norse sagas. He was a poet of an

unanticipated kind—a different race from ourselves—and also a diagnostician of literary,

social, and individual psychosomatic situations, who mixed this Iceland imagery with

Freudian dream symbolism”(1973:3). Auden has used symbols in his poetry to dramatize a

situation and to enhance the element of satire in his poems. Moreover, abstract concepts are

given concrete embodiment by the help of these symbols. Poems like ‘Paysage Moralize’,
“In Praise of Limestone” and “The Shield of Achilles” are just a few that have a number of

symbols that highlight the themes in the poem. In all the three poems, landscape has been

symbolized to show human struggle in life.

In "Paysage Moralize”, for example, natural geographical features of land have been

used to symbolize the hard and difficult struggle that man undergoes during the process of his

life:

So many, doubtful, perished in the mountains,

……………………………………………………

So many, wretched, would not leave their valleys. ( Paysage Moralize, 31-36.)

The Quest symbol is common in most of Auden’s poetry. In “The New Year Letter”,

he symbolizes the quest of life. Modern day lifestyle has led man to loneliness due to the

emerging power of machines. And in the process of that quest, he uses places as symbols as

is seen in “Dover”.

The city is also another symbol which is used by Auden very commonly. Some of the

poems in which the city has been symbolized are “For the Time Being”, in which the city of

Rome is symbolized. Another poem “Memorial for the City” which is again a poem in which

the city is symbolized through comparisons made in the difference of attitudes of people.

According to M. K. Spears, ‘Auden uses the city as a symbol quite explicitly and

extensively (1970:82). He cites two poems of Auden’s as examples which are “Memorial for

the city” (Ibid: 83) and “Nones” (Ibid: 84). Auden’s use of the city was a medium to reflect

his opinions and thoughts on the growing urbanism. Auden has also used the city in the poem

“ September 1, 1939” as a symbol of ‘conservative’ in the dark of the subway and that of
‘ethical’ in the street above which is lighted. The symbolic use of city to show two of its

aspects has been used by Auden in the poem.

Auden had always expressed abhorrence towards war, and quite naturally war is a

symbol used by Auden in some of his poems. In the poem “Spain- 1937’, war is used as a

symbol of the struggle and strife that man undergoes within him. Similarly, the poem

“September 1, 1939”, speaks of the tragedies of war and the how humans are affected by it.

Auden has used symbols like the “hawk” to convey harshness and to convey liberation.

Symbols like the “airman” has been used in the poem “The Orators” and “The Sea and The

Mirror”. In both these poems, the sea, the marine animals like the shark, the whirlwind

symbolize the agony that the poet is going through at the time of writing.

Symbolic allusions in Auden’s poetry seem to be very personal and a lot depends on

the mood of the poet at the time of writing. Thus we see that the symbolic references are

quite dynamic and the ready is kept engaged in the poem. “His great originality”, says

Stephen Spender, “lay in his endlessly fertile invention of symbols, which did not float in the

poetry unrelated to anything except by association, as in the work of the symbolist poets, but

which, in the manner of Freudian dream symbolism, bodied forth psychological situations,

private or social. On one level Auden replaced the 'symbol' in poetry by the 'symptom'. Yet

the symbol-symptoms are not equivalents which represent situations outside the poetry. They

have an independent, purely poetic existence within it as part of a completely imagined

world”(1973:479).

2.4.1.4 Rhetorical Devices:

A number of rhetorical devices have been put into use by Auden in his works and

some of them include the use of simile and personifications. The use of simile is so common

in Auden’s work that it is impossible to talk of similes in poetry without making a reference
to Auden. Some of his more popular similes include “Here war is simple like a monument”

and “Museums stored his learning like a box” from the poems “Here War is Simple “and

“From In Time of War” respectively. In most cases, the use of adjectives was discarded to

help include similes and Auden enriched his works by adding similes that were slightly

beyond imagination too.

Personification is another rhetorical device in which Auden excelled, and he did that

by merely avoiding the use of the article. As is seen in “Like A Vocation”:

Not as that dream Napoleon, rumour’s dread and center, (stanza 1 line1)

In this line by removing the indefinite article ‘the’, Auden has personified ‘rumour’. Further

examples of personifications include “spacious day”, “intransient nature”, “betraying

smile”,etc.

Such changes in sentence constructions make Auden stand out as a poet of high caliber and

ability to use words and language to attract the reader. These are one of the distinctive

features of his poetry.

2.4.1.5 Traditional Verse Form- Meters/ Subjects, People and Places

Auden has successfully combined the use of traditional as well as modern form of verse. It is

quite evident in the way he makes use of the meters and sounds. In her book, Auden, Barbara

Everett says, “In his verse, Auden can argue, reflect, joke, gossip, sing, analyze, lecture,

hector, and simply talk; he can sound, at will, like a psychologist on a political platform, like

a theologian at a party, or like a geologist in love; he can give dignity and authority to

nonsensical theories, and make newspaper headlines sound both true and

melodious”(1964:87).
 Though basically he used traditional forms of verse, he brought in innovations to make the

poetry modern and contemporary. His themes being conventional and contemporary to the time of

writing it, he was able to arouse the emotional impact he wanted from the readers. Themes that were

relevant enough to make an emotional impact in the reader were explored by Auden and his

verse forms were in accordance to these themes like, war, love, death and the modern way of

life which hindered togetherness and the feeling of unity. Being traditional in his verse forms

his works are usually found to be in sonnets, ballads, elegies, sestinas and songs.

His free verses are characterized by syllabic and non-syllabic meters with a highly

traditional rhythmic verse, but accompanied by a somewhat non-rhythmic sound effect, as is

seen in the lines, “how everything turns away”: “for this and for all enclosures like it the

archetype in Breughel’s Icarus”. A lot of incompatibility can be seen in his use of traditional

metrical patterns and speech rhythm as he tries to make it real for the modern reader.

Similarly people, places and events have always had been a theme for Auden and the

perfect example is the death of his two very dear people , W. B. Yeats and Sigmund Freud,

for whom he wrote a memorial. By using people who are known he is able to influence the

reader with the impact of their personality.

The details of verse form and sound pattern will be discussed in Chapter IV.

2.4.1.6 Allegorical Devices

Auden’s poetry is filled with allegorical devices that has enriched his poetry to a great

extent and has given it the popularity it enjoys. Allegorical devices have been found used

generously in his poems such as “Petition”, “The Unknown Citizen”, “The Shield of

Achilles” and many others. His allegorical devices animate the humblest and the most modest

of lines and words to make it exemplary and impactful:

 Looking and loving our behaviors pass

The stones, the steel and the polished glass;(stanza 2 line 1-2) (A Bride in the 30’s)

“In Praise of Limestone” is a perfect example of how the allegorical device has been used by

Auden to heighten the effect of the poem and make it more impressive.

2.4.1.7 Use of Adjectives

Auden’s use of adjectives has made his poems highly dynamic and animated. The adjective

he uses does not only decorate his works but also helps to animate his ideas and themes to

generate the interest of the reader and to retain it. His use of adjectives in “Poem XXX” in his

Collection of Poems is an evidence of how cleverly he used the adjectives he uses in phrases

like ‘negative inversion’ and ‘ingrown virginity’ in the poem “Petition” to modify the

abstract nouns used in the lines. To explain the peculiar traits exhibited by the mentally

disturbed, instead of using adjectives that would directly hint at psychological problems,

Auden uses words to conjure up images that explain the condition quite aptly as in, ‘an

average disgrace’, ‘A neutralizing peace’(“The Questioner Who Sits So Sly”, line 49-50).

Auden’s use of adjectives enhanced the power of the language he used in his writing and

thereby had a greater impact on the reader who was able to take the subject or theme

seriously.

Auden’s style and technique varied according to the various influences he was

subjected to during his life and each of these styles and techniques were adopted by him

whenever they seemed compatible enough to the theme of his poetry

2.5 Conclusion
Auden was known for his representation of the times of the 1930s and from the

written works it can be seen that Auden was anti- romantic. His treatment of both nature and
love was anti-romantic. He was very people-centric and was concerned with the well-being of

the public in general. It is this factor that sets Auden apart from other poets as he did not have

the traditional treatment of nature. Auden’s poetry is also characterized by the intellect that

Auden is characterized by and there is an intellectual outlook in the poems of the entire

genres of poems he wrote, whether it is a love poem or a nature poem. One of the first to

create poems that had a psychological outlook and a Freudian concept present in the poems,

Auden was very intelligent enough to be able to perceive what was not seen, especially in

human nature, thought and character. And being highly frustrated with what he saw around

him, he advocated changes that would be according to him remove misery from the life of the

people. He created the character of a hero who was in quest for peace in the world. Auden’s

earlier poems like “The Door”, “The City” and “The Quest” all are an exploration into the

minds of people urging them to act in order to make their lives better.

Auden in his effort to be highly innovative and true to his theme and subject introduced a

variety of stylistic devices and coined an array of words in his poetry. His introduction

includes adjectives that were transformed into nouns by preceding them with the indefinite

article “the”. The art of personification was done differently by Auden as he gave life to

Abstract nouns. This was a completely new and unique method that was introduced at the

time. The introduction of what came to be called “Auden Simile” made his work stand out of

the ordinary. This made him one of the most revered and recognized poet of the modern era.

Moreover being influenced by great men like psychologists of the caliber of Sigmund Freud,

politically by leaders like Marx, and literally by T. S. Elliot, his poetry has a great range and

depth.

Continuous experimentations beginning with conventional meters of the 19th century bringing

variations into his verse forms till the very end. These variations were a result of the various

influences that affected Auden during the period of his literary work. Though this may have
seemed somewhat eccentric initially to the readers who were used to a more regular method

of poetry, there is no denying that Auden has left an indelible mark in the history of English

Literature especially in the world of poetry.

***
Lexis As Style

3.1 Introduction

Language is usually described or studied at different levels viz: phonology (sound),

morphology (internal structure of words), lexis (words), syntax (internal structure of

sentences) and discourse( inter-sentential structures, cohesion and coherence). Description of

structure at all these levels eventually leads to their signifying functions and effects, Thus

semantics (meaning) continues to be the goal of linguistics, notwithstanding the professed

objectives of the structuralists to divorce structure from meaning while analyzing it. In

stylistics, semantics becomes the focus and the term of reference for the description of

structure, for the Hallidayan model of linguistic description of structure for its own sake

becomes gratuitous unless it throws light on semantic structure. Although we are aware that

semantics and grammar are two mutually independent levels linguistic organization, there can

be interesting correlation between them, and each can account for the other to a large extent.

In semantic analysis and description being the focus of stylistic analysis, lexis

becomes the preferred level of study other than syntax and phonology. The term originated

from Greek and came into prominence in linguistic circles in the 1960’s. It has been used

particularly by British linguists for the vocabulary of a language or sub-language, especially

of its stock of lexemes. The term became popular because it is unambiguous, unlike its

synonym “lexicon”. Alo (1995:18) defined lexis as “…the level of linguistic analysis and

description concerned with the way in which the vocabulary of a language is organized”. In

linguistics, lexis describes the storage of language in our mental lexicon as prefabricated

patterns that can be recalled and sorted into meaningful speech and writing. Thus, lexis, as a

concept, has a distinct identity from other traditional levels of linguistic study or

interpretation, as it refers specifically to the word-stock of a language from which writers and

speakers make choices for self-expression according to their purpose or intended meaning.
The areas lexis covers include synonyms and antonyms, collocations, common idioms, and

figurative language, proverbs and phrasal verbs, registers, homonyms and homophones,

prefix and suffix, general knowledge of words, special loan words, neologism, adjectives and

prepositions, etc. The point is that the rationale for studying the nature and functioning of the

vocabulary of a text is to decode the meaning of the text (i.e. lexis as semantic markers or

signifiers). This notion is echoed by McCarthy and Carter (1988) when they averred that

most scholarly works on lexis over the years have discussed the term within semantics. For,

as Socrates put it, “words have the power to reveal…, conceal and signify all things; they…

also turn things this way and that” (See Eyoh, 1997:90). Alo (1998) shares a similar

viewpoint viz: “As a level of language study, lexis seeks to elucidate how words mean and

how they interact with one another meaningfully…”

Fundamentally, a writer taps from and exploits the vast resources of language for his

imaginative relations. Lexical items help the writer to crystallize his thoughts, express certain

emotions and create images all of which give literature its peculiar expressive beauty. In this

regard, writers depend on lexical items and their connotative implications, to convey their

intended meanings. Therefore, the writer must choose the appropriate words to effectively

convey the intended meaning and also achieve aesthetic beauty. This is inevitable because a

writer must use linguistic resources imaginatively to have the desired effect on the reader or

audience. This explains why writers, particularly poets, make lexical choices with great care

to achieve the delicate target of conveying meaning in the best way possible. In fact, an

artistic effort must achieve a fusion of meaning and imaginativeness in language use.

Language is a product of man’s need for self-expression and communication, as a

social animal. Basically, therefore, language is a social and functional phenomenon; a tool of

social engineering in our day-to-day existence as human beings. Fundamentally, human

beings function in myriads of social situations and language serves as the instrument of

expression in all of these situations. Hence various scholars have defined the term in terms of
its social function. Language function refers to the purpose or goal of language use in any

given context. The functions of language cover six basic communicative and social areas viz:

informational, expressive, phatic, directive, ideational and performative (Ndimele, 2005).

According to Alo (1998:5), the term function has two meanings:

Firstly, it refers to the specific uses to which the writer or speaker puts the language

(e.g. description, explanation, argument, persuasion, humour, etc). The term ‘function’ is also

used in the context of stylistic description to refer to the communicative value or role of

specific language categories (sentence, clause, word group, collocation, word and

morpheme).

Language function, therefore, implies varieties of language that are defined according

to use. This means that the context of use determines the meaning of the word or phrase.

Thus, a word or phrase could have a particular meaning in one context, and another in

another context. This view tallies with Halliday’s view of language and grammar in

particular, as a whole system of choice or option with complex relations between them.

Hence the definition of language according to function focuses on language use in contexts of

situation and postulates that meaning is multi-layered and can be interpreted at various levels.

Stylistic function is an aspect of language function. The critical point is that the

specific communicative or social function that a speaker or writer deploys language to

perform has the potentials to shape its use. Halliday (1978) labeled language as a ‘social

semiotic’ in the sense that it evolves in a context and the environment in which people deploy

language to serve communicative needs can shape its form and meaning. According to

Ogunsiji (2000:53), the “social circumstances” of language use are pertinent in determining

stylistic meaning because, “… language is not a monolithic entity – it varies according to

some factors like geographical location, subject matter, medium (spoken or written), sex, age,

role relations etc.”

3.2 An Overview on the Lexis as Style in Poems by W.H. Auden

The words that are used to refer to a particular object or thought and to help the

writer express the same are referred to as the lexis of the sentence. The use of appropriate

lexis makes the poem relevant and comprehensible to the reader. The lexis needs to be used

in various forms to help the grammatical functions of the sentence become obvious.

Generally poets make use of lexis that provides clarity of thought, subject, and theme to the

reader and the vocabulary thus used enriches the quality of the poem. This further helps in

highlighting the psychological, emotional, spiritual and political aspects of the poem. The

level of understanding the reader has been able to gain about any written form of work

depends upon its lexical quality.

One fact that is highly prominent is that there is no particular form that can be called

“Audenesque” as he has been known to innovate and experiment with a variety of lexical as

well as syntactical deviations. One of the reasons for this vast range of words used might

have been the various influences that Auden was subjected to in his life time that included the

influence of Sigmund Freud, Christian influence, Marxism, and then again with the political

upheavals in the world then, he was also politically motivated. His form of narration is very

varied which include the libretto, verse, play, epigram and oratorical. The hallmark of

Auden’s poetry has been his endeavor to use words, phrases and sentences that may not

have been previously used by any other poet. The vocabulary, the phrases and the rhyme

scheme with its unusual musical rhythms makes Auden’s poetry distinctively different.

Though Auden was known to use lexis that included unfamiliar words, archaic words and

even commonly used slangs, his poetry did create a benchmark because of such lexical

adventures. Some of his very unusual yet prominent traits in poetry include:
 3.2.1 The Use of Adjectives

Auden’s use of adjectives has made his poems highly dynamic and animated. The

adjectives he used do not only decorate his works but also helps to animate his ideas and

themes to generate the interest of the reader and to retain it. His use of adjectives in “Poem

XXX” in his collection of Poems, is evidence of how cleverly he used the adjectives in

phrases like “negative inversion” and “ingrown virginity” to modify the abstract nouns used

in the lines. To explain the peculiar traits exhibited by the mentally disturbed, instead of

using adjectives that would directly hint at psychological problems, Auden uses words to

conjure up images that explain the condition quite aptly as in, “An average disgrace”, “A

neutralizing peace”. Auden’s use of adjectives enhanced the power of the language he used in

his writing and thereby had a greater impact on the reader who was able to take the subject or

theme seriously. Themes that were relevant enough to make an emotional impact in the

reader were explored by Auden and his verse forms were in accordance to these themes like,

war, love, death and the modern way of life which hindered togetherness and the feeling of

unity. Being traditional in his verse forms, his works are usually found to be in sonnets,

ballads, elegies, sestinas and songs which were made more colorful with the use of the right

adjectives and adjectival phrases. Auden’s use of adjectives in his poems allowed the reader

to conjure up the exact image that the poet had intended to do.

3.2.2 Use of Archaic words

Auden was well known for his poetry that had words straight out of the dictionary.

Highly verbose and unfamiliar, the reader at times is lost to find the meaning behind those

lexical expressions. The use of archaic words, for example, was one such trait that was seen

in most of the poems of Auden especially in the poetry of the early period. A perfect

example is the use of such archaic words by the poet in “O Where Are You Going?”:

Yonder’s the midden where odours will madden, (line 3)

“Yonder” and “midden” are old fashioned words meaning “there” and “dung hill”. Such

jargon might have been confusing for the reader though it was also very apt and hence

matched the theme and the situation in the poem. It also helped to enhance the readers’

interest level in the poem and retain it. Auden never backed out of using words that were

obsolete and unfamiliar if it helped in enhancing the quality of his poetry, hence we see even

biblical words used in his works. His poem “Victor” is a perfect example of biblical

allusions that is used throughout the poem:

His father took a Bible from his pocket and read;

Blessed are the pure in heart.' (Stanza 3, Lines 3-4)

And the blood ran down the stairs and sang,

I'm the Resurrection and the Life'. (Stanza 33, Lines 3-4)

Saying; 'I am Alpha and Omega, I shall come

To judge the earth some day.' (Stanza 35, Lines 3-4)

3.2.3 Use of Rhetorical Devices

Some of the rhetorical devices used by Auden in his works include the use of

metaphors, similes and personification and he used lexis to suit these rhetorical devices. The

different rhetorical devices used by Auden in his poems were usually the result of his

various influences that determined his thought processes. Hence his early poetry has

references to the language and style of the Anglo-Saxons and had terms used in

psychological analysis. This reference at times made his poems clinical and filled with

jargon and verbosity. They were difficult to comprehend for the common reader as had the

quality of a riddle. The use of Free Verse was his forte and he was considered master in its

use as can be seen in “Musee des Beaux Arts”.

Having made these preliminary remarks about the stylistic implication of Auden’s

lexis in general I shall attempt lexical analysis of some of his poems. The texts shall be cited

in the full, followed by lexical analysis in each case.

3.3 Lexical Analysis of Auden’s poems

3.3.1 Analysis-1 O Where Are You Going?

"O where are you going?" said reader to rider,

"That valley is fatal when furnaces burn,
Yonder's the midden whose odours will madden,
That gap is the grave where the tall return."

"O do you imagine," said fearer to farer,

"That dusk will delay on your path to the pass,
Your diligent looking discover the lacking
Your footsteps feel from granite to grass?"

"O what was that bird," said horror to hearer,

"Did you see that shape in the twisted trees?
Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly,
The spot on your skin is a shocking disease."

"Out of this house," said rider to reader,

"Yours never will," said farer to fearer,
"They're looking for you," said hearer to horror,
As he left them there, as he left them there.

Originally the poem “O where are you going?” was the epilogue poem in The Orators

published in May 1932. Written in the form of a ballad, the poem was first titled “Three

Companions” and was included as individual poems in the Collected Shorter Poems publish

in 1950. The poem is written in the form of a dialogue and the conversational manner is very

informal and easy. The ballad is made up of the conventional four-lined format of the stanza

and the language is simple. There have been various interpretations to this poem and they

include the political, social and psychological because of the different influences that Auden
was exposed to. The poem is a reflection on the times that Auden lived in and the nature of

those times were perceived rather negatively by the poet and interpreted in the same manner.

His acknowledgement and stoic acceptance of death as an integral part of life and the

tranquility that the poet exerts in his acceptance of death is evident in this poem. The

perception of death is rather witty and the acquiescence of death is calm and composed.

According to the poet the darkness lies in the lives lived rather than in death. It is in the

minds of the people who live life and in their thoughts that make living so difficult in the

society that Auden lived when writing this poem. The poem “O where are you going?”

examines this darkness that Auden thinks is in the thoughts and deeds of man living in a

society that was full of trials and tribulations. This fact seems to be authenticatedby the use of

the form in which the poem is written which is a dialectic form. Hence this poetic form gives

a lot of scope for the poet to express the opinions of the public and make it more

argumentative. The lexis used in the poem is true to form as it echoes the voice of the

millions of Americans who were suppressed under the influence of the Great Depression of

the period, the political upheaval caused by the emergence of Fascism, and the suffering of

the people that left them defenseless and vulnerable and who according to Auden belonged to

“a low, dishonest decade”.

In this poem “O Where Are You Going?” Auden has confronted two sets of people.

One set is the courageous which constitutes the “rider”, “farer” and the “hearer”. The other

set is that of weaklings, the “reader”, “fearer”, and the “horror”. The courageous prepares him

for the adventure in order to explore new lands and wants to start his journey soon.

In the first stanza the “reader” who is a mere “theoretician” and hardly does anything

adventurous causes hindrance in the mission of the rider. The reader draws before the rider a

picture of “death” and “destruction” in “that valley”. The images of burning “furnaces”,
odour of “midden” and “graveyards” created by the reader poses hindrance in the path of the

rider.

In the second stanza, the “fearer” describes the obstacles in the path to the “new

valley” a new order of civilization. The fearer tries to inject the element of “fear” into the

“farer” who wants to bid farewell to others and start his journey. The “fearer” says that the

“dusk” or the night will cause problems to move to the new places: the path is full of

obstacles as it is not a smooth passage but a path of “rocks” and “grass” which will be tiring

and difficult for the “farer” to sail through the journey easily. Gerunds such as “looking” and

“lacking’ are used to create an uneasy feel in the poem, like something isn’t quite right.

Gerunds are verbs which are used as nouns. They emphasise the fear which the fearer feels

about going out of the house and exploring the world. It makes him uneasy, and thus he

attempts to make the reader feel uneasy too.

In the third stanza the “horror” dissuades the “hearer” from going to “that valley” by

drawing his attention to the bird of ill-omen and describing ghosts and strange figures behind

him. He tries to stop the hearer by talking of “shocking diseases” and “scars on his skin”. In

order to convince the adventurous side of the brain that they are right, the voices of the horror

etc use rather disturbing and scary imagery. They play on the fact that sometimes humans see

things differently to what they are. For example “did you see that shape in the twisted trees”

is a good example of how the horror in all of us tries to scare us by misconstruing objects and

deforming them to scare us. The use of alliteration “twisted trees” here also sounds rather

menacing, as the “t” sound is sharp and bitter. Sibilance is used to give the poem a sinister

feel- “the spot on your skin is a shocking disease”. It emphasises the subterfuge used by our

subconscious to protect us but also prevent us from doing things. Another example of this is

the verbs “swiftly” and “softly”, indicating a sense of secrecy. The horror argues that we

cannot always see what may hurt us, it isn’t always obvious, and thus we should be careful. It
is possible that the sinister nature of the voice could be related back to the Garden of Eden

and the snake which encouraged Eve to eat from the tree. The Snake is, in many ways,

representative of the part of our mind which tells us to go out and do things. Thus, by using

snake-like language and sibilance it is possible that the horror is trying to prevent us from

“picking the fruit” and making a dreadful mistake.

But in the fourth and last stanza the “cowards” and “timid” have been silenced by

the “rider”, “farer” and “hearer” who have strongly enough taken determination to set out on

their mission. These two sets of people are in fact the two antithetical aspects of an

individual. These are the two phases of the same face.

The first three stanzas begin with imperative constructions:

‘O where are you going’

‘O do you imagine’
‘O what was that bird’

These can also be shocking exclamations. This would also indicate that the addressee has

already begun his journey and it is a distant call made to him. The difference or the distance

is shown by the difference in nature of the two sets of opposite natured characters. One set

“fearer, reader and horror” and the victorious set of characters “the farer, rider and hearer”.

The “reader-rider”, “fearer-farer” and “horror-hearer”, though have difference in

nature and have antithetical characteristics still there is an attempt on the part of the poet to

draw some similarities by using similar consonants in the beginning of the terms- “r”, “h” and

“f”. This shows that these two opposite characters are two aspects of the human will.

The alternating feminine and masculine-end rhymes show the wavering attitude of

the individual. It shows the two attitudes: “weakness” and “strength” of human will.
 Contrasts are very important in the poem. The juxtaposition of the passive and active

sides of the human psyche emphasise the inner turmoil which Auden (and by extension, all

humans) feel about making decisions. The active part of the brain (the rider, farer etc) and the

passive part (reader, fearer) are always competing against one another. They could also

represent the introverted intellect and the extrovert lover. “Midden” and “Gap” be seen to

allude to sexual images and Auden’s continued sexual confusion and frustration. The contrast

made between the “granite” and “grass” emphasize one’s fear to take risks and be exciting.

Auden worries that being adventurous and different (much like his poetry) will lead to

terrible disasters, as warned by the “reader”. His literary mind tells him to stay to what he

knows and follow a safe path, whereas his adventurous mind tells him to go out of the

“house”, a safe place, and into the “valley” (which may again have sexual connotations)

We find phonemes like /r/, /s/, /f/ etc. in each and every line, which are alliterated.

These alliterations indicate the individual having different aspects and phases in his

personality.

The poem being in a dialogue mode allows the passivity of one of the participants to

be overcome by the active participation of the other. Thus, if there is a note of pessimism in

the first three stanzas the final one is more optimistic and extremely encouraging, especially

with the repetition of the last line for an impact. In the last line “As he left them there” shows

it is not the determination of three brave men but an individual. The poet could have written

“they” in stead of “he” and the sentence would have been “As they left them there”. So we

can say the poem is about the victorious triumph of the “courageous,”whose strong will

overpowers ,and he arouses “horror” and “fear” in the “reader”. The strong determination

has been emphasized by the repetition of the sentence twice.

3.3.2 Analysis-2 Who’s Who

A shilling life will give you all the facts:

How Father beat him, how he ran away,

What were the struggles of his youth, what acts

Made him the greatest figure of his day;

Of how he fought, fished, hunted, worked all night,

Though giddy, climbed new mountains; named a sea;

Some of the last researchers even write

Love made him weep his pints like you and me.

With all his honours on, he sighed for one

Who, say astonished critics, lived at home;

Did little jobs about the house with skill

And nothing else; could whistle; would sit still

Or potter round the garden; answered some

Of his long marvellous letters but kept none.

The poem “Who’s Who” was written in 1934 and was published in 1936 in Look

Stranger!. “Who’s Who”, by W.H. Auden, is an endearing sonnet that explores the heroic

qualities of man that helps him overcome the different struggles he faces in life. The poem

lays open the contrasts that lie between what is assumed to be about a person and what the

real person is. Auden ridicules the art of writing biographies and the biographers who write

on what they presume to be the truth. According to Auden, they do not really have a clear

knowledge of the person and the emotions that the person endures. His tongue-in-cheek

comments on the importance that the famous people are given by the society in general and

the biographers in particular give this sonnet its humor and wit.
 The poem is a brief psychological and sentimental biography of an imaginary and

representative famous man. High ranks and positions, achievements and glory do not make

an individual joyous and complete. Peace and self-sufficiency are most important in man’s

life. Name and fame can impart a feeling of pride and temporary satisfaction, but not

happiness and solace in one’s life. “One shilling” is enough to get detailed information about

this famous man. Each and every minute tit bit of this great man is known to each and every

insignificant individual of that time. He struggled, fought, fished, hunted, and worked all

nights till he was successful man in his life. He discovered mountains, explored sea and

pursued his goal till he achieved it. But in spite of all these, he ‘sighed for one’. This

insufficiency in his life subdued his achievements and glories, counter to his lover who lived

a satisfied life though nondescript and insignificant. This nondescript evolves as a “hero” in

this poem slowly and silently.

The phrase “A shilling life” (stanza 1 line 1) is a startlingly new coinage that sounds

ironical. In the ironical context, it provides the events which in the great man’s life are

enumerated in a matter-of –fact way, just as in a cheap biographical index.

Father beat him

How he ran away

he fought

were the struggles of his youth

What

acts/made him the greatest figure of his day

 Auden portrays a life of a man who has lived a very hard life and the lexical usage all

point to this concept of hard life. Words like “ought”( stanza 1 line 5 ), “struggles”( stanza 1

line 3) and “hunted” ( stanza 1 line 5) all lead to the thought that life is full of adversities that

needs to be overcome by man and he also “worked all night” (stanza 1 line 5) to fulfill his

needs. The phrases “climbed new mountains” and “named a sea” suggest that he was far

above the normal human beings. That this mechanical thing composed of mere activities,

should beneath his social mask be actually human is emphasized by the debunking colloquial

language:

Some of the last researchers even write

Love made him weep his pints like you and me.

The slangy phrase, “weep his pints”, is not a concession to popular taste, but a deliberate

device to reduce the mythical celebrity to normality. It has also an undertone of mockery of

the person who acts as a sentimental fool.

The famous man “sighed for one” (stanza 2 line1) indicates his lack of emotional and

sexual fulfillment or unsatisfactory life. If we take “sighed for” to mean “was in love with”,

rather than “envied”, then this “one” must be a woman, to whom he writes long, marvelous

letters. But in the light our knowledge of Auden’s homosexuality the one in question is a

man. It is interesting that Auden never uses feminine pronouns like “she” or “her” to qualify

the gender of the other person. The nonentity is deliberately made to seem socially useless,

untalented, and uncreative. Auden’s frequent awareness of clashing public and private

aspects of life is clearly shown in the contrast between the ‘greatest figures of the day’ and

the one who lived insignificantly and trivially at home, pottering about the home and

whistling. What is still more interesting is that while Auden brings out the contrast between

the public and private life, he seems to be playing around this line of demarcation which is
heavily gendered, i.e., men inhabit public sphere and lead an eventful, heroic public life,

while women live a nondescript private life.

It is interesting to take into account words like “struggles”, “fought’, ‘fished”,

“hunted” “worked all night”, ‘climbed new mountains”. “named a sea” are indicative of

masculine acts. Of these, the fist five are the acts of a boy who is growing up, and the later

two are acts of an adult man, who explores and conquers the vast world. The “he” performs

these various acts, acquires the distinctive masculine identity, and faces a glorious destiny

that is appropriate to his gender. The overbearing presence of “Father” (with an apt capital

“F”), and his punishments build up an oppressive patriarchy to which a boy must submit for

his own good to become “the greatest figure of his day”.

In contrast, the acts enumerated in the second stanza are “lived at home”, “did little

jobs about the house with skill”, “sit still”, “potter round the garden” are associated with

quiet, passive, domestic, private world, which has by and large been – or at least surely was

in the 1930s England – assigned to women. But cleverly Auden does not feminize them. He

deliberately refrains from specifying the “little jobs about the house with skills” as household

chores such as cooking and sewing that have been culturally assigned to women. These acts

seem to be largely ungendered, but definitely unmasculine. Further, the act of whistling

which the unspecified person at home does is a somewhat masculine act. The person is also

not a committed lover of the “greatest figure of the day”, nor a wife, since this person “kept”

none of his letters. So, the words are vague in the second stanza as far as their gender

implications are concerned, even as the domestic space is clearly feminine. This vagueness of

gender and the nature of relationship between the great man and the person at home seem to

be deliberate, as it questions the gender binaries of masculine vs. feminine. The person

concerned is a homosexual man, who chooses to live incognito, away from public life, but

seems to be self-sufficient and happier than the man who lives in a patriarchally regimented
world, with its masculinist values. The domestic gay man is relatively free from patriarchal

coercion, whereas the other, more distinguished man of public life, who is also gay, has to

suffer the masculinist coercion of public life and act suitably to maintain his manly identity.

Although the latter cracks up and “weeps”, violating the gender rule that big boys are not

supposed to weep.

“Who’s Who”, the title of the poem becomes supremely ironical, because Auden is

adopting the strategy of camouflaging the gender of the person in the second stanza, and

cleverly dismantling the gender binarism as well as the heterosexual norms of patriarchy. All

said and done, the who in Who’s Who model of information directory is ambiguous. Like the

unknown citizen, the private self of a man remains hidden, with predilections, desires and

sentiments shockingly different from what is expected of him. This is one poem, among

others, that deals with Auden’s difficult negotiations between the private homosexual

compulsions and desires on the one hand and the prescribed performatives of public life.

The two persons described in the two stanzas may as well be the two personae of a

deeply tortured man with his problematic sexuality.

3.3.3 Analysis-3 Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with the juicy bone.
Silence the pianos and, with muffled drum,
Bring out the coffin. Let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

Scribbling in the sky the message: “He is dead!”
Put crepe bows around the white necks of the public doves.
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
 He was my north, my south, my east and west,
My working week and Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song.
I thought that love would last forever; I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one.
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun.
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can come to any good.

The poem “Funeral Blues” by W.H. Auden has an interesting textual and cultural

history that informs the subtle ironical import of the poem. A close reading or simple

linguistic analysis of the poem unsupported by knowledge of its cultural history misses the

ironic import of the poem and the fact that being a commemorative piece, it undercuts the

cultural act and ideology of commemoration in the times bedeviled by the fear of the second

World War. Its intent and effect are part of its meaning, which are manifested in the choice of

words and figuratives. Since diction and metaphors are components of lexis, and the stylistic

choice and execution of them is germane to the semantics of the poem.

The poem first appeared as part of Ascent of F6, a satirical play that Auden and

Christopher Isherwood wrote in 1936 as a piece of funeral oration made jointly by Lord

Stagmantle, a corrupt, power-broking newspaper baron, and Lady Isabel Welwyn, daughter

of the former colonial governor of the fictitious African colony of Sudoland, on the death of

Sir James Ransome, the Colonial Secretary in the Tory government. The oration is in fact a

strategy to whip up Britain’s imperialist zeal against its rival Ostnia (a fictitious European

empire), which also made claims upon British territory in Africa. The poem was given a

setting for chorus and instrumental group by Benjamin Britten as part of his incidental music

for the first production of The Ascent of F6 in 1937. In 1938, it was re-written by Auden in 4

stanzas to be sung by Anderson Hedii, a noted soprano, and published in the anthology The

Year’s Poetry( 1938). It was also included in his book Another Time (1940). While in all
these versions, and the ones variously titled in Collected Poetry (1945), Collected Shorter

Poems: 1927-1957 (1966) , and his posthumous Collected Poems (1976, 1991, 2007), the

political meaning remains distinctly, in which, however, a homosexual meaning embedded to

be more manifest after Kallman betrayed Auden in 1942. In the film Four Weddings and a

Funeral (1994), the poem was read by Matthew (John Hannah) at the funeral of his partner

Gareth (Simon Callow). Although a lament, it seems in the first two stanzas a flamboyant

public performance of funeral and a calculated parody of the genre of Old Boy’s speech, a

species of camp commemoration. It assumes not so much the expressive function in good

earnest as the directive or conative function, as Roman Jakobson (1960) would have it,

although in an ironic vein. It is ironically directive in its function in the sense that it directs

the listener to act or behave in ceremonially solemn ways as desired by the speaker in certain

funerary settings of the State. The third stanza assumes an expressive speech function in that

the speaker expresses his feelings of loss and sorrow. The fourth stanza is directive, but

hyperbolical and richly ironical.

In stanza 1, words like “clock”, “telephone”, “the dog”, “pianos” collocate as

objects of the ordinary, quotidian, domestic world, producing sound bytes that are ordered

temporarily. These types of sounds variously serve as indices (in the sense Charles Sanders

Pierce uses ‘index’) of sounds of the passage of time, tele-conversation, feeding of dog,

musical entertainment within the setting of home. The muffled drum and coffin disrupt the

sonorous ordinariness of domestic world, and the sounds are now silenced, marking the

suspension of quotidian time.

There is a transition from stanza I to stanza 2, with the arrival of the “mourners”, who

are joined by “aeroplanes”, “public doves” and “the traffic police” to publicly proclaim and

mourn the death of the important man, presumably a statesman, a politician, a dictator,

observing the solemn ceremonials. Here the setting is public, and the grand scale on which

the funerary ceremonials of aeroplanes planned to write “He is dead” with the smoke emitted
by them, doves seen in public places like a city piazza or cemetery or park be made to wear

crepe bows, or policemen ordered to wear black cotton gloves makes the entire exercise

ludicrous.

Stanza 3 becomes deeply personal, and backward gazing, with the focus shifting

from the domestic and public space outside the subjective self to the space inside, which is

laden with memories and feelings of loss. Here the He is a lover, and the speaker is clearly

hyperbolic while declaring that “He” was “my north, my south, my east and west”

metaphorizing the entire world. The metaphors “working week” (stanza 3 line 2) and

“Sunday rest” (stanza 3 line 2 ) show that the friend was with him during work and pleasure.

Similarly, “noon, my midnight, my talk, my song” are metaphorical markers of leisure time –

not the quotidian time to be shared with others and observed in public, but personal time,

privately defined and savoured in intimate, private space, accompanied by subjective states

of feelings of bliss in the company of the lover talked about. The repetitive use of “my” is too

glaring to miss, and it intensifies the effect of a deeply private voice. What is most

significantly different from the preceding stanzas is the theme of betrayal in love in this

stanza. What the lover mourns now is not the ephemeralness of life but that of love. In the

light of our knowledge of the fact that Auden’s poetry in the late 1930s began to express his

intense experience of isolation in intimate homosexual relationship and his mortifying

realization that erotic impulse and political activity are both expression of vanity and desire

for power (Summers 2002), this stanza, we notice, convincingly marks the transition from the

figure of politician to that of lover. The poem juxtaposes funerary occasion of public

mourning and that of rueful private reminiscence of lost love, underscoring vanity of the

politician in one case and the betrayal of the lover in the other. The hyperbolical metaphoric

expressions in this stanza ironically suggest the enormity of the betrayal and pains.
 Stanza 4 becomes even bolder hyperbolically with cosmic imagery. Here “the stars”,

“the sun”, “the moon” and “the ocean” now collocate as cosmic objects of eternity and

contrast themselves sharply with the quotidian object that mark time in Stanza 1. These

objects are vehemently dismissed together with the emphasis on “now”, which is repeated

twice. Within the quotidian time of the present thus the markers of cosmic time and eternity

are negated in anger and disillusionment. But this is curiously an inversion of what the

speaker does in Stanza 1: that he orders that the quotidian markers of sound and time be

dismissed for a while to effect the enormity of the eternity of death.

3.3.4 Analysis-4 Mundus et Infans

(For Albert and Angelyn Stevens)

Let him praise our creator with the top of his voice,
Then, and the motions of his bowels; let us rejoice
That he lets us hope, for
He may never become a fashionable or
Important personage:
However bad he may be, he has not yet gone mad;
Whoever we are now, we were no worse at his age;
So of course we ought to be glad
When he bawls the house down. Has he not a perfect right
To remind us at every moment how we quite
Rightly expect each other
To go upstairs or for a walk, if we must cry over
Spilt milk, such as our wish
That, since, apparently, we shall never be above
Eeither or both, we had never learned to distinguish
Between hunger and love?

The poem “Mundus Et Infants” was first published in Common-wealth, 1940 and later

re-published in all the editions of Collected Shorter Poems. Auden celebrates the birth of his

friends’ child as some kind of a god father. The poem is a vivid description of of the child’s
biological activities, antics and emotional and psychic states from a highly benignly jocular,

ironic and reflective adult point of view, which is more a collective point of view rather than

a personal one, as evidenced by the collective pronoun “We” from the 4th stanza till the end.

With its lexical richness and wonderful tonal variations, the poem offers complex

perspectives on different relationships that exist in the war-time adult world. The title,

“Mundus Et Infants” meaning “the world and the child” in Latin is by itself an exploration of

the relationship that exists ecologically. Hence the oikos of the child, his world, is traced back

to the mother’s womb. One is reminded of the anonymous English morality play from source

is a late 14th-century or 15th-century poem under the same title. It served to mirror of the

periods of man's life in an age that was anchored upon strong moral values and religious faith

in the late medieval period. But this resonance, which is struck by Auden’s poem invest irony

in it particularly in a war-torn time.

The attempts made by the child to free itself from the mother’s womb are

symbolically presented as man’s need of freedom, as many critics interpret. But such

interpretation does not exhaust the richness of meaning. The child makes its presence in

terms of an “appetite”, which assumes secondary meaning of an impersonal machine whose

needs for “supply” and “delivery” of raw materials must be met, and in case of “shortage”,

“responsibility” should be fixed on the mother in case the promise made by her is breached.

All this regime of the child’s demand and coercive power in fact begins with a violence of

birth, the brunt of which the mother bears. These are suggested by the phrase: “Kicking his

mother” (stanza 1 line 1). So, all the association of felicity and grace associated with child-

birth has been ironically undermined.

The child grows from a demanding presence to a bellicose posture of “clenched fist”

(stanza 2 line 1) as we come to the second stanza, and takes the shape of a little ogre,

resolved to fight tyranny, although being a tyrannical and anarchical figure himself in a

jocular way. Thereafter the baby is presented as a “pantheist”, wise as saints despite his “loud
iniquity” and someone who cannot lie, and be judgmental in a subjective way, without being

embarrassed like the adults. The child also makes the adults learn to distinguish between

“hunger” and “love”.

The ironic effects of the poem are heightened by the use of language that describes

the activities of a child, although it should best represent the adults. This basic contradiction

in the usage of imagery and the diction gives rise to the ironic effects of the poem. Through

this poem the poet hopes to get across the message that the child like quality and innocence

of the child must remain even when the child has grown into a full-fledged adult. The

“hypocrisy” and “lying” that grown-ups tend to adopt once they become adults are however

characteristically absent in the child.

Auden’s use of a wide range of expressions in the form of figures of speech and

idiomatic expressions make “Mundus Et Infans" a great poem. Moreover, the language of the

poem being paradoxical to the subject of the poem, gives it a unique quality of being serious

and playful at the same time. Its exalted and affected rhetoric combined with the colloquial

humor that is ironical in nature makes the poem an amalgamation of different styles. Though

the poem speaks of a child, its grandiloquent verbosity gives it tonal and semantic

complexity. By using lexis that is supposed to suit a child, the poet makes references to

serious issues of moral confusion and emotional muddle, political injustice, war, violence and

economic crisis that the adults live through. We also find a number of different registers

being employed by Auden in this poem. They include, each of which consists of its

vocabulary that is suitable to the register:

a)Theological and Philosophical Register as in -‘soul, pantheist, solipsist’

b) Political register- ‘New Order, Dictated peace’
c)Economic Register-‘Supply, raw materials, delivery, Shortage’
d)Social Register -‘Cocky little ogre’
 There is a marked incongruity in the use the lexis to describe the child on the one

hand and the expected vocabulary lexis that is more appropriate for the description of the

adult. The poet achieves this paradox by using words that describe the child in its face value,

but the underlying meaning warrants a more serious usage.

One remarkable aspect of the poem is the use of enjambment in the entire

poem enriches the poem, making it a perfect example of the use of a wide range of poetic

devices in a single poem. The enjambments in the poem have been well balanced by the use

of Caesuras that are placed at regular intervals in the poem:

Though, to take on the rest

Of the world at the drop of a hat or the mildest

Nudge of the impossible. (Stanza 2 lines 3-5)

The use of idiomatic expressions like “cry over spilt milk” and “at the drop of a hat”

enhances the poetic quality in the poem.

Auden has made extensive use of various poetic devices in this poem to reflect and

highlight his ideas and concept of the birth of a child and its life on earth. No regularity in

verse is found in the poem and hence it is a poem completely made up of free verse.

Similarly, no regular rhythmic beat is found in the poem even though there are instances of

an obvious rhyme scheme.

Some of the full rhymes found in the poem include:

1. Soul / role (stanza 1 lines 1- 2)

2. Be / free(stanza 1 lines 3- 4)
3. Rest / mildest (Stanza 2 lines 3-4)
4. Co-operates / states (stanza 3 line 1-2)
5. Place / face (stanza 3 lines 3-4)
 In some stanzas the rhyme scheme has been constructed as aabb as is seen in the

above examples and in some it is abab. In stanza 5 both the rhyme schemes have been

combined into one stanza:

So / no (lines 1-2)
should / good (lines 3-4)
least / beast (lines 5 & 7)
blame / shame (lines 6 & 8)

In the collection of unusual rhyme schemes, some rhyme only partly, as in “into / through”

(stanza 3 lines 5 & 7) and some rhymes are muted and do not rhyme at all as in “promises” /

“peace” (stanza 1 lines 6 & 8 )and “impossible” / “all” (Stanza 2 lines 6 & 8 )

Both stressed and unstressed syllables are found in the lines of the poem. Since the

poem has long and extended lines, there are more than 10-12 syllables in each long line and

about 6 in each short line.

Use of metaphors is also found in the poem that is politically motivated. References to

Hitler and political motives are found in “dictated peace” (stanza 1 line 8), “raw materials”

(stanza 1 line 4), and “new order”(stanza 1 line 3), These metaphors may seem out of place in

comparison to a small defenseless child, but it is the humorous aspect of the poet to compare

a child as being completely apolitical as against the mighty rulers referred to here.

The poem is garnished with spicy humor with references to the child as “cocky little

ogre” (stanza 2 line 2), who has been given “supreme powers”(stanza 2 line 6), in its own

limited world to “resist tyranny” (stanza 2 line 7), and with all “forces at command”(stanza 2

line 8),

Auden in the middle stanzas shows the ability of the child to be peaceful even though

it does not have the ability to think. The lexical quality of the second stanza highlights this

thought:
 ...for, to his eyes, Funny face
Or elephant as yet
Mean nothing.
“He thinks as his mouth does (stanza 3 lines 4-8)

So though the idea in the poem is a satire towards the thought processes of the grown-

ups or adults, it also provides hope in the form of a future adult who may not follow the same

thinking.

3.3.5 Analysis-5 As I Walked Out One Evening

As I walked out one evening,

Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river

I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
“Love has no ending.

“I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you

Till China and Africa meet
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street.

“I’ll love you till the ocean

Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.
“The years shall run like rabbits
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages
And the first love of the world.”

But all the clocks in the city

Began to whirr and chime:
“O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

“In the burrows of the Nightmare

Where justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

“In headaches and in worry

Vaguely life leaks away,
And time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.

“Into many a green valley

Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver’s brilliant bow.

“O plunge your hands in water,

Plunge them in upto the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you’ve missed.
“The glacier knocking the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the cracks in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.
 “Where the beggars raffle the bank notes
And the Giant is enchanting the Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer
And Jill goes down on her back.

“O look, look in the mirror,

O look in your distress;
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

“O stand, stand at the window

As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.”

It was late, late in the evening,

The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming
And the deep river ran on.

The poem, in the mode of a conversation between the narrator, the the lovers, and

the clocks (which represents time) shows the helplessness of the lovers racing against time.

The poem ‘As I Walked Out One Evening’ was first published in 1940 in the collection of

Auden’s poems Another Time. The poem is in the old poetic form of ballad, consisting of

fifteen quatrains of a straight-forward rhyme scheme ‘abcb’. Because of this generic quality

the poem exhibits a stark resemblance to the folk songs of yester years, especially with

respect to its rhyme and rhythm. The lexical use of words and images in the poem highlight

the quality of old ballads of England f time against love, as discussed by the people involved

in the conversation.
 Two themes of love and time as mutually opposed have been explored in the poem

with respect to each other and individually. The poem is a perfect example of how imagery

is utilized by the poet to highlight the concept of the passage of time and the lover’s inability

to impede that pa ssage of time in order to be able to continue their love.

The poem is basically divided into four parts that are distinct in its division. The first five

quatrains is positive in nature and is a proclamation of love, though there is a distinct force of time

and the impersonal force of death ready to scuttle all plans and ruin all dreams of the lover even

though his rhetoric is full of hyperboles of continent drift, apocalypse, and the eternity and pristine

form of love:

I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you

Till China and Africa meet
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street.

I’ll love you till the ocean

Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

“The years shall run like rabbits

For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages
And the first love of the world”.

But Time shall have its writ over the lovers and human beings in general. These ideas have been

conveyed in the next four quatrains. So, what is needed an enlightened acceptance of life in its

imperfections, failings, absurdities etc. in the five quatrains that follow the line: “O plunge your

hands in water”…
 The lexis of the poem highlights collocation of signifiers of similar ideas and

metaphoric as well as metonymic links between signifiers. Words such as “walked” ,

“Walking”, “pavement”, “railway”, “run like rabbits” do collocate as signifiers of movement

and progress. This idea is metaphorically linked with the idea of the flow of time and,

therefore, with “river”. For its part, the river as an elemental force of nature collocates with

snow and desert that are inflected with meanings of death, a consequence of the fleeting of

time.

Again, the snow that destroys the green valley is an anti-life force at the level of nature

and a metonymic equivalent of the desert that sighs in the bed, and the glacier knocking the

cupboard. Since the bed is a very intimate space of lovemaking and procreation and the

cupboard is a personalized space of possession within home, the desert and the glacier are

cosmic forces that are disruptive of life in vegetative and corporeal terms.

But the paradoxical truth is that whatever appears to be fleeting, or being destroyed in

fact reaches a state of maturity and fulfillment, and whatever appears to be disruptive of life is

in fact life-sustaining, on the other hand, .Hence perhaps the image of “crowds upon the

pavements are wheat” in the first stanza. The wheat is shown as fully grown and ready to be

harvested which means it has reached the fulfillment and also the end of its life. As for the

“river” in the second stanza, it continues to flow unending, providing sustenance to life. So it is

not the ending of time but the unending quality of love that is portrayed in the stanzas to prove

that time does conquer the love of true lovers.

Extremely familiar imagery with simple language makes this poem easy to

comprehend. The familiar imagery of the everyday domestic world “basin”, “cupboard”, “bed”

and cracked “tea-cup’ create a banal order of reality, which, however, signifies elemental

experiences of death and destruction in cosmic magnitude. This simple and ordinary lexical

terminology is juxtaposed by the more complex and intricate terminology to describe nature
around us and the supernatural element that is intriguing and unknown. The poem highlights

the archetypal imagery with the lexical usage that is used for time as against the lexis to

represent love and hence we find a highly contrasting language emerging in each stanza:

Into many a green valley

Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow (Lines 32-36)

The use of unconventional capitalization on the part of the poet serves to personify Time and

its Justice against which humans have to struggle in life and love. The lines: “And Time will

have his fancy” (line 31).and “Where Justice naked is” (line 26) seem sinister in their intent and

effect, for:

Time watches from the shadow

And coughs when you would kiss
and
The desert sighs in the bed

There are some more examples of personification of time and clock, the index of time, in the

following lines:

But all the clocks in the city

Began to whirr and chime:
“O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

The clock is used to symbolize the quotidian, chronic time, whereas the river that flows on

brings us the intimations of eternity, which is time in its infinite form:

 It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming
And the deep river ran on.

As the poem draws to a close we begin to realize that there is a suggestion of hope

and optimism in the lexis of the narrator, and hence the poem “As I walked out one

evening” is a reflection of Auden’s own hope and optimism towards life.

3.3.6 Analysis -6 CANZONE

We are created from and with the world

To suffer with and from it day by day;
Whether we meet in a majestic world
Of solid measurements or a dream world
Of swans and gold, we are required to love
All homeless objects that require a world.
Out claim to own our bodies and our world
Is our catastrophe. What can we know
But panic and caprice until we know
Our dreadful appetite demands a world
Whose order, origin, and purpose will
Be fluent satisfaction of our will?

Drift, Autumn, drift; fall, colours, where you will;

Bald melancholia minces through the world.
Regret, cold oceans, the lymphatic will
Caught in reflection on the right to will;
While violent dogs excite their dying day
To bacchic fury; snarl, though, as they will,
Their teeth are not a triumph for the will
But utter hesitation. What we love
Ourselves for is our power not to love,
To shrink to nothing or explode at will,
To ruin and remember that we know
What ruins and hyaenas cannot know.
If in this dark now I less often know
That spiral staircase where the haunted will
Hunts for its stolen luggage, who should know
Better than you, beloved, how I know
What gives security to any world,
Or in whose mirror I begin to know
The chaos of the heart as merchants know
Their coins and cities, genius its own day?
For through our lively traffic all the day,
In my own person I am forced to know
How much must be forgotten out of love,

How much must be forgotten even love,

Dear flesh, dear mind, dear spirit, o dear love,
In the depths of myself blind monsters know
Your presence and are angry, dreading Love
That asks its images for more than love;
The hot rampageous horses of my will,
Catching the scent of Heaven, whinny: Love
Gives no excuse to evil done for love,
Neither in you, nor me, nor armies, nor the world

Of words and wheels, nor any other world.

Dear fellow-creature, praise our God of Love
That we are so admonished, that no day
Of conscious trial be a wasted day.
Or else we make a scarecrow of the day,
Loose ends and jumble of our common world.
And stuff and nonsense of our own free will;
Or else our changing flesh may never know
There must be sorrow if there can be love.
 A poem written in the early forties (1942), W.H. Auden’s ‘Canzone’ is a later addition

to his collection of poems titled Collected Shorter Poems (1950). It is a deeply personal lyric

with profound ethical implications in relation to the destructive socio-political forces of the

war. The poem gestures towards ‘agape’ or “universal love” as a way of life and the freedom

of both love and ‘the will’ from desire.

As the title shows, the poem is a canzone, an early form of sonnet consisting of 10- to

12-syllable lines without a refrain. Originating in Italy during the period of Italian

Renaissance, this form of poetry became popular all over Europe. Many English poets have

tried their hands at canzone, adaopting particularly the formal features of Petrarchan canzone.

Auden chooses a particularly difficult form rime petrose of Dante’s “Amor, tu vedi ben che

questa Donna” (c.1296). Dante’s poem consists of five twelve-line stan- zas, with a commiato

of six lines, in which each line ends with one of only five rhyme words- “donna”, “petra”,

“freddo”, “luce”, and “tempo” (lady, stone, cold, light, and time). It is all about the lover

being spurned by the cold lady-love, and the expectation that she will warm up return the

love only at the end of time. What the poem shows is the possibility of: “return” of love,

which is free from desire and time. It underscores the trope of”‘return” in a mythical time

scheme. Like Dante, as Susannah Young-Ah Gottileb( 2001) argues, Auden suffered from a

rejection of his homosexual love for Chester Kallman, who turned out to be unfaithful. Still,

Auden pined for Kallman’s love. But unlike Dante, Auden does not gesture towards the end

of quotidian time and possibility of a cosmic time in which “return” of the love denied will be

possible. Dante’s anticipations of cyclic retrun have been made possible through his canzonic

form,a complex lexical and phonological pattern of repetition. “The cyclical pattern of

Dante's poem mirrors the transmutations it describes and the transformations for which it
pleads” (Gottileb 135). On the contrary, the cyclical pattern Auden's poem continually

interrogates the cyclical character of its form.

For example, the idea of seasonal cycle signifying cyclical time is suggested to be

disrupted. "Drift, Autumn, drift; fall, colours, where you will." -this line reproduces in

miniature the problematic character of the poem's form. As Gottileb observes:

“Instead of the repetition of the seasons, prepared by the repetition of drift, what
is repeated is a word, fall, that, in the dimension of cyclical, seasonal time, would
be a synonym for Autumn, but is here instead an imperative: not a recurrence of a
natural phenomenon, but an expression of the will. Thus, cyclical time is
overtaken by the will, and this word dominates the stanza. For the word will not
only marks the future (as a verb tense); as a faculty, the will demands an
unforeseeable future, one determined not by a past that returns in ever-repeating
cycles, but by the will itself. (136)

Auden’s linguistic virtuosity lies in teasing out of the lexical items like ‘fall’ and

‘will’ multiple meanings. Fall is another name of Autumn, and it suggests an interruption in

the movement. As for will, it is a modal which also signifies volition or choice.

In Auden's canzonic form there are five stanzas of twelve ten-syllable lines (with only

one line differing in syllable count) and a five-line envoy. The end of each of the envoy's

lines is one of the five rhyme words:day’ , “world’ , ‘will’ , ‘know’ , ‘love'-in a sequence

(aedcb) determined by taking the first rhyme word in each of the five main stanzas and

maintaining the same order of rhyme words in each of the successive lines. While in Dante,

the poetic form corresponds to cosmic time (in the sense of both seasonal transformation and

the eternal return of the same as it is outlined in Platonic-Aristotelian cosmology), in Auden,

however, there is no such intimations of “cosmic time”. In his poem the five rhyme words do

return in a regular fashion to close all the sixty-five lines of the poem. The sequence they
form seems to be a cryptic statement: “(the) day (the) world will know love”, pointing, as it

were, towards a future when the world will attain the understanding of a great philosophical

truth: “there must be a sorrow if there can be love”.

In absence of any cyclical scheme of time, the self, desire, will and love is caught

corporeally in a linear time. That is why “will” and “melancholia”, which are a mental

impulse and mental state respectively, get inflected in terms of bodily attributes to become

“bald melancholia” and “lymphatic will”.

In the line “Bald melancholia minces through the world”, the verb “minces” has been

used deliberately by Auden in intransitive form. It means that melancholia does not affect the

world, it is affected in itself. It maintains an elegant and decorous air, and therefore it is

decadent. These become symptoms of effete and passive body and mind of the modern man.

Elsewhere the will becomes “haunted will”, which hunts for its “stolen luggage”. For will to

be “caught in the reflection of the right to will”, or to be hunting for its “stolen luggage”are

images of self-obsession, which impedes positive action. The aggressiveness accompanying

such will is that of dogs at their dying day’ just as self-love is as much subhuman as hyaenas

“that do not know the cause of their ‘ruin”. Here the “dogs” and “hyaenas” signify animality

of self-love and obsessive will that lack grace. Overweening pride and ambition can make

“rampageous horses of will” “whinny”, as they catch the scent of Heaven. On the other hand,

Love that “does not give excuse to love” becomes divine love. Hence the appeal to praise

“God of Love”. The poem is a call to humanity to come away from the idea and embrace

“agape”, for Auden asks people to move away from violence and accept the Christian way of

life to save the world:

The line “Dear flesh, dear mind, dear spirit, dearest love” extols Auden’s loved

person (object of one’s desire) as body, mind and soul, which Love embodies. Therefore,

Love is larger than the objects or persons one desires and “asks it images for more than love”.
The poet realizes that much out of “love” needs to be “forgotten” and “forgiven”, and these

are quite certainly desire, greed and ambition that inhere in self-love and obsessive will. Here

the Christian resonance of “forgiven” and “forgotten” is unmistakable. The poem thus reflects

Christian influence on Auden. Abstract and highly metaphysical, the poem is a call to man to move

away from materialistic desires and adopt spirituality as a way of life as is the will of God. What is

emphasizes in the last lie of the poem (“There must be sorrow if there can be love.”) Is sorrow as a

form of suffering – once again a profoundly religious experience in the Christian sense – that is

different from the affected and decadent “melancholia”.

This analysis reveals how Auden builds his thematics around key lexical elements

that are meaningful at multiple levels. One picks different strand and threads of meaning

from the poem while concentrating on its lexis. Polyvalence, metaphorical extension of

primary meaning, collocation, Christian resonance of words and above all generic novelty of

Canzone are feature of Auden’s lexical style.

As this chapter shows, Auden extensively uses synonyms and antonyms,

homophones, collocations, adjectives, registers, archaic words, prepositions, etc. as semantic

markers for self expression according to his purpose or intended meaning. Through lexical

analysis of a few poems we saw how words mean and how they interact with one another

meaningfully. In the next chapter we shall see how sound components of Auden’s poems

serve as features of his style and structure meaning.

***
Sound Pattern as Style

4.1 Introduction

In the first lecture out of six on the subject of sound and meaning which Roman

Jakobson gave at MIT in 1937, he talked about their relationship by way of pushing the

frontiers of linguistics beyond describing sound as mere acoustic phenomena, and going

beyond the level of the phonetic signifiers towards the domain of the signified, the domain of

meaning. In fact he is one of the early linguists to have looked into the relationship between

sound and meaning in the formalist poetics which he developed. In the fourth lecture he

emphasized the importance of morphology as the bridge sound and structure thus:

The systematic investigation of the way in which phonological resources are put to
use in the construction of grammatical forms, which was initiated by Baudouin’s
school and by the Prague circle under the name of ‘morphology,’ promises to
construct an indispensable bridge between the study of sound and that of meaning,
as long as one takes into account the range of linguistic levels and what is
specifically fundamental to each of them.
(http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ru/jakobson.htm).

Truly enough, words and the patterns of their formations, which we call

morphological structures, provide the focus on the discussion of sound patterns and also link

these to the larger syntactic structures. Indeed, if language is a system that relates sound with

sense through structure, then the structure has to be primarily morphological and secondarily

syntactic. This chapter thus anchors its discussion of the relationship between sound and

sense or meaning.

Formalists like Jakobson (1960) and Jan Mukarovsky (1970) tried to differentiate the

language of literature – more of the language of poetry than that of the novel, which is

bewilderingly varied and indeterminate – linguistically. They provided the theoretical ground
to scholars of formalist persuasion and stylisticians of the later times to define literariness

linguistically, although not very convincingly; for understanding what exactly makes a poem

a poem can seem almost impossible to pinpoint. Yet, combinations of features distinguish

poetry from prose. Although both poetry and prose comprise the basic structural elements of

language, poetry boasts of a more creative twist on those elements since it strives for more of

a concentrated beauty in language. Therefore, in order to create poetry of a high artistic level,

poets not only deliberate word choice, but exercise care in the structuring of these words and

combine them in ways that help convey the theme or emotion of the poem. The subject

matter evident in the verbal content is significant in establishing meaning; however, because

poetry is a highly artistic form of language, the structure and sound of the poetry ought to

support or add to what is communicated through the verbal content. Peter Levi attempts to

define poetry as “a particular and beautiful behaviour of language: it is less like the notation

of music than like a particular performance of certain particular notes on a particular

instrument” (1977:40). When the poet understands and utilizes the multi-dimensional

qualities poetry comprises, a poem becomes a superior “performance” of words, form, and

sound working together to achieve a unified work of art.

Poetry, because it is an art form, is compared to other arts such as painting and even

architecture, but because of its elements evincing musical qualities, the comparison between

poetry and music merits a greater degree of attention. Leonard Bernstein asserts that

“language leads a double life; it has a communicative function and an aesthetic function,” and

he calls poetry the “true parallel with music” (1976:79). Although music and poetry are

distinct genres, the qualities of poetry strongly resemble those of music; therefore, methods

involved in the analysis of music can be applied to the analysis of poetry. This allows the

critic to understand the nature of poetry to a greater degree, enabling him or her to approach

poetry with a greater understanding of its strengths. Schlauch confirms, “People study poetry
as a discipline, just as they study harmonic analysis of music, in order to heighten their

appreciation and to deepen their understanding of the classics” (1956:22). While analyzing

the musical elements of poetry is a fascinating study on its own, the purpose of analyzing the

two art forms is to develop a greater understanding of each work as a whole. This includes

understanding not only the sum of the parts but also what is achieved beyond the sum.

Bernstein explains that in music, “the combination of two different chords automatically

creates a third one, a new phonological identity” just as in poetry, “rhythm (sound) and

content produces something new” (1976:341).

Understanding what the poem achieves as its own work is the goal, but beginning

with individual elements and moving steadily toward the sum of those elements and then to

the work as a whole can simplify complex issues of meaning. Although some of the elements

of poems are parallel to elements of music, the poems themselves should not be termed

“musical” unless all of their parts work together to promote the unity of the poem. Schlauch

remarks, “All of the physical aspects of language sounds—intensity, duration, pitch,

harmonic relations—contribute to a total effect of greater or less acoustic prominence. It is

this complex of factors which produces the quasi-music of verse” (1956:173). Just as one

expects the melody, harmony, and rhythm of a musical piece to all work together to achieve a

sense of oneness, a poem, with its elements—some musical and some not-ought to evince a

sense of unity. If a poet is successful in combining its “factors,” producing a coherent whole,

only then can a poem be termed “musical” in the sense that all of its parts fit together as a

unified whole.

One layer of poetry that can help the work achieve “musicality” is sound—many

times, the layer first noticed by a listener. According to Amy Gross, “It is sound that we first

experience as pleasure in the reading of poetry” (23). Even if the words of a poem
communicate a highly artistic idea, if the sounds accompanying them do not echo the same

artistic level, the poem does not achieve its artistic potential. Blackmur points out that “the

music of words alone may lift common sentiment to great import” (1957:238). Analysis of

this layer of poetry is essential since even if a person does not understand the verbal content

of a poem, he or she can still enjoy the artistic aspects of the sounds produced and perhaps

even gain knowledge of the poem’s content without fully comprehending the text. Poetry,

even if the verbal content is not clear to a listener, can still communicate and thereby affect

the reader. T.S. Eliot explains, “We can be deeply stirred by hearing the recitation of a poem

in a language of which we understand no word” (1942:15). The sound of a poem, an entity

that can be separated from verbal content and structure, is essential to the poem’s aesthetic

value. Besides the verbal content and the form of the poem, the sound can also help

communicate the message of a poem, whether by acting as a backdrop, supporting the

meaning communicated by other layers, or creating additional meanings that embellish the

main idea of the poem. For instance, assonance of low-frequency vowels, when used

frequently, can create an atmosphere of dread that serves as a backdrop to the verbal content.

In addition, a faster tempo can give the poem a more energetic sound, perhaps establishing an

emotion in addition to what is already being communicated. Aspects of sound can be used in

an almost endless number of ways to help the poem communicate artistically.

Since sounds are physical elements that can be measured scientifically, pure sound is

a layer of poetry that at times can objectively reveal characteristics that relate to the meaning

of poetry. Because some consonants and vowels emit certain pitches or continue a set length

of time when in combination with other letters, sounds can communicate what some would

term a “melodic line” that is capable of communicating an attitude or emotion, or affecting

the lyrical flow of the passage. In music, a melody is quite obvious to a listener, while in a

poem, what one would consider the element most closely related to a melody requires much
attention on the part of the listener. Pitch fluctuations can be difficult to hear, especially since

many times, the pitches do not greatly contrast one another. Analysis of this layer must be

done with caution since, as Geoffrey Leech relates, “All too often imaginative reactions to the

meanings of words are projected on to the sounds of which they are composed. We must be

careful, therefore, to distinguish between the generally agreed symbolic range of a sound and

its associative value as apprehended by a particular reader in a particular linguistic context”

(1969:100). Although a poem may use onomatopoeic language, one cannot allow the

definition of the word to colour the sound of a word if that sound, in fact, is not illustrating

the meaning of the word. There is room for variations in interpretations of poetry, but in some

passages, the range of sounds and fluctuations between sounds is limited, even in

combination with absences of sound. Levi stresses the significance of not only pitches, but

also “certain silences and certain fulfilled expectations of the ear, with the subconscious

expectations of the language itself and with what is particularly expected in given forms of

speech” (1977:23). The sound of poetry can, therefore, be analyzed in relation to the natural

expectations of its listeners.

Because silences play an integral role in poetry just as rests play an integral role in

music, the sounds produced by poetry are even more similar to those in a true melody. Aaron

Copland clarifies the listener’s expectations when he explains that “a beautiful melody, like a

piece of music in its entirety, should be of satisfying proportions. It must give us a sense of

completion and of inevitability. . . .the melodic line will generally be long and flowing, with

low and high points of interest and a climactic moment usually near the end. Obviously, such

a melody would tend to move about among a variety of notes, avoiding unnecessary

repetition”(1957:50). Poetry, in the same way, should demonstrate beauty in its sound. This

does not mean that the sound patterns will necessarily sound smooth to the ear. Sounds that

communicate tensions through dissonance can help communicate the nature of a passage that

is meant to sound abrupt in comparison to surrounding passages. Whether the sounds

produced by the poem are melodious or dissonant, they should further the theme

communicated by the words and structure to give the listener an aesthetically pleasing

experience. Because poetry includes the aspects of language and sound, it can be analyzed in

a way that helps listeners understand what they are hearing and why they are hearing what

they are hearing. Analysis of the sound in poetry is essential in the overall analysis; however,

it must be done accurately, separated from the other elements until an overall analysis is

derived.

Closely connected to the sound a poem makes is a second layer—form—which

comprises all the structures in which words appear. Looking at individual words can be

deceiving if words are not analyzed in relation to their surroundings, a process giving the

listener the context necessary for full understanding of the poem. Levi remarks, “A word is

much affected by the context of other words, and a phrase by the context of other phrases as a

particular colour in one corner of a picture is affected by and affects all the other colours in

it” (1977:36). Analyzing smaller structures such as parts of speech, phrases, clauses, and

other structures inherent in lines and stanzas clarifies the implications of the verbal content.

These structures also determine which words are emphasized since the grammar of the

structures, especially the more meaningful parts of speech and emphatic positions, can give

particular words considerable weight. Verbs and nouns are considered the more significant

parts of speech since they reveal more information in comparison to other parts of speech;

therefore, where verbs and nouns are placed within the structure of a line or stanza can help

to emphasize or de-emphasize them in relation to the surrounding words. The placement of

words on accented syllables within the metric pattern or stressed beats within the rhythmic

structure of the poem can draw the listener’s attention to particular words. Even more

significant are structures that illustrate a detour from what is expected since unexpected

patterns can emphasize a particular idea. Sometimes grammatical structures and peculiar
word combinations can produce ambiguity rather than clarity, making them a source of

tension, but even in this case, if structures are used to further the whole poem, they add

dimensions to what is communicated verbally, supporting the ideas communicated in the

verbal context of the poem while strengthening the listener’s experience and overall

conception of the poem’s message. For instance, a grammatical structure, in relation to the

preceding and following structures, can promote ambiguity of meaning; however, if the

poem’s content is relating a struggle, the poet may purposefully use a grammatical structure

that mirrors the idea of a struggle, producing tension in the poem. The ambiguous

grammatical structure, therefore, strengthens the poem since it is used to produce tension that

is also communicated by other aspects of the poem. Although understanding words in the

context of phrases, clauses, lines, and stanzas is significant in analysis, how these smaller

structures relate to each other and to the larger structures and finally to the overall poem

should not be ignored, especially since how the poem reads as a unified whole determines its

ability to “sing.” If only smaller structures are analyzed, the significance of the poem can be

lost since a poem is more than the sum of its parts. Therefore, step-by-step analyses moving

from smaller structures to the structure of the poem as a whole should be completed and then

related to what has already been established from analysis of the verbal content.

One way in which elements of music and poetry specifically coincide in the realm of

form is through rhythm. Although poets’ ideas for content sometimes originate initially just

as some composers first create a musical idea, other poets begin with a set rhythm in mind

before they write the words of a poem just as composers at times begin with some kind of

rhythm as a basis for a musical work. In both art forms, rhythm plays a significant role not

only because it can represent the foundation of both poetry and music, but because it

comprises patterns that function in meaningful ways within the context of the poem. Eliot

explains that “the properties in

which music concerns the poet most nearly, are the sense of rhythm and the sense of

structure” (1942:28). The rhythm of a poem not only helps to emphasize words, but also

showcases the continuous flow of the ideas and expressions conveyed in the poem, aiding in

the delivery of the verbal content. Gross emphasizes the significance of rhythm since

“rhythmic sound has the ability to imitate the forms of physical behavior as well as express

the highly complex, continually shifting nature of human emotion” (1965:11). Although

rhythm can be an onomatopoeic device, even more importantly, because the rhythm moves

the poem along, it causes the content of the poem to become more vivid to the listener. Gross

explains that “rhythmic structure offers the means by which a work of literature achieves its

peculiar reality, the illusion that what we are reading is quickened with a life of its own”

(1965:13). This quality heightens the listener’s awareness of the poem because it is alive as it

is read.

Since the rhythm of poetry and the rhythm of music are so intertwined, one can

approach the rhythm of a poem in the same way that he or she approaches the rhythm in

music. According to Leech, “The rhythm of English is based on a roughly equal lapse of time

between one stressed syllable and another” (1969:106). Therefore, in a poem applying

traditional structural methods, the reader can expect the steady pulse produced by the rhythm

in the first line of poetry to continue without drastic variation throughout the poem. Being

aware of the rhythm and analyzing it helps the reader understand not only which words or

syllables are stressed but also what exactly is affecting the flow of the poem. Although the

pulse may remain steady, Leech notes “that syllables vary in intrinsic length, as well as in the

length imposed on them by the rhythmic beat” (1969:109); therefore, the characteristics of

the words themselves are still retained even within the rhythm of the poem’s meter. The

meter, however, in connection to the rhythm, can also affect the speed of the poem’s flow.

Leech asserts that “the impression of speed increases with the number of syllables per
measure” (1969:112). By analyzing the rhythm of poetry, one can analyze the movement of

the poem in conjunction with what is being communicated through the verbal content,

therefore, illustrating the specific, meaningful connections between the verbal content and its

rhythm—connections imperative to understanding the work as a whole.

Another element pertinent to structure in both poetry and music is parallelism or

repetition with variation. Bernstein claims that “it is repetition, modified in one way or

another, that gives poetry its musical qualities, because repetition is so essential to music

itself” (1976:149). In many musical forms, the melody is introduced within the first section,

and later in the work, variations on the melody appear. These variations may be very similar

to the melody perhaps with a few different notes or in a different octave, or even employing a

different rhythmic pattern, but still maintaining a close connection to the melody. In other

cases, the music may move from the first section which introduces the melody to a second

section which introduces a new idea subservient to the first. Although the theme in the second

section seems to contrast that in the first, eventually the connection between the two sections

will be seen, and the music will once again return to its first melody. This process shows that

although the music has one central theme, other melodies can add to or support the central

theme yet still create variety within the work. Poetry as well usually presents one main idea

or theme developed throughout the poem, yet other supporting ideas can vary and add to the

theme but still preserve the continuity of the poem. Eliot argues that “in a poem of any

length, there must be transitions between passages of greater and less intensity, to give a

rhythm of fluctuating emotion essential to the musical structure of the whole” (1942:18).

Although music may seem different from poetry in that its musicality is obviously present,

because poetry employs and depends on rhythm, the sound of the voice, and a theme with

variations, it too employs musical elements. Leech furthers the comparison, stressing “that

parallelism is the aspect of poetic language which most obviously relates it to music”
(1969:93). Leech’s definition of parallelism includes alliteration, consonance, assonance, and

types of rhyme, focusing on how the syllables relate to each other (1969:89). Essential to an

understanding of the sounds involved in alliteration, consonance, and assonance are

definitions of the various sonorants and obstruents. Sonorants are ounds that are song-like in

nature because the air flow is more unrestricted while the sounds of obstruents reveal an

obstruction of air flow.

Understanding the significance of individual sounds is essential to analyzing poetry, a

genre that utilizes sound to express meaning. David Mason and John Frederick Nims explain

that “we can think of words as having not only a mind (their meanings) but also a body—the

structure of sound in which their meanings live” (2006:145). Therefore, those who study

poetry have learned to connect particular sounds to particular emotions or tones. This

approach is impressionistic to a certain extent, but because many poets have used particular

sounds in a particular way, authors such as Mason and Nims confidently present connections

between sound and meaning.

Although the study of how particular sonorants and obstruents connect to the text of

poetry may seem insignificant, individual sounds impact the meaning of words, even more so

when sounds are repeated in passages with alliteration, consonance, and assonance. Mason

and Nims assert that alliteration “can create a bond of identity between words, hinting that if

they have sound in common, perhaps they have something more” (2006:162), a principle that

can be applied to examples of consonance and assonance as well. Observing individual

sounds and steadily moving to patterns of sounds and, ultimately, to the overall sound of the

poem reveals significant relationships between sound and text that would otherwise go

unnoticed. Levi agrees “that so many characteristics of the whole spectrum of poetry from the

greatest to the least are determined by such tiny and obvious factors as a repeated noise”
(1977:15). Therefore, repetition and parallelism can be seen in several ways in both poetry

and music.

Finally, requiring more attention is the verbal content—the layer that can

communicate the main ideas or feelings of the poem. Words comprising a poem are, of

course, extremely important in the art form of poetry since creativity in word choice is an

expected occurrence in poetry. Ideally, the idea is expressed in the most fitting words so that

its creativity in language draws in and entices the listener. Blackmur asserts, “The typical

great poet is profoundly rational, integrating, and, excepting minor accidents of incapacity, a

master of ultimate verbal clarity” (1957:269). The clarity of the verbal content is extremely

significant since while sound and structure imply meaning, language is a system of

representations in which words represent specific meanings; therefore, the verbal content has

an advantage in its ability to communicate.

Calvin S. Brown explains that “language consists of sounds endowed with

associations and meanings, and even in deliberate nonsense it is impossible to escape the

external associations which are always present in the sounds of speech” (1948:14). The

verbal content is certainly an important layer because of its ability to communicate, but it is

not necessarily the most important layer. It is, at times, the core of the idea or feeling of the

poem, but without the artistic nature of the other layers, the verbal content would lose much

of its nuanced flavor.

Ideally, each layer of a poem—verbal content, form, and sound—works together to

produce a unified work of art. The poem that excels in every aspect evincing a sense of unity

because each aspect works towards the overall theme, can rightly be termed “musical”—not
because the poem is pleasing to the ear, but because, like a piece of music, the poem “sings”

as a result of its oneness.

The sounds created by the poems support and add to the form and verbal content,

emphasizing their similarity to musical works where every part works together to form a

coherent whole. While the selected poems by no means represent the gamut of poetry that can

be deemed “musical,” they illustrate a method of analysis that can be used on any poem to

determine its value as a unified, “musical” work of art. Since many struggle with

understanding how the nuances of poetry work and how they heighten the effect of poetry,

this system of analysis, promoting a deeper understanding of poetry, should enable them to

identify not only each aspect of a poem, but also the function of each aspect as it relates to the

whole. Fully understanding poetry’s capabilities, although it involves an orderly process, is

essential not only for a true analysis of poetry but also for the pleasure from listening to

poetry read.

4.2 An Overview on the Sound Pattern as Style in Poems by W.H. Auden

W H Auden’s work is famous for its variety in style. In his formative years young

Auden was searching for an idiom and distinctive style of his own. He emulated his favourite

poets until he found his own distinctively individual style. So, while writing his juvenilia he

passed through a Georgian phase, owing his craft to Edward Thomas, Walter de la Mare, and

then he started imitating Hardy and early 20th century poets, namely Edith Sitwell, TS Eliot,

Hopkins etc. For example, the sprung rhythm of Hopkins is so clearly in the lines of the early

poem “Aware”, which is a metrical homage to the great poet:

Bones wrenched, weak whimper, lids wrinkled, first dazzle known,

World-wonder hardens as bigness, years; brings knowledge, you…
But soon enough he developed a style of his own, and showed virtuosity in developing the

meters to match his themes. He developed the poetics of “light verse” in his Oxford Book of

Light Verse (1938). It was based on the belief that the cultural context of modern poetry is

very different from what it was in the Elizabethan period. There was consensus of beliefs and

opinions, attitudes and interests among majority of people in Elizabethan England. At this

time the poet was not "conscious of himself as an unusual person, and his language [was]

straightforward and close to ordinary speech". But in the modern age, due to spread of

education, rise of academic elite, and a lack of homogeneous, general audience for poetry, the

poet was beset with the crisis of catering to the academic intelligentsia, who have their own

"areas" and want him to cater to their elitism. On the other hand, he was to face the

philistines, who admittedly read little poetry, although they were exposed to verses of sundry

inferior kinds like those in advertising, in church, in folk doggerels, dirty songs, and pop

music. That is why Auden developed, according to Chistopher Pollintz (1977), a low as well

as high style. The low style includes many songs and ballads he wrote, sometimes composing

them to the tunes of popular ballads. The poem “Victor”, for example, which has been sung

to “Franky and Johnny”, is a case in point. At times he also wrote ribald university songs like

“Miss Gee”, which could be sung to the tune of “St James Infirmary”. He also produced

parody of conventions of ballads, folk-songs and nursery rhymes, writing poems like “As I

Walked Out One Evening”, “The Witnesses” etc. In “Roman Wall Blues” and “Calypso” he

imitated the style of jazz and West Indian music. However, the second style of "light verse"

which Auden developed was serious in tone and on topics of wide public concern. Some of

the best examples of poems of high style were “September 1, 1939”, “In Memory of W. B.

Yeats”, “In Memory of Sigmund Freud”, “At the Grave of Henry James” etc.

In keeping with the changing notion of poetry, Auden made variations upon the stanza

forms, rhyme schemes and rhythmic patterns. Auden’s concept of what a poem ought to be

never remained constant, at least after 1965. Although the notion of poetry as a “memorable
speech” remained even in the 1960, there had taken place certain transformations in the

poetic diction of Auden, and by the late 1960s it had gravitated towards the language of

prose.

In 1932 in the essay “On Writing” he had said that the patterned movement of words,

which constitute meter, is a “group excitement of words”. Poetry, with strong rhythm,

emphatic rhymes and definite stanza forms, casts a hypnotic effect on the readers, and

profoundly affects them. In The Poet’s Tongue ( 1934) , an anthology of poetry which Auden

compiled with John Garrett, he said that it was a memorable speech and something that

“must move our emotions, or excite our intellect, for only that which is moving or exciting is

memorable, and the stimulus is the audible or spoken word or the cadence”( 327). It is in his

early poetic career that his poems were invested with the moral power of parable-like orality.

But parable-like quality does not seek to offer any moral advice or propagate a dogma. Rather

ironically it challenges dogmas and conventional opinions and religious beliefs. Lucy

McDiarmid observes” “Auden voices the tentative hope that poetry can be like loving spoken

words, transforming and redeeming, themselves carriers of value” (8). That is why we find

him at times using unrhymed epigrams as in one of the early poems “Dover” (1937):

Steep roads, a tunnel through the downs are the approaches;

A ruined pharos overlooks a constructed bay;
The sea-front is almost elegant; all this show
Has, somewhere inland, a vague and dirty root:
Nothing is made in this town.

In the 1940s, his views showed changes. In a review of Roethke’s “Open House”, he

said that good poetry should be able to show “tense awareness of both chaos and order,

the arbitrary and the necessary, the fact and the pattern” (qtd in Arana 60). But he still

retained the earlier view of “memorable speech” and refined upon it by saying that the
 versification of poetry should be such that order must be created where there is chaos.

However, towards the 1960s he said that he preferred a “drab” poetic style to a “theatrical”

one. By drab poetry he meant a poetry that is unpretentious and natural, not tawdry and

artificial. It must offer itself to the reader in the form of parables in a bid to make them

conscious of the reality around them. Indeed, in the sixties, one comes across many of

Auden’s poems that sound plain and matter of fact. A case in point is “A Change of Air”,

a poem in iambic pentameter, without any exciting rhythm.

In much of Auden’s poetry, one notices use of both traditional metrical patterns and

natural speech rhythm of ordinary language. Auden is known for using skillfully a wide

repertoire of meters that are possible in the English language, and effecting variations of

beats upon the feet. For example, Auden uses as in “Refugee Blues”, which we shall discuss,

the four- beat rhythm of poetry (the most common rhythm in nursery rhymes, street genres,

popular ballads, advertising jingles, sports chants). However, as Derek Attridge ( 2005: 156)

shows, he resists this rhythm by using three-beat lines (trimeters) that prove effective and

sound playful in allowing occasionally a fourth virtual beat on lines of run-on syntax and

varied rhyme-schemes as in his humorous poem “Five Senses”:

Be patient, solemn nose,

Serve in a world of prose

The present moment well,

Nor surlily contrast

Its brash ill-mannered smell

With grand scents of the past.

Also, Auden has used some of the most challenging stanzaic forms like the Sestina,

villanelle, canzone, and a sonnet form that is dissimilar from both Shakespeare’s and
Petrarch’s. Auden experimented with new forms, using new techniques. Some of the

important components of the sound of Auden’s poetry include different rhythmic patterns,

stressed and unstressed syllables, alliterative verse and, onomatopoeia. He incorporated all

these, adopting modes as different as musical folk ballads, nursery rhymes, jazz, ordinary

conversation etc. Whether it was light verse, serious, satirical or doggerel, his styles always

had a unique quality which matched the theme and ambience of the poem. His technical

brilliance in versification can be seen in “Canzone”, in which he used a highly technical form

known as the “continental form”, repeating a specific number of words in the entire poem at

the end of each line. Different tones highlight his poems, thereby producing voices that are

very wide ranged to suit the characters of the poem.

Part of Auden’s experimentation with rhythm was the adaptation of strong-stress

verse, which originates from Old English, and rather uncommon in modern English poetry.

He imitated the Old English (also known as Anglo-Saxon) verse, dating from the seventh to

the eleventh centuries. An example is “The Seafarer”, with the stresses underlined, and the

vowels indicated in bold, according to the conventions of this verse, any vowel may alliterate

with any other:

The thriving of the treeland, the town's briskness,

a lightness over the leas, life gathering,
everything urges the eagerly mooded
man to venture on the voyage he thinks of,
the faring over flood, the far bourn.

Interestingly, also, he made experiments with syllabic stanza forms at many points in

his entire career, experimenting with Horatian, Asclepiadean and Sapphic quatrains. As far as

the Sapphic form is concerned a brilliant case in point, which will be discussed at the end of

this chapter, is Auden’s “River Profile”.

 Auden’s novelty of sounds depends crucially on his diction, especially on the use of

rare words and dialects in the poems of the later period. Sometimes words like "oddling

angler” and "Dotterels and dunlins on its dark shores" as in “The Age of Anxiety” (1947) are

highly unusual and presumably his own coinage. And yet, at other times he uses familiar

words in the most extraordinary manner to make an ordinary line sound good. Again in ‘The

Age of Anxiety’ he uses the phrase "tacit tarn” which looks quite strange as it is used to

describe a mountain lake which is not generally quiet. This was basically to make the line

more alliterative.

Another special feature of his poetry is the use of conversational meter in order to

simulate the racy, conversational language of everyday contexts, which we will be discussing

with reference to the poem “Musee the Beaux Arts”.

The phenomenon of sound imitating and producing sense is felt when Auden employs

the poetic device of onomatopoeia, which is a representation of sound in the poem. His well-

known poem “Night Mail” (1937), meant for young readers, has a rhythm that imitates and

reproduces the movement of a train, especially with words that sound like the movement of a

train: “Shoveling white steam” (stanza 1, lines 8), “Snorting noisily”(stanza 1, lines 9), “tugs

yelping”(stanza 3, lines 3). Its regular dactylic meter and perfect rhyme imitate the rhythmic

sound of the train in motion. When the train moves fast, the rhythm of the poem quickens;

when it slows down, the rhythm also becomes slow. The poem can be read with a beat and

rhythm that resembles the music of the wheels of a moving train. The train begins with a slow

chugging of its wheels and as they rotate on the track clattering, they slowly but steadily pick

up speed and finally reach a crescendo as the narration gets breathless with pace and speed in

the penultimate stanza. But in the final stanza there is a slowing down of the pace to indicate

the nearing of the destination, in this case, Scotland and the versification is seen to be more

sedate and sluggish.

 Indeed, Auden is an accomplished poet as far as his control over literary forms and

sounds are concerned. It is, perhaps, for this reason that today most of his poems are cited to

illustrate standard poetic devices.

From here onwards, we shall see a few specific poems of Auden, if not in their

entirety always, at least in fragments. We will take some poetic stanzas for analysis to

understand what specific rhyming patterns, meter, and stanza forms the poet uses, and for

what intent as well as effect. We will be a position to understand how sound contributes to

meaning in the poetry of Auden. Considering the fact that Auden used a wide range of styles

in his early and later poetry, we will choose poems representing different phase of his poetic

career. We may begin with the following poem ‘O Where Are You Going?’ An early poem

written in 1931, it is based on a folk ballad, which was popular in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Structurally, it seems to be an imitation of “Cutty Wren” folk songs comprising two voices

engaged in a dialogue of call and response, which are believed by some to be associated with

human sacrifice.

4.3 Analysis of Sound Pattern

4.3.1 Analysis-1 O Where Are You Going?

"O where are you going?" said reader to rider,

"That valley is fatal when furnaces burn,
Yonder's the midden whose odors will madden,
That gap is the grave where the tall return."

"O do you imagine," said fearer to farer,

"That dusk will delay on your path to the pass,
Your diligent looking discover the lacking
Your footsteps feel from granite to grass?"

"O what was that bird," said horror to hearer,

"Did you see that shape in the twisted trees?
 Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly,
The spot on your skin is a shocking disease?"

"Out of this house" ‚ said rider to reader,

"Yours never will" ‚ said farer to fearer,
"They're looking for you" ‚ said hearer to horror,
As he left them there, as he left them there.

Auden structures it as four quatrains with amphibrach feet, the first one of which is thus:

O where are you going? " said reader to rider,

"That valley is fatal when furnaces burn,
Yonder's the midden whose odors will madden,
That gap is the grave where the tall return."

The poem produces the calculated effect of archaism because the metrical foot of

amphibrach was used in Greek and Latin prosody, and in various popular poetic narratives

like ballads and limericks in the 19th century. It consists of a stressed syllable surrounded by

two unstressed syllables. In the above scansion the stressed syllables have been underlined,

and the metrical feet have been marked off by vertical lines.

The alliterative sound pairing of /ˈriːdər/- /ˈraɪdər/, /fɪərər/- /fɑːrər/, /ˈhɒr.ər/-/hɪərər/ is

very folksy in tone and pronouncedly oral. Similarly, /mɪdən/ -ˈmæd.ən/ is an instance of

internal rhyme and assonance, together with other words like “gap” – grace”, and “granite”-

“grass”, to accentuate the effect of oral narrative. There obtains, on the one hand, conceptual

similarity between gap and grave (conceptually, the grave is a gap), and midden and madden

(a midden’s stench is maddening), while, on the other hand, antithesis builds up between the

reader( being static and staying indoors) and the rider ( who is outdoorsy and mobile). The

word granite, which is hard and without life also contrasts with grass which is soft and

animate. Within such semantic order of similarity and antithesis, exchanges take place
between the speaker, who is variously the “reader”,“fearer” and “hearer”, while the “rider” is

“farer” and even “horror”. Auden’s “reader” warns the “rider” of the dangers he will face on

his journey through the “fatal” valley, presumably of life, which may be inevitably towards

death ( also “dusk”). But the dauntless rider does venture “out of the house”, tauntingly

replying to the pleadings of the ‘reader”. In W. H. Auden: Contexts for Poetry ( 2002), Peter

Edgerly Firchow argues that the “rider” stands for the writer and that the poem serves as a

warning to those who are too timid to follow. However, the “writerly” abilities of the

“reader” figure show that the “rider” and the “reader” are not opposing characters: instead,

together they serve as a model for the kind of socially engaged, persuasive writer that Auden

imagines would be able to lead a community( 26). The exchanges work out the engagement

that Firchow talks about.

Undoubtedly, Auden foregrounds the sound patterns of alliteration and assonance as

pointed above. This stylistic choice determines his use of the unusual morphology of “fearer”

and “farer”. “Midden” ( a heap of dung) is again chosen for reason of sound, although being

old and obsolete, this word gives an archaic touch to the poem. The poem has remarkable

dramatic quality.

We shall move on to another poem ‘On this Island’ now, which is as much dramatic

as the foregoing one, but strikingly different in stanza form, rhyme and rhythm. “On this

Island”, one of the early poems first published in 1936 under the title Look Stanger, and later

in 1937 eponymously in the collection On this Island. It is deeply romantic in temper like

Wordsworth’s, with lilting musical effect of high Victorian poetry of Tennyson.

4.3.2 Analysis 2

On This Island

Look, stranger, on this island now

The leaping light for your delight discovers,
Stand stable here
And silent be,
That through the channels of the ear
May wander like a river
The swaying sound of the sea.

Here at a small field's ending pause

Where the chalk wall falls to the foam and its tall ledges
Oppose the pluck
And knock of the tide,

And the shingle scrambles after the suck—

ing surf, and a gull lodges
A moment on its sheer side.

Far off like floating seeds the ships

Diverge on urgent voluntary errands,
And this full view
Indeed may enter
And move in memory as now these clouds do,
That pass the harbour mirror
And all the summer through the water saunter.

The poem has a variable number of accents that can be 2, 3, 4 or 5 in the lines of varying

length. And yet it is rhythmic largely because it employs iambic feet of an unaccented

syllable followed by an accented one, except for line 7. It has no regular rhyme-scheme. One

comes across instances of para-rhyme in the words “ ledges”/”lodges” and also one notices
internal rhyme of “light”/ “delight”. For an early poem of Auden, it is quite complex in the

pattern of meter and has a rhyme scheme that is highly irregular. .It is like--a b c d c e d f g h

i g i j k l m l m m. As one can easily see, certain sounds do not get rhymed--a b / e f h / j k.

However, it is richly musical because of devices of alliteration and assonance:

leaping/ light; delight/discovers....line 2

stand/stable............................line 3
swaying/sound.........................line 7
falls/foam (mediated )................line 9
scrambles, sucking/surf..............line 12
far/off/floating..........................line 14
move/memory...........................line 18

The nearness of the speaking voice is keenly felt when it addresses the hearer. It feels as

if we are gazing upon an island in the sea with a voiceover. It is a voice that is measured and

slow, and it directs the sensory attention of the hearer to the “swaying sound of the sea”. Let

us scan the lines of the first stanza, pointing out the accents by underlining them and marking

the pauses by vertical lines:

Look, stranger, on this island now

The leaping light for your delight discovers,
Stand stable here
And silent be,
That through the channels of the ear
May wander like a river
The swaying sound of the sea.

These are end-stopped lines, with powerful periodic pauses. They have no pauses or

caesura in between them, excepting the first one with three pauses, which calls the attention

of the viewer to the island. The pace of the poem is slow in the first stanza because of the

preponderance of diphthongs in the following words:

/ˈstreɪn.dʒər/ , /ˈaɪ.lənd/ , /naʊ/ , /laɪt/ , /dɪˈlaɪt/ , /ˈsteɪ.bl̩ / , /ˈsaɪ.lənt/ /ɪər/, /sweɪŋ /, /saʊnd/
 However, in the second stanza as we begin to notice the “chalk walls” or waves

breaking into the foam, we find the movement quickens. Except for the words “oppose” and

“moment” (/əˈpəʊz/ and/ˈməʊ.mənt/), the other words have no diphthongs. Therefore the

movement is faster. The monosyllabic words “pluck” and “knock” (/plʌk/ and /nɒk/) make

the movement of the tide quick and snappy. It is quite ingenious of Auden to break the

“sucking” word into two parts and take the second part over to the next line thus:

And the shingle scrambles after the suck—

ing surf, and a gull lodges
A moment on its sheer side.

This is deliberate on the part of Auden. First of all, it creates the effect of a run-on line and

creates the effect of uninterrupted movement of the shingles scrambling after the surf, and

secondly it maintains the iambic measure, which could have been disrupted had “sucking”

been kept intact at the end of line 12. Further, it also gives the impression of a precarious and

fleeting moment for the gull.

Again in the first line of the last stanza the two pauses halter the movement:

Far off like floating seeds the ships

The diphthongs in the words in the last stanza like “diverge”, “voluntary” and

“clouds” also slacken the movement. Thus what we see in this poem is how sound controls

sensory perceptions of a landscape. This poem is descriptive in a plain and simple way,

without complex ideas and irony, which we find in the later poems. However, it is deeply

powerful in its visual qualities. The sound patterns reproduce them ably.
4.3.3 Analysis -3 Musée des Beaux Arts

A wide range of tones are used by Auden in a dramatic way when he ascribes these

to various characters or to the personae that he himself represents. What is created is a music

of voices, as it were, accentuated by the use of vowel and consonant sounds that are either

use repetitively or by rhyming them in different ways. These voices, which can be as varied

as oratorical voices, elegiac voices, nostalgic voices, call forth a variety of the readers’

emotions. The oratorical voice is distinctively present in one of the most popular poems,

“Musée the Beaux Arts” (1938).

The first stanza is an apt example of it:

About suffering they were never wrong,

The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

The poem describes the old masters whom a museum-goer will see at Musée des

Beaux Arts – not just Breughel’s “Fall of Icarus”, that represents the human position of

suffering, but also “The Numbering [Census] at Bethlehem” and “The Massacre of the

Innocents”. But the focus of the poem is not on the subjects of the painting, but on human

suffering in the midst of the ordinariness of everyday life, and even the ordinariness of the
experience of strolling among paintings, which the rhythm of the poem imitates by means of

its heavy pauses.

About suffering they were never wrong,

The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

The opening three lines resemble blank verse. These are decasyllabic each, and do

not seem to rhyme – until we come to the end of the fourth line, which is more than twice the

length of any of the first three lines. Further, the first two lines are end-stopped, with medial

and terminal pauses as indicated above. The pauses in the lines create a rhythm that simulates

the leisurely walk and pause of a visitor in the art museum. Whereas the run-on lines, with

internal rhyme pattern of “eating” , “opening” and “walking” ( /ˈiː.tɪŋ/, /ˈəʊ.pən.ɪŋ/,

/ˈwɔː.kɪŋ/) of syllables of similar stress bring about a smoother and swifter flow of sounds,

suggesting how one moves inexorably towards the tragic “human position” through ordinary

activities. And yet the rhyming words that sound trite and reflect the banalities of the

everyday world only ironically qualify the abstract “human position”, which is profoundly

tragic in its implications. This is in keeping with the central idea of merging the great poetic

events and mundane, prosaic affairs of the everyday world, which old masters like Brueghel

painted amidst the prosaic banalities. The semantics of the human condition of suffering is

built around four archetypal dramatic scenes like suffering, miraculous birth, martyrdom and

the fall of Icarus, but each of them forms itself amidst the trivia of eating, opening the

window or dully walking, or children skating on the pond, the dogs living their doggy life and

the torturer’s horse rubbing its back. What is brought to the fore is the randomness and the

contingencies of everyday life that do not lend themselves to a definite scheme and purpose,

which the great masters in their classical art have reckoned with even as they have artistically

imagined scenes of archetypal human suffering.

 The haphazard commingling of the visuals contingencies and banalities together with

symbolic scenes of archetypal events with epochal dimension characterize the human

conditions of suffering. Such haphazardness has been represented through the sound patterns

of the poem. As P.V LePage (1973) observes, the poem is irregular in its syllabic

structure and rhyme scheme. In the first stanza which has been quoted, the first three lines

have ten syllables and four regular stresses or accents, while the fourth one has 22 syllables

and eight accents. Thereafter the rest of the poem is irregular in its syllabic feet and accents.

It only smacks vaguely of iambic and anapestic rhythms, but it does not lend itself to any

order. Excepting 7 end-stopped lines the rest are run-on lines that make the rhythm irregular.

As for the rhyme, it appears at first reading as though the poem has no rhyme.

LePage observes:

One perhaps sees “waiting” and “skating” are rhymes. One perhaps hears “wrong”
in the first line chime with “along” in the fourth, perhaps forgot with spot in the
ninth and eleventh lines, “ away” and “may’ in lines fourteen and fifteen seem to
make more sound than any pair of word before – though the lines are enjambed,
both words are accented; “green” and “seen” make the fact of rhyme visual, if not
audible. The scheme never rises above seeming haphazardness in any reading of
the poem, and the haphazardness again helps to give the work the same feeling that
the other comminglings of the poem convey: the merging of great poetic events
with prosaic everyday events. (257)

Let us look at the last lines of the poem:

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
 Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

As David Perkins aptly observes, there is a distinct feel of conversational tone

because of the use of colloquial phrasings: ‘must have seen something amazing” and

“somewhere to get to”, and empty phrases such as “for instance” and “quiet leisurely”( 1987:

164). These linguistic elements and their stylistic overtones of colloquialism and

conversational idiom are reinforced by irregular prosody and irregular rhyme that we have

already discussed. The overall effect of such stylistic execution is a rhythm of prose and the

feel of the everyday banal life.

4.3.4 Analysis- 4 The Crossroads

Now we shall move on to Auden’s formal treatment of the sonnet form, and the

phonic qualities of a unique sonnet form he developed. Our example is ‘The Crossroads’, the

third sonnet in a sequence of 20 sonnets under the collective title ‘The Quest” (1940). The

year of the publication of ‘The Quest’ coincided with Auden’s return to Anglo-Catholic

Christianity, from which he had strayed away in youth. In fact the quest motif is recurrent in

many of his poems, of which we have already discussed ‘O Where are You Going?”. It is a

search for order out of chaos and a larger meaning of life the individual must seek to

overcome the condition of alienation he is beset with on account of absence of universal

system of beliefs. Paradoxically, the order he is in search for can be obtained through the

breaking away from the conventional sonnet form.

The Crossroads

Two friends who met here and embraced are gone,

Each to his own mistake; one flashes on
 To fame and ruin in a rowdy lie,
A village torpor holds the other one,
Some local wrong where it takes time to die:
This empty junction glitters in the sun.

So at all quays and crossroads: who can tell

These places of decision and farewell
To what dishonour all adventure leads,
What parting gift could give that friend protection,
So orientated his vocation needs
The Bad Lands and the sinister direction?

All landscapes and all weathers freeze with fear,

But none have ever thought, the legends say,
The time allowed made it impossible;
For even the most pessimistic set
The limit of their errors at a year.
What friends could there be left then to betray,
What joy take longer to atone for; yet
Who could complete without the extra day
The journey that should take no time at all?
This poem is a radical experiment with sonnet form. It has 21 lines and three stanzas,

of which the first two have 6 lines each, and the third one has 9 lines. The six-line stanzas are

expansion of quatrains, and the nine-line stanza is an expansion of a standard sestet. Actually,

odd as it may seem as a sonnet, it still maintains its bipartite ratio of the Italian sonnet, as one

can find that a normal octave and sestet have been expanded by half, as it were ( from eight

lines to twelve and six lines to nine) . The six-line stanzas have identical rhyme scheme:

aabcbc in the first being paralleled by ddefef. Lines 1and2, 3 and 5, and 4 and 6 are rhymed.

In fact “formal continuities” of rhymes in the first two stanzas “are matched by

corresponding development of theme”, for the catastrophes met by the two friends have been
seen in larges perspectives through the question raised by the speaker in the send stanza, and

that the crossroads are turning points for journey into an unknown and possibly a “perilous

future”

The first stanza has stress patterns as follows: (Adames 574).

Two friends who met here and embraced are gone,

Each to his own mistake; one flashes on
To fame and ruin in a rowdy lie,
A village torpor holds the other one,
Some local wrong where it takes time to die:
This empty junction glitters in the sun.

The first line is a trimester of 3 anapest feet, consisting of two uaccented syllables
followed by an accented syllable of heavy pauses. The stress on ‘gone’ is well-pronounced to
signify a sense of finality. But rhythm changes abruptly in the next line to dactyl (one
stressed syllable followed by two unstressed. Usually, a dactyl has faster movement than
anapest, given the phonetic quality of these feet. Hence, what is suggested here is an
uninterrupted flow of events such as each of them drifting quickly to his own mistake. The
second line ends with unaccented ‘”on”, and therefore runs on to the third one. Again there
is another sharp change in the rhythm of the third line, with most irregular feet, combining
amphibrach, dactyl and cretic.

To fame and( amphibrach)

ruin in a (dactyl)
rowdy lie,( cretic).

Of these, cretic consisting of two stressed syllables enclosing an unstressed syllable is

rather rare in the prosodic scheme of serious English poetry. However, in proverbs and folk-

songs it is commonly used, as in: “After a while crocodile…” This is, indeed, typically

Audensque. Very rarely have poets shown such skill to compose lines with varying feet and

changing rhythm. Auden gives his reader no scope to anticipate what rhythm his next line
will take. Even in the same line, the metrical measure changes after caesura. For its part the

fourth line is also irregular:

A village (amphibrach)
torpor holds (cretic)
the other one ( four feet amphibrach)

Now this deployment of irregular rhythm is however mitigated by the rhyme scheme

mentioned earlier. While the rhythmic irregularity intensifies the sense of uncertainty as to

the path one will take at the crossroads, the rhymes give a sense of structure, and continuity

of the theme. Further, interesting as it may seem, the second line, which runs on to the third,

marks the continuity of the thought that one of the friends had a meteoric rise and fall.

Similarly, the fourth line runs on to the fifth one producing the effect of the continuity of

thought. Both friends, who are referred to by ‘ones’, follow different paths and meet opposite

fates (one flashed while the other remained in torpor). That is why “one” in the first case is

accented, while in the second case it is unaccented.

Thus, while the rhyming words achieve some order, the irregular stanzaic form of

sonnet and irregular meters counter it with disorder. The central proposition which the

conventional sonnet offers at the end is the speaker’s rhetorical question: “Who could

complete without the extra day/The journey that should take no time at all?” The answer is in

the negative, and, for that reason, the sense of uncertainty persists. As for the extra day that

could have accomplish one’s end and ‘complete’ the journey is an extension, which the

stanzas of this poem have been given in order to be expanded versions of quatrains and

sestets. But such extension intensifies uncertainty and disorderliness rather than reduces

them.

4.3.5 Analysis- 5 Refugee Blues

 One can well argue that Auden’s poetics of realism is predicated upon the sense of

uncertainty disorderliness that life signifies. However, it does not amount to mystification.

On the contrary, it makes poetry evocative and suggestive rather than directly denotative.

While writing his poems on war – many of which are very famous – he maintained a critical

perspective on war, a subject which literature had treated in a high style, according to him,

until the outbreak of the World War I. It is against the grand treatment of war accompanied

by the self-assuredness of the literary artist and his high-falutin eloquence on the soldierly

courage, honour and heroism that Auden brought in a low-key and calculatedly unsure

conversational voice, a contemporary idiom. Ballad as well as various folk verse forms and

the “low style” were the elements of style he adopted to give the piquancy of irony to his

poems on the subject of war. In this manner he expressed his sense of doubt about any noble

purpose ever could be served by war. Though the poem “Refugee Blues” that I am going to

discuss is not on the subject of war, it is nevertheless regarded as a war poem, since it is

about the persecution of the Jews in the Nazi ruled Germany during the time of the World

War II.

In March 1939 Auden wrote this poignant poem in which he dealt with the plight of

persecuted German Jews during Hitler’s dictatorship and oppressive regime. The Jews were

rendered homeless in the home country and denied asylum by indifferent democracies.

Though the horror of the Holocaust genocide was yet to be revealed in 1939, Auden could

foresee it clearly.
Refugee Blues

Say this city has ten million souls,

Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's no place for us.

Once we had a country and we thought it fair,

Look in the atlas and you'll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.

In the village churchyard there grows an old yew,

Every spring it blossoms anew:
Old passports can't do that, my dear, old passports can't do that.

The consul banged the table and said,

"If you've got no passport you're officially dead":
But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.

Went to a committee; they offered me a chair;

Asked me politely to return next year:
But where shall we go to-day, my dear, but where shall we go to-day?

Came to a public meeting; the speaker got up and said;

"If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread":
He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me.

Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky;

It was Hitler over Europe, saying, "They must die":
O we were in his mind, my dear, O we were in his mind.

Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin,

Saw a door opened and a cat let in:
But they weren't German Jews, my dear, but they weren't German Jews.

Went down the harbour and stood upon the quay,

 Saw the fish swimming as if they were free:
Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.

Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;

They had no politicians and sang at their ease:
They weren't the human race, my dear, they weren't the human race.

Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,

A thousand windows and a thousand doors:
Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.

Stood on a great plain in the falling snow;

Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro:
Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.

Characteristically low in style, “Refugee Blues” employs the features of the ‘blues

songs’, the tradition of which began by the African American slaves who sang in melancholic

tunes and in a specific rhythm their stories of suffering in the plantations, displacement from

home, separation from the family, and deaths of their near and dear ones. Writing his ballad

in adopting the blues rhythm Auden relates the predicament of the refugee German Jews to

the universal theme of human suffering.

The poem consists of 12 stanzas. Each stanza has a simple structure of a rhyming

couplet and a single line refrain, which are repetitive. Thus the overall rhyme scheme is aab.

The repetitive nature of the refrain and the rhyming lines make the poem sound like a ballad.

There is a complete rhyming in all the stanzas of the poem except in stanza 5 in which the

words “chair” and “year” rhyme only partly:

Went to a committee; they offered me a chair;

Asked me politely to return next year: (lines 1&2 Stanza 5)
 The stanza form, with its three lines, is also similar to a jazz stanza, the first two lines

of which have a syncopated, dancing beat, while the third line, with its repetition, is the

typical ‘blues’ line. In semantic terms, while the two rhyming lines tell the story, the third

line, the refrain, develops the theme of the poem. To facilitate the development of theme, the

refrain has been variously realized through changing in sound, structure and vocabulary.

Some of these are:

Yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's no place for us (Stanza 1).
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now, my dear,. (Stanza 2)
Old passports can't do that, my dear, old passports can't do that, my dear (Stanza 3)
Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours. (Stanza 11)
Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me. (Stanza 12)

The most interesting thing about the refrains is that these do not sound formulaic as

they do usually in folk songs, or blues. On the contrary, these sound dramatically

conversational and profoundly grief-stricken like someone repeating his words and phrases in

a sad and dejected mood. The repetition of the use of “dear” in the middle of each one of

them, which is an address of endearment, slows down the pace of lines and enhances the

sense of grief. As indicated by the accented syllables that have been underlined in some of

the refrains above, there is no uniformity in rhythm and no regularity in metrical feet;

therefore, the lines do not have easy sing-song effect, but acquire the poignancy of a live

voice that develops stanza by stanza the tragic implication of the homeless Jews.

Even when there are rhymed lines like the following, with regular dactylic feet of one

stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable, the regularity is broken by a pyrrhic

foot in each line such as “in a” and “and a”:

Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin,

Saw a door opened and a cat let in…
 Such irregularity caused by pyrrhic feet is a metrical device to produce ludicrous

effect, as evidently what is described is comic irony of poodles and cats being considered by

the Nazis and Hitler as superior to the Jews, and the comedy is black comedy.

When the freedom of the fish is imagined, the unrestrained movement

Went down the harbour and stood upon the quay,

Saw the fish swimming as if they were free:

The rhythm becomes smooth, with metrical regularity of iambic feet in the first line, with a

variation of trochaic feet, with another pyrrhic “as if”

4.3.6 Analysis -6 If I Could Tell You

We have said earlier in this chapter that Auden ceaselessly experimented with stanza

form, meter and rhyme schemes. We shall now see through our analysis of the poem “If I

could Tell You” what treatment Auden makes of the villanelle stanza form, and what

semantic effects his experimentation produces. The poem was published in 1940 and found

place in the anthologies such as Selected Poems (1958) and Collected Shorter Poems 1927-

57(1966).

Villanelle is a French verse form with 19 lines of five three-line stanzas and a

quatrain. It has a rhyme scheme of aba aba aba aba aba abaa, of which the 1st and 3rd lines

from the first stanza are alternately repeated such that the 1st line becomes the last line in the

second stanza, and the 3rd line becomes the last line in the third stanza. Repeated four times

these two lines in fact constitute the subject of the poem. The last two lines of the poem are

lines 1 and 3 respectively, making a rhymed couplet. Further, although villanelle needs no

regularity of metrical feet, nor regular line length, we still find iambic pentameter as the

preferred mode by some poets.

 Well known poems like Dowson’s “Villanelle of Acheron”( 1899), Dylan Thoms’s

“Do not Go Gentle into that Night”, or Sylvia Plath’s “Mad Girl’s Love Song” are perfect

examples of villanelle, and each of these poems seems to be obsessed with a basic idea.

Dowson’s poem insists that Acheron, the river of the netherworld, is beyond the pale of the

sun, its light and life. As for the other two poems by Thomas and Plath, the first one

emphasizes the raging passion against the “dying light’ and acceptance of the inevitable end,

i.e., death; the second one, for its part, seems to be obsessed with the longing for an absent

lover and makes neurotic objectification of the speaker’s desire through the other. All poems

of villanelle stanza forms tend to be dramatic monologues. Interesting as it might appear, the

themes in both poems are brought out very well with the help of villanelle stanza form and

rhyme scheme. An almost sledgehammer-like effect produced by the obsessive repetition of

two rhyming lines and their echo-like dispersal across the poems give them a brooding

quality and emotional intensity. Ezra Pound aptly speaks of villanelle as an emotional vortex

from which through its gyrations intellect tries to escape, although fruitlessly. In the

following poem, the repeated lines have been given in bold and italic forms.

If I Could Tell You

Time will say nothing but I told you so,

Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

If we should weep when clowns put on their show,

If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

There are no fortunes to be told, although,

Because I love you more than I can say,
If I could tell you I would let you know.
 The winds must come from somewhere when they blow,
There must be reasons why the leaves decay;
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

Perhaps the roses really want to grow,

The vision seriously intends to stay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

Suppose the lions all get up and go,

And all the brooks and soldier run away;
Will Time say nothing but I told you so?
If I could tell you I would let you know.

As a love poem it affirms the faith in beauty and life in the face of the uncertainties of

the future. It underscores the importance of time in the life of man and the power it holds

over man. As far as rhyming pattern is concerned the poem is a perfect villanelle, with the

usual aba aba aba aba aba abaa scheme being in place. However, Auden drastically changes

the iambic pattern, which we find in Sylvia Plath’s poem. Let’s look at the opening line. It is

the usual Audensque four-beat line, but with highly irregular rhythm as indicated under each

foot:

Time will say nothing but I told you so

trochee dactyl anapest trochee

The interesting thing is that such irregularity works out perfect contrapuntal

symmetry, with a trochee and iamb at the beginning and end respectively encasing

symmetrically opposite dactyl and anapest feet. On being repeated, the line largely

determines the rhythm. As for the other repetitive line below, we also find that contrapuntal

dactyl and anapest feet encase two trochee feet in between them:
 If I could tell you I would let you know.
dactyl trochee trochee anapest

Taken together, the two repetitive lines make an interesting contrapuntal rhythm

between themselves. As said earlier, in a villanelle these repetitive lines constitute the subject

or theme, which the other lines merely elaborate. Here these spell out the theme in its

elaborate form: that time does not say to us anything in advance; fortunes cannot be told;

winds blow and roses grow because they intend to; lions, brooks and the soldiers may as well

vanish for a reason time will not say. All this is what the speaker tells the hearer in addition to

pleading his inability to foretell anything. So, the entire theme boils down to the central

problematic: all one can tell someone else is that time does not say anything; ergo one could

not possibly let him or her know anything in advance of time.

Now let’s turn attention to the fragments of enunciations in both lines: “… but I told

you so…” and “If I could tell you...”. Semantically, the first one has the illocutionary forces

of “allegation” in a, argument, as opposed to the second one that has “apology” – as if one is

apologetic about not being able to perform the desired action. This semantic opposition,

which largely rest upon but (contrastive and conclusive in semantic function) and if

(conditional and hypothetical in semantic function) builds up tension in the poem, is matched

with the contrapuntal rhythm. In each of these lines of the first stanza, the words that are

semantically most important, i.e., “Time”, “say”, “told”, “you” ( first line) and “If”, “tell”,

“know” ( third line) are stressed and therefore phonetically marked out.

As for the pace of the poem we do find opposing tendencies of fast movement as well

as pauses. In a poem enjambment is a common device to hasten one line to the next not only

because a single though is broken into two lines, and no line is a complete thought unit, but

also because the line ending of a run-on line has weak stress and weak pause.
 For semantic reason Auden’s use of enjambments in the lines below show the run-on

quality of a thread of argument or a line of logical progression of ideas, owing to the syntax

linkages of “although”, “Because” and “If”. And yet the flow is arrested by “although”, a

strong qualifier in heavy parenthesis:

There are no fortunes to be told, although,

Because I love you more than I can say,
If I could tell you I would let you know.

From the point of view of rhythm, the line “Time will say nothing but I told you so”

has weak stress on “so”. As a result the second and fourth stanzas seem to run easily and fast

into the third and fifth stanzas respectively. On the contrary, “If I could tell you I would let

you know”, with heavy stress on “know”, arrests movement from the first and third stanzas to

second and fourth stanzas respectively.

The overall semantic effects produced are those of an intellectually over-wrought self,

struggling logically with the ifs and buts without possibilities of release from the anxiety

about the inability to know the future. Thematically it describes a situation of impasse, which

it works out through sound as well. It is very clever of Auden to suitably modify the opening

line as a rhetorical question in the last four-line stanza, so that he creates a new stress pattern,

which is contrapuntal thus:

Will time say nothing but I told you so?

Trochee amphibrach cretic iambic

What is gained here is a heavy stress on “so”. Therefore the last two lines of the poem
with stress falling on the rhyming words so/know arrest the pace of the poem to a grinding
halt, as it were, and pronouncing that it is a situation of impasse:

Will Time say nothing but I told you so?

If I could tell you I would let you know.
 Needless to say, alliteration and assonance enrich the euphonic qualities of poetry. To

merely point out cases of alliteration and assonance in stylistic analysis means little or

nothing, for our sole business is to analyse and demonstrate how these contribute to the

meaning of a poem and can serve as an interpretive cue while reading it.

I have already demonstrated that the contrapuntal rhythm and the tension between

the quick and arrested movements of lines in ‘If I could Tell You’ build up a situation of

impasse, which is also thematically supported. In this context the preponderant pattern of

assonance such as the repetition of /aɪ/ in /taɪm/ /praɪs/ and /aɪ/, and /əʊ/ in /nəʊ/ /səʊ/, /ʃəʊ/,

/bləʊ/ /ɡrəʊ/ /ɡəʊ/, /təʊld/, /səˈpəʊz/, /rəʊzɪz/ seem to produce a sense of phonetic enclosure,

as it were from which the speaker struggles to escape.

4.3.7 Analysis-7 The More Loving One

Now I shall move on to the analysis of the sound patterns of the later poetry of

Auden. Many critics believed that the later poetry of Auden is less appealing than his early

poetry. Frederick P. W. McDowell’s observation in this regard is a case in point:

There is reason perhaps to regard the poetry of the later Auden with some of this
indifference. His output has been slight. He has not written nothing as arresting as
New Year Letter (1941), The Sea and the Mirror (1944), or The Age of Anxiety
(1947); nor have his individual collections of shorter poems had the weight of On
This Island (1937), Journey to a War (1939), Another Time (1940), and above all
The Collected Poetry (1945). His earlier work has overshadowed all that he has
done since, and is possibly of greater importance. So many of his poems in The
Collected Poetry have become standard that it may be difficult to envision a poet
adding to a canon so sharply defined and in itself so authoritative. Auden's defects,
moreover, have not been entirely eliminated in his later verse. We find, at least
intermittently, a philosophical glibness, a coyness of style, a lumbering
facetiousness, a recondite vocabulary, and a slackness in phrasing and thought.(29)
 However, if we take Auden’s later poetry collections, Homage to Clio (1960), we find

the poems dealing with the problematic nature of companionship, responsibilities,

adaptability of humans to adversely changing circumstances, alienation from nature etc. show

the same intellectual energy and virtuosity of Auden with regard to meter and rhythm. This

volume of poem shows a marked predilection for the four-stress line, even his decasyllables

and free rhythms tending to turn into the Old English strong stress meter. Many of the poems

like “The More Loving One” acquire an uncannily cryptic quality, and in a terse style suggest

the ambivalent nature of humans, at once savage and capable of being attuned to the

intimations of the divine. Its meter lends to the poem” an old air of off-hand naturalness’

(Sandeen 380)

The More Loving One

Looking up the stars I know quite well

That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn

With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,

I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
 The poem is composed of four stanzas, each of which is a four-lined quatrain. The

rhyme scheme used by the poet is a simple format of “aabb”, and this format continues

throughout. The poem is set to iambic feet of variable syllables. The number of feet also

varies from three to four. While the regularity of the stanza form and rhyme lend to this

philosophically loaded and overwhelmingly reflective poem an epigrammatic orderliness, but

such order gets broken through the variation of syllabic number serving the purpose of

producing the effect of a speaking voice that enounces various kinds of speech acts to drive

home to the listener a certain ethical position and a philosophical attitude he would develop.

For example, he introduces a philosophical hypothesis by way of the illocution of suggestion

thus:

How should we like it were stars to burn

With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

These lines consist of two propositions combining as one speech act, with the

illocutionary force of making suggestion of a hypothetical case where it becomes impossible

to return passion to someone who showers it on one. Evidently, these clinch the central

argument of the poem that the “more loving one” should be the speaker himself.

Interestingly, the irregularity of the syllables: 9, 11, 9, 8 produce the effect of a live voice,

speaking in iambic measure of stressed and unstressed syllables of English rhythm, and the

natural cadence of spoken language of everyday world has been made possible through the

variable number of feet. Were it not so, such effect would have been lost. Because of the

voice that is conversational, persuasive and argumentative vis-à-vis an implied audience, the

illocutionary force strikes the convincing note for the proposition that the speaker ought to be
the loving one. He should rather be the loving one not for satisfying ego, but for fulfilling the

ethical obligation of loving others, irrespective of their not loving.

Auden’s analysis of relationships and love for humanity is measured on the basis of

emotional proximity and reciprocity of affection. What is brought to fore is the contrast

between the distance of the stars from the speaker and their indifference on the one hand and

his nearness to humans, notwithstanding the cruelty and violence they are capable of. On the

later Auden the influence of Anglican Christianity was profound and filled with creative

possibilities of finding new themes and forms of expressing them. All through his life as a

poet he dealt with the problematic nature of his homosexuality, which was to be kept private

and under guard, and gravitated towards public issues of politics, morality and ethics. In his

later phase of life, as this poem exemplifies, Christianity helped him to develop agape, the

highest form of Christian love, which involves compassion, selfless love for others despite

their indifference. He should learn, as he says, to look at an empty sky, devoid of stars, and

still be overwhelmed by its dark sublimity. It is this supreme moment for which he seems to

be preparing himself.

The patterns of alliteration and assonance, which become conspicuous in the last

stanza, structure the ideas of time, death and transcendence.

Were all stars to disappear or die,

I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

The alliterative words: “disappear” and “die” are almost synonymous and do play

upon the ambiguity of non-presence. These are significant in the poetic vocabulary of

Auden’s poetic vocabulary, for they hark us back to the opening line of “In Memory of W.B.

Yeats (1939)’: “He disappeared in the dead of winter…” Similarly, the rhyming pairs such as
die/sky and sublime/time are semantically related. Death and emptiness, particularly of the

sky, seem to be established in Christian eschatological tradition as cosemous ideas. As for

sublimity, the idea of transcendence is strongly suggested, which draws contrast with time,

and this way sublime/time are related. As for the repetition of the vowel sound /aɪ/ in words

like /daɪ/, /skaɪ/, /səˈblaɪm/, /maɪt/ and /taɪm/, the device of assonance only reinforces the

sense relations among the words just discussed.

4.3.8 Analysis- 8 River Profile

As mentioned earlier “River Profile”( 1966) is a later poem by Auden, which is

remarkable for its experimentation with syllabic verses. Published in the anthology entitled

City Without Walls (1969), it consists of 12 rapid stanzas of quatrains. It is grouped among

Sapphic poems, namely “Fairground”, “The Garrison” and “Circe”. It traces the course of

human life from conception to death through an extended metaphor of a river. As the

epigraph makes it evident, Auden owes the metaphor of river to Novalis. There is a flow of

adjectives and nouns that describe the river’s genesis from a mountain storm, its flow through

the hills countries and industrial cities to a delta. The dissolution or death of the river is

suggested through its evaporation and condensation: “image of death/ as a spherical dew-drop

of life”. What is

invoked is the idea of a life cycle, which leads to an allusive reflection on the religious

doctrine of resurrection of the body:

Unlovely
monsters, our tales believe, can be translated
too, even as water, the selfless mother
of all especials.

The Sapphics consist of Sapphic stanzas of 4 lines. Of these the first two are

hendecasyllabic or 11 syllables, and the third line beginning with as many syllables continues
with five additional syllables in a line called Adonic or adonean lines. Although the original

Greek Sapphics were composed of fixed syllables and quantitative meter, English Sapphics in

hands of Ezra pound, John Frederick Nims, Rudyard Kipling, Allen Ginsberg, W,H. Auden

etc. have been composed their Sapphic poems in terms of accentual meters that are

determined by the patterns of stress and unstress. As shown below, the u ( unstressed

syllable), (stressed syllable) and X( free syllable) work out the original Sapphic.

-u - x - u u - u - -

- u - x - u u - u - -

- u - x - u u - u - -

- u u - u

But in the accentual pentameter in English convert each of the lines into two trochees, one

dactyl and two more trochees.

Auden brings about still many more changes to the number of syllables and

rhythm in various lines, which have been subjected to scansion. But first the full poem:

River Profile

Our body is a moulded river

—Novalis

Out of a bellicose fore-time, thundering

head-on collisions of cloud and rock in an
up-thrust, crevasse-and-avalanche, troll country,
deadly to breathers,

it whelms into our picture below the melt-line,

where tarns lie frore under frowning cirques, goat-bell,
wind-breaker, fishing-rod, miner’s-lamp country,
already at ease with
the mien and gestures that become its kindness,
in streams, still anonymous, still jumpable,
flows as it should through any declining country
in probing spirals.

Soon of a size to be named and the cause of

dirty in-fighting among rival agencies,
down a steep stair, penstock-and-turbine country,
it plunges ram-stam,

to foam through a wriggling gorge incised in softer

strata, hemmed between crags that nauntle heaven,
robber-castle, tow-rope portage-way country,
nightmare of merchants.

Disembogueing from foot-hills, now in hushed meanders,

now in riffling braids, it vaunts across a senile
plain, well-entered, chateau-and-ciderpress country,
its regal progress

gallanted for a while by quibbling poplars,

then by chimneys: led off to cool and launder
retort, steam-hammer, gasometer country,
it changes color.

Polluted, bridged by girders, banked with concrete,

now it bisects a polyglot metropolis,
ticker-tape, taxi, brothel, footlights country,
à-la-mode always.

Broadening or burrowing to the moon’s phases,

turbid with pulverized wastemantle, on through
flatter, duller, hotter, cotton-gin country,
it scours, approaching
 the tidal mark where it puts off majesty,
disintegrates, and through swamps of a delta,
punting-pole, fowling-piece, oyster-tongs country,
wearies to its final

act of surrender, effacement, atonement

in a huge amorphous aggregate no cuddled
attractive child ever dreams of, non-country,
image of death as

a spherical dew-drop of life. Unlovely

monsters, our tales believe, can be translated
too, even as water, the selfless mother
of all especials.

In this poem 26 lines are syllabically fixed as Sapphic lines should be. The rest 12

out of the total number of 48 lines have been found to be syllabically irregular. They have

been scanned thus:

Line 5 it whelms into our pic ture below

The melt –( line 12/5

Line 8 alread y at ease (with 5 or 6/2

Line 11 flows as it should through a ny

Decli ning coun(try 12/5

Line 14 dirty in-fighting among rival agencies 12 ?

Line 17 to foam through a wrig gling gorge incised

in sof(ter 12/5

Line 21 Disembo guing from foot hills, now in hushed

mean(ders 13/5
Line 22 now in riff ling braids, it vaunts across a se(nile 12/5

Line 23 X plain, well-en tered, chateau – and ci- der- press country 12/5

Line 30 now it bisects a pol yglot metro( polis 12/5

Line 33 Broadening or bur rowing to the moon’s pha(ses 12/5

Line 40 wearies to its fi(nal 5 or 6/2

Line 42 in a huge amor phous ag gregate, no cud( dled 12/5

In the above scansion of the syllabically deviant lines, which Victioria Arana does

( 232-235) , she finds the rhythms are pretty regular as all lines are pentameters or dimeters

except line 14. Lines 21 and 22 begin with unusual cretic feet, with an unaccented syllable

flanked by accented ones. She observes that the accentual syllabic meter prompts one to scan

the first foot of each of these lines as a trisyllable, and reasonably so, for wrongly interpreting

‘Disembo and “now in riff as anapests( unaccented, unaccented and accented). Even scanned

as beginning with amphimacers( a trisyllabic metrical foot having an unaccented or short

syllable between two accented or long syllables), the lines may tally as pentameters.

Line 14 offers greater difficulty. Its disorderly rhythm does not lend it to a

pentameter. However, if we mark the units of rising rhythm, we get:

X dir ty in – fighting among ri val a( gencies

It is not a very satisfactory scansion “because it keeps threatening to break down into a series

of trochees and dactyls, and we cannot stress the syllables in any other way” (Arana 234).

Further, the two-line end, unstressed syllables suggest a sixth foot, even though these may be

understood as extrametrical:

dirty in-fighting among rival agencies

 So it is the unorthodox scansion, which is the best, since it suggests through the

turbulent rhythm of “dirty”, “in-fighting” and “agencies” and portrays the reality of

disturbance. The feet in the falling rhythm sabotage the foot meter.

Most of the irregularities in “River profile” are syllabic, but the lines in which they

occur are pretty regular either as foot verse or as stress verse. “The converse rule ( lines

accentual-syllabically irregular must conform to a syllabic, or stress, pattern) is exemplified

by the poem (234).

Line 41 can never be construed as a pentameter, observes Arana: “act of / surren/der,

efface/ment, atone(ment” , since it has 4 feet and 11 syllables. Metrically and lexically as

well, the line communicates a shrinking back from full stature, while it claims prosodic

legitimacy by virtue of its strict adherence to the syllabic requirement, the Sapphic eleven

syllables.

The strict meter of the Sapphic, with effects of starts and pauses created out of

stressed and unstressed syllables do create a sense of forcefulness and urgency. The X

syllable ( the unstressed free syllable) at the centre of the line offers a heavy caesura. The

fourth line, which is shorter in length, seems to be summative or conclusive in effect, at least

in Auden’s case. These closely match the eddy and turbulent flow of the river as well as the

obstructions it faces.

One more interesting stylistic feature of the poem is the phonetic quality of the words.

One notices that in this poem Auden also makes bold experiment with lexis, with passion and

restless energy. The words “frore” transcribed as / frɔː/ as found in line 6, is an archaic form

of “frozen”, having been derived from “froren”, the past participle of the Old English

“frēosan” or “to freeze”. It is a stylistic choice of a lexeme for the purpose of quantitative

syllabic regularity that would be disturbed if the sound would be /frəʊzən/, with an extra
syllable. Similarly, in line 5 of the same stanza the unusual and rather archaic use of

“whelms” (derived from Middle English “whelmen”, to overturn, which is in turn a probable

alteration of the Old English ‘hwelfan’ meaning to cover over) . As has already been

discussed, the line shows 12 syllables of accentual pentameter, which conflicts with the

Sapphic scheme of 11 syllables.

In the last two lines: “the selfless mother/ of all especials”, we find the use of

‘especials” as a deviation, as it is used as a noun in order to avoid the use of “especially’,

which would again have disturbed the syllabic number of the fourth line of the 12th stanza of

the poem.

The preponderance of hyphenated compound nouns such as “fore-time”, “crevasse-

and- avalanche”, “wind-breaker”, “fishing-rod”, “miner’s-lamp”, “penstock –and- turbine”,

“robber-baron”, ‘tow-rope’, “portage-way”, “well-entered”, “chateau – and – cider – press”,

“steam –hammer”, “ticker-tape”, “foot-lights”, “cotton-gin”, “punting – hole” , “fowling-

piece”, “oyster-tongs”, “non-country”, “dew-drop” is deliberate.

As we have seen, Auden adopts the format of Sapphic syllabic meter on the one hand

and breaks it with his accentual meter on the other. As seen earlier, line 23 has 12 syllables

and five feet with unusual scansion, all because Auden wants to maintain the syllable timed

rhythm of the Sapphic verses, although in practice he follows an accentual format with most

unusual pauses that are compounded by the hyphens and punctuation:

plain, well-en tered, chateau – and ci - der- press country

The effect produced is one of restless, turbulent flow of the river that gets obstructed.

Many of these compound nouns, with their patterns of alliteration and assonance, produce a

ludicrous sing-song effect with a mocking intent on the part of the speaker, who debunks

crass commercialism of cities, shallowness of urban life, exploitation of natural resources

driven by human greed, rise of the factories and the pollution caused by them are the issues

the speaker addresses in subtle mocking humour. This is an important component of

meaning, notwithstanding the philosophical reflection of life as a river.

As this chapter shows, Auden is a ceaseless experimenter of stanza forms, prosody

and rhyme. His stylistic choice of sound components does structure meaning. In the next

chapter, we shall see how the syntactic properties of Auden’s poems serve as features of his

style and inform meaning.

***
Syntax As Style

5.1 Introduction

Syntax is the schema of linguistic structures at the level of phrases, clauses and

sentences. Nowottny (1962) asserts that syntax is one of the most powerful elements which

are necessary to make a sequence of words or utterances meaningful due to its important role

in controlling the order in which impressions are received and conveying the mental

relationship behind sequences of words. Words are like the beads of a rosary. Once they are

arranged in a beautiful order, a beautiful rosary will be obtained. This image represents the

role of the syntax in poetry as that cunning arrangement of words, phrases, clauses etc in a

given piece of poetry. It is considered to be something important for both the poet and the

critic since it operates as a cause of poetical pleasure and produces strong effects, however,

remain explicable as far as the power of syntax is not discovered (10).

Linguistics has syntax as a major area of study, and a huge body of syntax theory has

already emerged over the years. Many of these seek to analyze and describe syntactic

structures – as the Structuralists did – and also theorize generation of syntax in tandem with

meaning, which Chomsky has been doing since Syntactic Structures(1957) till date, while

moving through various TG paradigms to that of Minimalist Programme. Structuralist

theories were rejected by TG theories because the former treated structure as isolated from

meaning. The later theories developed by Chomsky and fellow TG grammarians took a more

inclusive view of Linguistics as a study of the structure of meaning as well as sentences.

Thus, notwithstanding their differences as to how to describe syntax in the most economic

and effective way, the TG theories underline the interface and mutual dependency of the

essentially two independent levels of semantics and syntax at which language is organized.

These theories are structuralist and semanticist in a more nuanced way because of their study

of the Deep Structure and its relations with the Surface Structure. Stylistics has immensely
benefitted from the scholarly studies of scholars like Richard Ohmann (1964, 1966, 1967), J.

P. Thorne (1965, 1970), Samuel R. Levin (1965, 1967), to name only a few. While Thorne

argues that a mentalistic grammar can provide an adequate basis for stylistics, with clear

indebtedness to Chomskyan linguistics, Ohman emphasizes in the seminal essay “Generative

Grammar and the Concept of Litarary Style’ (1964) the centrality of transformational

approach in literary styles, according to which stylistic choices are to be treated as the

exploitation of language structures to fulfill expressive possibilities, and moves on to say:

A generative grammar with a transformational component provides apparatus for

breaking down a sentence in a stretch of discourse into underlying kernel
sentences (or strings, strictly speaking) and for specifying the grammatical
operations that have been performed upon them. It also permits the analyst to
construct, from the same set of kernel sentences. These may reasonably be thought
of as alternatives to the original sentence, in that they are simply different
constructs out of the identical elementary grammatical units. Thus the idea of
alternative phrasings, which is crucial to the notion of style, has a clear analogue
within the framework of a transformational grammar. (430-431).

For his part, Levin talks about deviation from the linguistic norm as stylistic choice

and the generativeness of the stylized poetic form.

Syntax, which represents the structure of words, phrases, clause and sentence, is

operated by a principle of structural combination to embody meaning. But the combination is

not linear, but it is by way of embedding of smaller combination into larger combinations at

successive stages and through transformations that militate against the principle of linear

ordering. As for meaning, it inheres in communally shared information, ideas,

presuppositions, expectations and cultural values, and signified trough the culturally coded

systems, of which language is one. It is inferred from utterances produced according to the

communicative protocols that are collectively agreed upon. Syntax brings to bear upon the
culturally shared information, ideas and sentiments its principles of lexicalization,

compression, linearization, ellipsis, thematization and cohesion, and structures them for

textual representation. Modes of representation can be either non-literary and non-aeasthetic

on the one hand, and literary and aesthetic on the other. The aesthetic and literary

representation can have its principles and methods, according to the form or genre it belongs

to, whether lyric and epic in poetry, or in prose fiction such as short story or the novel, or

drama. Whether the mode of representation is realistic, allegorical, symbolic, imagistic, or

whether it is lyrical, polemical, aphoristic in its rhetoricity are questions of literary taxonomy,

which have a bearing upon the syntactic structure of the text and its cultural context. Poetry

as a genre, with its formal variations, its tropes will inflect the linguistic analysis of syntax

and its stylistic implications. Styntactic structure is to be regarded as a stylistic choice for

representation of poetic meaning, as syntactic choices in poetry are thematized and these

define a poem’s metaphysical, psychological and historical aspects. So what is suggested here

is a comprehensive and holistic critical approach to literary text that involves a close

encounter with the linguistic and formal aspects of the text on one hand, and aesthetic

appreciation of the txt on the other hand. According to Cureton (1980), both literary critics

and linguistic critics seem to fail to connect their knowledge to the text because literary

critics "overly biased towards content, tend to emphasize other aspects of poetic form and

thus avoid discussing these effects altogether" (318). Linguistic critics, on the other hand,

"overly biased towards formal description, tend to produce analyses which have little bearing

on the actual source of the reader's aesthetic response to a text" (318).

Francis (1964) finds that though a linguistic analysis of syntax provides a better

understanding of a literary text, critics, when conducting their analyses, "are likely disregard

syntax almost wholly" (515). Most people, Francis adds, "aren't really aware of how many

syntactic ambiguities there are, especially in written English, where punctuation only
partially makes up for the absence of prosodic features" (517). Such lack of knowledge is the

reason why both the reader and the critic, who view syntax as "a harmless necessary drudge,

… will be at a loss to understand why a passage affects them as it does and a loss to do

critical justice to its art" (Nowttony 10). Thus, the contribution of syntactic means and

patterns to the meaning of a literary text can not be denied. It is taken for granted that the

poet's organization of this language is responsible for creating unusual effects. But, to say that

"something called 'poetic effect' is dependent upon style is one thing; to demonstrate how this

is quite another" (Baker 1967:4).

Though the arrangement of words and phrases in verse writing helps determine style,

few writers have been interested in the significance of syntax. Press, however, expresses his

belief concerning the impact of syntax stating that "the fundamental importance of syntax in

poetry has seldom been understood or even discussed by the majority of critics who have

preferred to meander through the more picturesque by ways of dictions". For him, "the poet's

syntax is almost more important than his vocabulary"(1958:14).

Recently, many scholars try to benefit from methods and techniques of linguistic

studies in the field of understanding and interpreting literary texts. Freeman, for instance,

expresses his attitude concerning the importance of syntax in the analysis of literary texts

stating that the poet's manipulation of syntactic means and patterns "not only reflect cognitive

preferences but fundamental principles of artistic designs by which the poet orders the world

that is the poem" (1975:20). He believes that the discovery of the poetic design begins with

the discovery of the linguistic strategies. Freeman asserts that the most important part for this

poetic design is "… syntactic foregrounding, the exploitation by the poet, at points crucial to

a poem's thematic structure, of rarely used rules of the language," or by "the creation of

syntactic texture in a poem by motivated use of particular structures in a disproportionately

high frequency compared with that encoun-tered in non-poetic language" (20). In this way, a

linguistic analysis includes a particular technique that is used to demonstrate that important

part which is "foregrounded exceptional manipulation of syntax, blendings but not breaches

of the rules" (Fowler 1975:6). Indeed, it is for this reason that Freeman says that the

foregrounded syntactic features are what matter most, for "one doesn't want to know every

syntactic fact about a poem; one wants to know the significant ones, where significant units

means essential to the poem's design" (Freeman 21).

While writing a poem, a poet tends to manipulate a range of syntactic means and

structures to produce the effect of imitation the situation he refers to. Epstein provides an

account of syntactic mimeses when he argues that, in the process of producing language, the

speaker first "constructs a lexical constellation which mimes a state of affair; the constellation

then is realized in linear and segmental form syntactically”. The choice and disposition of

linear segments may be either automatic or conscious. Automatic disposition results in

writing causal prose in the sense that "no principle of selection operating among its linear

element other than the style of the speaker or writer, whereas conscious disposition

constitutes, by its arrangement of syntactic and phonological linear elements of form, the

poetic function…"( 1975:4).

What emerges from the brief overview of statements made by linguists is that

significant syntactic arrangements are stylistically motivated and semantically rich. These

make up for the textual ‘content’, together with the patterns of lexis and sound; if at all poetry

has at all any content. This in fact runs counter to the standard belief that themes, sentiments,

tones etc are the content, to be explored by the critic, although in reality these are categories

of the perception and experience of poetry. For his part, Epstein (1975) defines content in

terms of the styles of representation, namely mimetic and non-mimetic. As regards mimetic
representation, it is divided into two types: objective mimesis and subjective mimeis.

Objective mimesis is restricted to imitation of the "psychological processes involved in the

apprehension of phenomena external to the consciousness of the observer as well as the

linealy successive phenomena them-selves". Subjective mimesis, on the other hand, involves

imitation of personal sequences of emotions and it is the subtlest, most valuable and most

difficult to achieve (50). The close syntactic analysis of a poem, Epstein adds, "reveals

complex mimetic schemata which reinforce and convey the subjective state to the

reader"(60).

Accordingly, the poet's experiences, feeling, sequences of emotions and states can be

clearly effected or imitated through his cunning employment of his particular range of

syntactic structures. Cureton (1980) believes that the poet’s manipulation of syntactic

structures and patterns may create a considerable number of stylistic effects of syntax. Some

major types of such effects are as follows;

1- 'Iconic syntax' a means by which the poets "shape the formal and/or the spatio-

temporal structure of the syntax so that …… it 'resembles' the situation to which the

syntax refers" (Ibid: 320). In this case the poet exploits particular combination of

words and in order to imitate or depict spatial or temporal juxtaposition. In other

words, he can "scramble words to indicate situational confusion, inverts word to

indicate thematic inversion"(318).

2- Rhetorical Emphasis: Many ways are followed by the poet in order to achieve the

effect of using to increase the perceptional prominence of signs to direct the attention

to their conceptual content. Among these words are: syntactic version, syntactic

pivots, syntactic breaks etc (318).

 3- Structures to lead the reader to the referents of the noun phrase: The impact of using

nominal structure lies in their ability to destroy "the narrative, assertive force of the

statement Nominal Syntax: As regards the nominal function of syntax, the poet can

use syntactic in a poem" leaving "the reader in a direct confrontation with the bare

referents of the noun phrases"(322).

4- Syntactic Tension: A poet can exploit the temporal dimension of the syntax by

"setting up structural expectations at one point in a complex structure and then

delaying the satisfaction of these expectations until some later point in that structure"

(322).

5- Syntactic Ambiguity: syntax may be used to present two different contextually

appropriate units. This device enables the poet to exploit different structures in order

to create syntactic ambiguity :

Dependent clauses that can modify either a preceding or following clause; verbs
which can be either transitive or intransitive, dynamic main verbs or stative passive
participles; genitive constructions which can be interpretive as either subjective or
objective genitives; clauses that can be read as either subjective-objective or object-
verb-subject; and so forth. ( 325)

6- Syntactic Parallelism: Syntax can be used as "an indexical frame to compare or

contrast the meaning of lexical items or phrases which appear in equivalents structural

positions in syntactically parallel clauses"(326).

7- Semantic Tension: Temporal dimensions of syntactic struc-tures can be used to

"exploit what readers know about the semantic interpretation of finished syntactic

structures by setting up semantic expectations (i.e, presuppositions) and then

frustrating these presuppositions later on"(324).

 One deduces from the foregoing theoretical discussion that syntax is both the resource

for meaning and clue for interpreting them. It is the apparatus for the representation of ideas

and feelings through various structural devices that merit keen attention. In this chapter I

shall attempt syntactical analysis of some of Auden’s poems. The texts shall be cited in the

full, as has been done in the previous chapter, followed by syntactical analysis in each case.

5.2 Syntactical Analysis of Auden’s Poems

5.2.1 Analysis-1

That Night When Joy Began

That night when joy began
Our narrowest veins to flush,
We waited for the flash
Of morning’s levelled gun.

But morning let us pass,

And day by day relief
Outgrows his nervous laugh,
Grown credulous of peace.

As mile by mile is seen

No trespasser’s reproach,
And love’s best glasses reach
No fields but are his own.

This short poem was written by Auden in November 1931. It has been included in the

Collected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson. The poem has an air of anxiety and tension,

although one does not know for sure whether it is because of a war looming large over the

people who wish to make the most of an apparently safe and mirthful night, or it is about the

fear of a terrible punishment (death penalty) awaiting the lovers after stolen moments of

guilty sexual pleasures at night.

 Even as silence and peace which provide solace to some, these are the source of

suspicion for others. In this poem there is this sneaking suspicion that appearances are

deceptive, and danger lurks beneath silence and peace. As conflicting categories of

knowledge, the “real” and “virtual”, create confusion among the people, the peculiar syntax

seems to raise more questions than it answers them. Whose nervous laugh? Who outgrows

his laugh and has become credulous of peace? Who is the trespasser, whether the lover/lovers

or someone else whom the lovers fear?

In the middle of the line are a couple of principal caluses: “We waited for the flash/

Of morning’s levelled gun” and “But morning let us pass”. Like all principal clauses that

contain the main ideas in sentences – which is a basic semantic principle – the main clauses

in fact tell us the gist of the poem that a danger apprehended does not materialize. But the

subordinate clauses complicate the subject, for the danger remains very much so, unabated.

The first stanza offers a very interesting structure in that “That night”, the adverbial, which

occurs at the beginning, actually qualifies not merely the main clause “We waited for the

flash of morning’s leveled gun”, but also the adverb clause “When joy began/our narrowest

veins to flush”. It can be diagrammatically represented thus:

When joy began our narrowest veins to flush

That night

We waited for the flash of morning’s leveled gun.

“That night” becomes the “marked theme” of the sentence. As Quirk and Greenbaum have

said, the initial part of a clause is the theme, and the most important part of a message, while
the rest of it is the information focus. It becomes “marked", only when if it is an adverbial

and may occur at a backward position and can be brought to the front (411-412). Assuming

enormous semantic importance as the marked theme, it seems to be the intense moment of

time synchronizing both acts of waiting and love making, as it were.

Further, we also find a highly unusual use of the verb “flush” in the lines:

That night when joy began

Our narrowest veins to flush.

We are made to speculate if it has two components that have been nestled into one another,

and one of them is:

1. “when ___________began our narrowest veins to flush, where “our narrowest veins”

is the subject and “began” , the verb precedes it, moving as it does from a later

position:” began to flush”

2. “when joy began__________ to flush”

This is deliberate on Auden’s part to facilitate a fusion of the senses of “joy” and “our

narrowest veins” so that both items become inseparable. The “flushed” lovers, with obvious

erotic connotations, also become the embodiment of joy. What is effected is ambiguity of

meaning, which, however, suggests the richness of the experience of joy, apprehension,

anxiety and sexual excitement.

Later in the poem we also encounter problem as to whom does “his” refer to in the

following lines, and who is grown” credulous of peace”.

But morning let us pass,

And day by day relief
Outgrows his nervous laugh,
Grown credulous of peace.
 Very likely “morning” is the subject to which ‘his” refers, and it is “morning” which

has grown “credulous”. Indeed, if “that night” assumes thematic importance in the previous

stanza, then morning, its semantic opposite, ought to be the theme, and subject, which brings

relief in this stanza.

On the other hand, could the subject as well be the partner of the speaker – a

homosexual male in the light of Auden’s personal life? Considering that homosexuality was a

criminal act in the 1930s in England, the ominous overtones of “morning’s leveled gun” in

terms of a terrible punishment looks justified. Here the fusion between morning and a lover

takes place, and both express relief.

The third stanza begins with a conditional clause in which an adverbial of time “ mile

by mile” is thematized, since transposition of adverbial and verb takes place there. This

thematization of space is a contrast to the thematization of the adverbial of time “that night”

in the first stanza. Here too we confront an ambiguity as to who the trespasser is. Secondly,

the last line is syntactically very unusual because of the verb “are’:

And love’s best glasses reach

No fields but are his own.

Had it not been there, the clause would have read “And love’s best glasses reach no fields but

his own”. The last line of the poem would have been alright, had it been a separate clause,

and had not occurred as the object of the verb “reach”. Given the peculiar pattern we have to

guess if the speaker is saying that the lovers glasses are not “field glasses’, but his “own”

spectacles. Field glasses or binoculars give excellent view of distant objects, on the contrary

spectacles can suggest myopia. Our guess seems reasonable.

In the immensity of space and safety no trespasser’s reproach’ is seen because

“Love’s best glasses” are suggested as short-sighted. The poet has ironically qualified “best”
since “Love’s best glasses reach/No fields but are his own” this short-sightedness indicates

that love is not alert or vigilant. It believes what it sees and accepts it as real. It never looks

beyond it or ever apprehends the future.

The conventional expectations that a morning should offer are contrasted to the harsh

reality it presents in the poem. This is the reality of violence and bloodshed that stares one in

the face. This reality is only apprehended by those having foresight. But those having “the

narrowest veins” are so much charmed by the illusion of “night” that they have no sense of

the impending danger at day-break. The night which is deceptive and creates the illusion of

peach and safety overshadows the “reality” of the ‘morning; and creates an atmosphere of

apparent safety.

The violation of conventional expectation and a sense of uncertainty about the future

have been represented through the scrambled syntax and clauses that have been nestled into

one another.

The full stops used at the end of the first two stanzas create an illusion that it is the

end, but then there is a continuation of thoughts and ideas in the following stanza. The first

stanza runs into the second stanza even after the full stop (.). This is because the second

stanza begins with ‘but’. And the second stanza appears to end with the full stop but

continues into the third stanza beginning with “as”. In the common man’s perception there is

peace. The full stop draws an apparent conclusion indicating the deceptive “peace” but “we”

having enough of foresight apprehend the future and look beyond the “lover’s best glasses”.

5.2.2 Analysis 2
 Spain" -1937

Yesterday all the past. The language of size

Spreading to China along the trade-routes; the diffusion
Of the counting-frame and the cromlech;
Yesterday the shadow-reckoning in the sunny climates.

Yesterday the assessment of insurance by cards,

The divination of water; yesterday the invention
Of cartwheels and clocks, the taming of
Horses. Yesterday the bustling world of the navigators.

Yesterday the abolition of fairies and giants,

the fortress like a motionless eagle eyeing the valley,
the chapel built in the forest;
Yesterday the carving of angels and alarming gargoyles;

The trial of heretics among the columns of stone;

Yesterday the theological feuds in the taverns
And the miraculous cure at the fountain;
Yesterday the Sabbath of witches; but to-day the struggle

Yesterday the installation of dynamos and turbines,

The construction of railways in the colonial desert;
Yesterday the classic lecture
On the origin of Mankind. But to-day the struggle.

Yesterday the belief in the absolute value of Greek,

The fall of the curtain upon the death of a hero;
Yesterday the prayer to the sunset
And the adoration of madmen. but to-day the struggle.
As the poet whispers, startled among the pines,
Or where the loose waterfall sings compact, or upright
On the crag by the leaning tower:
"O my vision. O send me the luck of the sailor."

And the investigator peers through his instruments

At the inhuman provinces, the virile bacillus
Or enormous Jupiter finished:
"But the lives of my friends. I inquire. I inquire."

And the poor in their fireless lodgings, dropping the sheets

Of the evening paper: "Our day is our loss. O show us
History the operator, the
Organiser. Time the refreshing river."

And the nations combine each cry, invoking the life

That shapes the individual belly and orders
The private nocturnal terror:
"Did you not found the city state of the sponge,

"Raise the vast military empires of the shark

And the tiger, establish the robin's plucky canton?
Intervene. O descend as a dove or
A furious papa or a mild engineer, but descend."

And the life, if it answers at all, replied from the heart

And the eyes and the lungs, from the shops and squares of the city
"O no, I am not the mover;
Not to-day; not to you. To you, I'm the

"Yes-man, the bar-companion, the easily-duped;

I am whatever you do. I am your vow to be
Good, your humorous story.
I am your business voice. I am your marriage.

"What's your proposal? To build the just city? I will.

I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic
Death? Very well, I accept, for
I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain."

Many have heard it on remote peninsulas,

On sleepy plains, in the aberrant fishermen's islands
Or the corrupt heart of the city.
Have heard and migrated like gulls or the seeds of a flower.
They clung like burrs to the long expresses that lurch
Through the unjust lands, through the night, through the alpine tunnel;
They floated over the oceans;
They walked the passes. All presented their lives.

On that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot

Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe;
On that tableland scored by rivers,
Our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our fever

Are precise and alive. For the fears which made us respond
To the medicine ad, and the brochure of winter cruises
Have become invading battalions;
And our faces, the institute-face, the chain-store, the ruin

Are projecting their greed as the firing squad and the bomb.
Madrid is the heart. Our moments of tenderness blossom
As the ambulance and the sandbag;
Our hours of friendship into a people's army.

To-morrow, perhaps the future. The research on fatigue

And the movements of packers; the gradual exploring of all the
Octaves of radiation;
To-morrow the enlarging of consciousness by diet and breathing.

To-morrow the rediscovery of romantic love,

the photographing of ravens; all the fun under
Liberty's masterful shadow;
To-morrow the hour of the pageant-master and the musician,

The beautiful roar of the chorus under the dome;

To-morrow the exchanging of tips on the breeding of terriers,
The eager election of chairmen
By the sudden forest of hands. But to-day the struggle.

To-morrow for the young the poets exploding like bombs,

The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;
To-morrow the bicycle races
Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle.

To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,

The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;
To-day the expending of powers
On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.
To-day the makeshift consolations: the shared cigarette,
The cards in the candlelit barn, and the scraping concert,
The masculine jokes; to-day the
Fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace before hurting.

The stars are dead. The animals will not look.

We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and
History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.
 Spain was ravaged by the civil war that lasted from 1936 to 1939. W.H. Auden has

written Spain as a pamphlet and “Spain 1937” as his painful response to the devastation of

human life and the misery. Passionately preoccupied with the war, Auden expressed to a

friend in a letter dated early December 1936 that he wanted to go to Spain as an ambulance

driver: “I so dislike everyday political activities that I won’t do them, but here is something I

can do as a citizen and now as a writer, and as I have no dependents, I feel I ought to go”

(Carpenter 206). In another letter about the same time he wrote “I am not one of those who

believe that poetry need or even should be directly political, but in a critical period such as

ours, I do believe that the poet must have direct knowledge of the major political events”

(Carpenter 207).Although these statements express the civic concern of Auden the man and

his sincere engagement with the pressing political issues of the times as a poet, he was

grossly misunderstood by Orwell in the essay “Inside the Whale”( 1940) that he was naïvely

idealistic and frustrated with his Marxist expectations of war; that he wanted to fight for the

Republicans against the Fascists, and he glorified the war without being aware of its

brutalities. Whatever merit Orwell’s criticism may have does not concern us so much here,

but the fact is that his opinions of the poem were based more on the reading of Spain (1937),

not “Spain 1937” cannot be disputed. The latter is a revision of the former poem in crucial

ways and it was published in Another Time (1940). The two versions seem to set up a debate

over the political role of the poet which was put to rest, with Auden declaring still later in

“Squares and Oblongs”(1948) that poets should dissociate themselves from politics

completely, and nor should they try to exercise control over the readers. The radical change

in his line of thought amounting to unqualified rejection of the poet’s direct knowledge of the

major political events was clearly a post-war thought, and it had already been foreshadowed

in the poem chosen for discussion.

 I choose to dwell on the textual background and the contextual aspects of the text

because its semantics and stylistic features are structured upon its modification of the earlier

version. First of all, as Tania Flores observes, the incorporation of semicolons in the revised

poem which replace many, if not most, of the periods, commas and colons of Spain is a

radical revision of the tone of the poem. “In contrast to the urgency, definitiveness and

passion of Spain, the tone of ‘Spain 1937’ is hesitant, rambling, and lacking in will. By

means of excision and the inversion of the meanings of the poem’s punctuation, Auden robs

his poem of its potency and of its potential for framing the Spanish Civil War

constructively”(2011:4). She also rightly observes:

The primary effect of the incorporation of the semicolon is that of reducing the

effectiveness, momentum, definitiveness, passion, and manifesto-like quality of the

poem. Vacillation characterizes “Spain 1937”, the tone of which contrasts sharply

with the self-assured quality of Spain. The semicolon lessens the effect of the anger

and sense of urgency on the reader, in large part because the use of the semicolon

mirrors the loss of agency found elsewhere in the transition between Spain and

“Spain 1937”.(13)

The beleaguered, war-torn Spain has been at the centre of three temporal orders,

namely past, present and future. The first six stanzas beginning with the time adverb of

“Yesterday” dwell on the past, enumerating the scientific, technological, cultural milestones

of achievements as well as changes in human history in its progress towards modernity .

What is interesting here is the foregrounding of nominal syntax paratactically, consisting of a

series of loose noun phrases and clauses, coordinated by commas and semicolons, and a

conspicuous absence of finite verbs in it until we come to line no 25 in the seventh stanza.

Such paratactic mode of nominal syntax, characterized by absence of cohesive devices to

bind the loose phrases, deliberately undermine the notion of teleology and human agency

underlying the history of progress towards scientific and technological modernity. It is the

absence of teleology again which makes the dialectical relation between the past and present

impossible. Therefore the future that is suggested is not a resolution of the dialectic conflict

of past and present, and the schema of history fails, according to the concluding stanza:

The stars are dead. The animals will not look.

We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and
History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.

The hopeless mechanical progress preceding “But/but to-day the struggle” gives the

lie to struggle that continues in the present, and ironically qualifies it. History is neither “the

operator/ Organizer”, nor is “Time the refreshing river” (stanza 9).

The present time has a number of finite verbs in stanzas 7 to 17. But these verbs

signify actions like whispering, peering, crying, invoking, hearing which are not strenuous

and energetic, but largely perceptual and very weakly communicative. All the strenuous and

productive actions of founding, establishing, descending, intervening etc are ascribed not to

the ordinary people – of whose lives the speaker has to inquire (stanza 8) – but to the abstract

“life”, which is invoked as a force by nation, or the abstract collective body of the people. On

the other hand life denies that it is the “mover” any more:

And the life, if it answers at all, replied from the heart

And the eyes and the lungs, from the shops and squares of the city
"O no, I am not the mover;
Not to-day; not to you. To you, I'm the
 "Yes-man, the bar-companion, the easily-duped;
I am whatever you do. I am your vow to be
Good, your humorous story.

I am your business voice. I am your marriage.

Here, the repetitive structure of “I am…”with a number of complements signifying a state

of subordination, subjection, obligation of life to the abstract collective will of the nation, It is

now devoid of its natural procreative force that built “the city state of the sponge”,” the vast

military empires of the shark and the tiger” and “the robin's plucky canton”. In fact the

scientific and technological development of humanity and human organization into nations

was made possible at the cost of the alienation of humanity from nature and its primal force

even as humans have made these through a natural process:

They clung like burrs to the long expresses that lurch

Through the unjust lands, through the night, through the alpine tunnel;

They floated over the oceans;

They walked the passes. All presented their lives.

On that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot

Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe;

On that tableland scored by rivers,

Our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our fever

In the founding of Spain the colonists did not have any agential role. Like burrs and

other seeds, they were carried afar air-borne, afloat and accidentally to present their lives “on

that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive

Europe”. The use of intransitive verbs, i.e., “clung’, ‘floated’, “walked” deny agential role to
the colonists, who accidentally and naturally landed in Spain as it were. Although “All

presented their lives” marks the use of “presented” as transitive in a technical sense, the fact

that the subjects themselves are their own lives makes us to interpret that they presented

themselves, not some others. As for the formation of Spain, it is presented through passive

constructions: “nipped off from hot Africa”, ‘soldered so crudely to inventive Europe” to

suggest as if it was the consequence of an automatic process.

The alienation of humans from nature can be overcome if they acknowledge their

corporeality and naturalness reclaim their bodies and reintegrate these into civilization. If we

compare line 180 of ‘ Spain 1937’ with its counterpart in Spain, we find that this poem brings

in “body” in line 180, which is: “Our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our

fever”, although it is found missing in its counterpart in Spain: “Our fever’s menacing shapes

are precise and alive”.

Again, the nominal clauses and phrases in a paratactic mode begin to signify events of

the future from paragraph 20 to 23. What is anticipated is a modern bourgeois life-style of

leisure, pleasure, pursuit of the hobbies of travel, sports, dog-breeding, photography, health-

care, romance, electioneering etc which centre around the body in a liberal cultural economy.

Once again, the absence of finite verbs precludes a sense of order in the world the future

holds in store after the struggle of to-day is over.

As for stanzas 24 and 25, which focus on the war or the struggle of today, we find

interesting changes from “To-day the inevitable increase in the chances of death; / The

conscious acceptance of guilt in the fact of murder;…”( Spain) to “To-day the deliberate

increase in the chances of death, / The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary

murder;…”( ‘Spain 1937’). The changes in diction are a calculated attempt to remove agency

at the level of lexis, which the syntax parallels by removing the verb. What is effected

thereby is a shift of the burden of guilt from the soldiers in war to the nature of the war itself.
The changes Auden made thus preempt further charges of warmongering likely to be made

against him. Indeed, while a “deliberate increase”, which is premeditated, presupposes it as

planned and thus presupposes a thinking subject, “inevitable increase” could well seem an

exigent need from the war itself . Similarly, a “necessary murder” requires rational action by

a subject and the ethical burden on him, while “the fact of murder” creates the illusion that

killing is not an act carried out by an individual, but rather, that it’s simply an unfortunate

event that sometimes occurs.

What emerges from the above discussion is that paratactic syntax and the

foregrounding of nominal phrases and clauses that appear loosely put together in absence of

finite verbs. This absence also entails absence of a thinking, agential subject.

In the last stanza the three temporalities meet. The past, i.e., “The stars are dead”,

and the future that “animals will not look” have been enunciated from the present:

The stars are dead. The animals will not look.

We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and
History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.

The sentences strike us with a chilling sense of finality of humanity’s alienation from nature,

which is manifested both in the world of cosmos and the animal world. Since both past and future do

not imply agency, which is evident from the absence of finite verbs, and even in the struggle of to-

day, i.e., the war, there is no rational, thinking subject, history – at least in the Marxian sense –

becomes a failed project; hence, perhaps, the unmitigated solitude of human beings and the failure of

History.
5.2.3 Analysis 3

In Memory of W.B Yeats

(d.january 1939)
I

He disappeared in the dead of winter:

The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness

The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,

An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities

And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow

When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree

The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II
 You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

III

Earth, receive an honoured guest:

William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark

All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right

To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse

Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart

Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
 This elegy not only combines beautifully the traditional elements of elegiac poetry

and innovations of modernity, but also celebrates the power and value of poetry to survive the

loss of an accomplished poet and remain a source of hope to humankind, even as poetry

cannot intervene in politics and “makes nothing happen”. Poets die, people suffer the defeat

of a great political cause after struggle and life goes on in its worldly ways. Nevertheless,

poetry does remain a powerful affective and commemorative power to move people, make

them remember loss and pains not with rancor but with sweet sadness. The elegy is not so

much a lament over the loss of Yeats as the attestation of the eternity of the poet through his

work to which Walter Benjamin ascribes “after-life”, the supreme literary power, in his essay

“The Task of Translator” (1923). This is evident from the fact that Yeats finds mention only

in the title of the poem, not anywhere else.

The poem was written in January 1939, one of the most turbulent periods of Europe,

coupled with a phase of Auden’s life that was full of disappointment. In 1939, Spanish Civil

War ended with the fall of Barcelona, and for a liberal Republicanist like Auden, it was a

great loss of a cause and cause for huge disappointment. It is in this period that Auden began

to be skeptical about the efficacy of poetry to impact politics and affect the course of life in

general, and became more so in the years to come.

The poem in its three sections shows a wide range of metrical variations, following

the conventions of pastoral elegy and also bringing in the remarkably modern metrical

elements of free verse. There are echoes of unevenly long dactylic lines in the first two

sections, interspersed with free verse as in the line “The | dáy of his | déath was a | dárk cóld

dáy” (6). The third section, however, consists of trochaic meters with emphasis on the first

syllable of the elegiac foot. Classicist though Auden was in taste, he employs blank verse to

create effects of chaos and disorder.

 Since the death of Yeats is the subject of the poem, and Yeats functions in the title as

the point of reference and only once more occurs in the 3rd section, all pronouns like “he’,

“his” and “him” assume simultaneously the function of exophoric deixis (making reference to

person existing outside the text) and cataphoric deixis (making reference to unspecific person

until of course the person concerned is mentioned in the 3rd section as “William Yeats” ).

These two modes of deictic functions interact through homophoric deictical references

(ubiquitous references that are semantically self-sufficient) of space and time.

For example, in the first section the clauses and phrases like “He disappeared” , “The

day of his death”, “ his illness”, “his last afternoon”, “his body”, “his feeling failed”; “he

became his admirers”, “he is scattered” and “his happiness” contain exophoric third-person

deictic references until the reader has come to the lines “Earth, receive an honoured guest:/

William Yeats is laid to rest” in the third section. Thus, until then these remain unreferenced

in themselves and become cataphoric only after one reaches the third section. However, as

these are inflected in terms of the ubiquitous homophoric references to places and time

references, the exophoric “he” undergoes a strange transformation. The transformation is

from a bodily and mortal authorial self into a self-sustaining textual authorial self that

survives death together with his texts, precisely because, as Foucault has already explicated

that the author’s ontology is but a textual projection in psychologizing terms( ‘What is an

Author’ 110).

In keeping with the convention of pastoral elegy, nature reflects the tragedy of the

occasion in the first section; hence the snowy weather seems appropriate for the funerary

occasion. As a temporal deixis winter is homophoric, but it is inflected in terms of the simple

past tense of verbs within the commemorative framework of the elegiac narrative. Because

“the day of his death was a dark, cold day” we find interesting metaphorical exchanges
between time reference and the mortal author in metaphors like “the dead of winter” and “it

was his last afternoon as himself. Here the homphoric winter and afternoon, despite their

pastness, invest in the mortal self – a self in its pastness – its homophoric self-sufficiency.

Just as winter and afternoon, as a season and a time of the day in the annual and diurnal

schemes of time respectively, are applicable to all years and days, similarly the dead poet

acquires ubiquitous status in the commemorative schema.

Further, in the following lines another series of metaphorical exchanges occur

between the dead poet and homphoric references of place as the death of Yeats becomes the

trope for the fall and dissolution of an embattled city, possibly Barcelona:

The provinces of his body revolted,

The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; …

Even as a city falls, it does not vanish from knowledge or memory. In its pastness

and its ruins it is remembered fondly like Athens or Alexandria, and is considered still

self-sufficient in beauty and significance. The ruins of such ancient cities become self-

referential and homophoric. Similarly, the poet, although dead, is not forgotten and

consigned to oblivion. For this reason the poem declares: “He disappeared in the dead of

winter…”. While death is tellingly conclusive, disappearance offers possibilities of

reappearance and entails an ambiguous status of presence. So, the poet is

epistemologically alive, as it were, in the readers’ reading of the poems. Thus, the funerary

mourning calls forth a commemorative agenda of keeping alive the poet through reading

his poems:

By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
This is in fact the commemorative logic of the elegy underlying the exchanges between

exophoric, cataphoric and homophoric references, so that what is effected is the

transformation that “he became his admirers”. This is a clear deviation from linguistic rule,

and a stylistically significant proposition in that it is richly ambivalent, suggesting death,

mutation and survival in the reading of his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities

And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
.

In the densely metaphorical lines cited above, “the poet is scattered among a

hundred cities”; he finds “his happiness in another kind of wood”; his “words are modified in

the guts of living” . The lines involve unusual choice of words that amounts to lexical

deviation, but are perfectly structured if we closely look at the syntactic parallels between the

main clause of the sentence that runs into four lines, and the other sentence:

[…] he is scattered among a hundred cities

And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections

The words of a dead man

Are modified in the guts of the living.

The passive constructions, which are parallel, establish semantic equivalence between

the subjects “he” and “the words of the dead man”. This helps the transformation of the poet

into a diffusive textual presence, and it also gestures towards the Christian meaning of

Eucharist, which is all about the trans-substantiation of bread and wine into Jesus’s flesh and
blood. In this way Auden’s poem performs the conventional role of the elegy to argue for the

immortality of the deceased. Once it has been successfully done , and in the second section

the poetic power to survive has been established, there follows an incantatory address to the

poet.

5.2.4 Analysis 4

The Unknown Citizen

(To JS/07 M 378

This Marble Monument

Is Erected by the State)

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be

One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
 That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

“The Unknown Citizen” was written in the year 1939 shortly after Auden migrated to

the U.S.. It was first published in 1939 in The New Yorker and reappeared in the anthology

Another Time (1940). Having been born a British and living in New York, America, Auden

probably wrote the poem out of culture shock he got on being confronted by the impersonal

and highly bureaucratized State in America. He may have alluded to the oppressive Nazi state

as well. The poem is a satire upon the modern State, which robs the citizen of his individual

freedom and autonomy, denies him personal identity and private life, and reduces him to a

figure or information in the official documents. Armed with statistics, dossiers, records and

surveillance system, the State, almost like the dystopic Orwellian state, sets its own yardstick

of good citizenry and promotes its own standards of civic virtues by coercing the citizen to

conform to them. What Auden is extremely critical of is that the worst form of conformism

and moral dumbness of the citizen is touted by the state as the best civic virtue. The supreme

irony of the poem is that a heavily dossiered individual still remains unknown, and the

question if the man in question was happy is dismissed as absurd.

In fact right from the beginning the chief irony of the poem becomes evident from the

epigraph, which is an engraving on the tombstone of the unknown citizen, and it reads:

(To JS/07 M 378

This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)
 It appears as though the poem is an official celebration of a dead person, who is declared to

be JS/07 M 378, an incomprehensible jumble of letters and numbers. Since the deceased

remains ironically unknown, the poem becomes the self-celebration of the state. Although

ordinarily a tomb stone marks the presence of the dead in the grave, here it only marks the

presence of the State, for the engraving announces pompously that the State has erected the

"marble monument".

The register of the language is prose-like, almost like that of an elaborate and a

somewhat pompous report, and style of the poem is distinctly official. It seems to be spoken by

a bureaucrat on behalf of the State. The officialese is reflected not only in the speaker’s choice

of bureaucratic words and expressions, but by its convoluted syntax in the first five lines:

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be

One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.

These are convoluted because these could have been structured in a simpler way. For example,

the first two lines could have been rephrased:

‘The Bureau of Statistics found no official compliant made against him’,

or alternatively
‘No official complaint was found against him by the Bureau of Statistics’.

But the passive construction in the poem thematizes the unknown citizen as the subject

of official knowledge, and that is the irony of the poem. However, in doing so, it produces a

rather strange kind of construction in which the subject gets removed from the subject

complement by the agent, i.e., the Bureau of Statistics:

 He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be one against whom there was no official…
Sb Agent Subject complement

As surface structure it is the complex process of embedding and transformation. The kernel

sentences that have been embedded and transformed are:

1. The Bureau of Statistics found him

2. He is the him

3. No official complaint was there against him

Firstly, the kernel sentence no 1 is passivized to yield:

1. He was found by the Bureau of Statistics

Then the second kernel sentence undergoes PRO-form transformation to become:

2. He is the one

At the third stage takes place the transformation of NP-raising, producing:

3. Against him there was no official complaint.

Then takes place the conjoining of 2 and 3:

He is the one against him there was no official complaint.

This undergoes the whom- replacement transformation to become

He is the one against whom there was no official complaint.

Then takes place embedding:

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics [he is the one against whom there was

no official complaint].

According to the case theory of Chomsky within the framework of GB, the tensed verb

assigns nomimative case to the subject ‘He’, whereas the complement has to be untensed, and,

therefore, has to be an infinitive construction:

 He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be the one against whom there was no
official complaint.

This entire analytic exercise explains how the nominative “He” in the passive

construction is the object of the verb that has been raised to the subject status only nominally. It

is case-governed by the verb ‘found’, which actually agrees with “the Bureau of Stastistics”. In

other word, the syntactic structure explains that the subject is under the control of the Bureau.

The complement qualifying it takes an infinitive PRO form and accusative case. Hence, all the

information it intends to provide to us about the subject is under the control of the Bureau.

The next four lines are a string of clauses coordinated to the foregoing lines with ‘and’.

But the information unit falling on the nucleus, or the most prominent of the tone unit, is “he is

a saint”. Semantically, it is the focus and information wise very important. Rhetorically a

hyperbole, the statement comes ironically after seemingly careful weighing of words:

…in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word…

But syntactically, it is part of a noun clause [that …] complementing “And all the reports on his

conduct agree…” In other words, the syntactic ordering in the lines subordinates the citizen to

the knowledge regime of the State-owned agencies. Whatever knowledge about him is

documented and declared only serves to reinforce the idea that his identity is a product of the

knowledge and reports circulated about him. In brief, he is the construct within an officially

produced and controlled discourse.

Strangely enough, the next clause begins with “Except for the War till the day he

retired/He worked in a factory”, although we should expect this post-modifier phrase to come

at the end of “in a factory”, and normally the structure should have been:
 He worked in a factory till the day he retired, except for the War

Such a fronting is for the purpose of thematizing the war or war-like situation as an exception

to the rule that the deceased citizen was a diligent factory worker, a productive and pliable

member of the society. Further, such deviant structuring of fronting the post-modifier delays

the grammatical subject and de-emphasizes the agential quality of the unknown citizen.

The irregular rhyme scheme shifting between ABAB pattern, AA and BB without

consistency gives the impression as if Auden is consciously disturbing the rhetorical control

which the speaker would like to exert over his utterances through rhyme. Some of the rhymes

are found to be sandwiched between other rhymes, and the examples are:

But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc. ( line 8)

That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.( line 13)

Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare( line 18)

A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire( line 21)

Our researchers into Public Opinion are content (22)

That he held the proper opinions for the time of year; ( 23)

When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went. (24)

These rhyming irregularities are deliberately deployed to draw the reader’s attention to the

lines, which would perhaps have gone less carefully noticed otherwise in the unbroken rhyming

order. These lines in each set are also semantically related, as one can see, stating three

important virtues of the citizen which the State highly commends:

 1. He is sincere, hardworking, productive, sociable, and therefore not a threat to the

corporatized industrial unit.

2. He is himself an up-market consumer.

3. He is a conformist, and he holds popular opinion.

These statements made on behalf of the State render the unknown citizen exterior to the

domain of power and knowledge. The first person collective pronouns (“our” and “we”), which

are preponderant in the poem, occur as pre-modifiers in the Subject NPs of main clauses thus:

Our report on his Union shows ……

Our Social Psychology workers found…

Our researchers into Public Opinion are content…
…our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation…
…our teachers report

In contrast, throughout the poem a large number of “he” and “his” occur as pre-
modifiers of complements or objects in the main clauses, and in the subordinate NCs ( noun
clauses) in the subject and pre-modifier positions.

At least in a few cases “he” occupies the subject position in the main clauses. But we

have already seen that in the opening line it is the subject of a passive construction, and in

line no 6, it is a delayed subject with de-emphasized agentiality.

The we/our versus he/him/his binary semantics of the poem is syntactically structured

to give the former agency and controlling power, so that he/his/him etc. are constructed

within and subjected to our information and knowledge regimens. “He” only appears

mediated through official dossiers, but does not exist in his own rights. Nor does he speak for

himself. Hence he remains unknown.

5.2.5 Analysis-5

If I Could Tell You

Time will say nothing but I told you so
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

If we should weep when clowns put on their show,

If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

There are no fortunes to be sold, although,

Because I love you more than I can say,
If I could tell you I would let you know.

The winds must come from somewhere when they blow,

There must be reason why the leaves decay;
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

Perhaps the roses really want to grow,

The vision seriously intends to stay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

Suppose the lions all get up and go,

And the brooks and soldiers run away;
Will Time say nothing but I told you so?
If I could tell you I would let you know.

This poem (written in 1940) has already been analyzed for its sound patterns and the

villanelle stanza form. At the risk of being repetitive I say that the poem reveals the power of

a mysterious ‘will’ whose workings can not be explained by the human community. Let alone

human beings, even Time is unable to explain it. Nothing in this world can be foretold, be it

the natural changes or unnatural events. Neither the future of the lovers can be foretold, nor,

indeed, the blowing of the winds or the decaying of leaves can be explained. All that human

beings can do is to wait patiently for things as they happen and to bear the consequences.

This poem indicates the inability and also the refusal of “Time” to explain “When”, “Why”
and “Where” of the incidents those take place in the world. The speaker constantly tries to

impress upon his lover, what unknown things, the future has in store for them. The speaker

further explains to his lover that wishes are not always fulfilled nor do dreams come always

true. He cites the examples of the roses which perhaps want to bloom more and more or the

vision perhaps of love, wants to stay on permanently. But these are mere uncertainties which

can not be explained.

The above poem is a paradox in the sense that it is a statement about being unable to
say anything regarding why, when and where. “Time” having (-human) features incapable of
speaking is expected to say. Time is unable to explain the actions of an impersonal “Will”.
Although it controls the natural and unnatural events in the world, it can not be explained.
Even time is unable or rather unwilling to unravel it to human being.

Time can not explain:

…when clowns put on their show

and

…when musicians play.

It can not explain “……why the leaves decay”. Nor can it explain from where the winds

blow, for “the winds must come from somewhere when they blow.”

In the first line “Time will say nothing but I told you so”, we find there is no comma

before the word ‘but’. Had there been a comma, it would have signified a contrast between

“Time will say nothing” and “but I told you so”. Here, however, the absence of comma

makes “but I told you so” a post-modifying phrase; modifying “nothing”, a nominal. In “but I

told you so”, “so” is a pro-form which should normally assume an anaphoric function

replacing an antecedent prediction such as follows:

Time did not tell us (to stop procrastinating)

But I told you so.

Here “so” replaces or refers to the prediction “to stop procrastinating”. But as it appears, the

pro-form “so” assumes a cataphoric function in the poem. In other words, “so” not only refers

to what the speaker has already been telling the implied addressee of the poem much before

the poem begins as a discourse, it also refers anaphorically to what is being said in the poem

later. The “told”, within the poem, turns out to be a repetition of the “already told so many

times” before the poetic enunciation has begun.

This line “Time will say nothing but I told you so” has been repeated in lines 1, 6 and

12, according to the convention of villanelle. These repetition shows that Time has been

depicted as an evasive presence and authoritative force which demands only “the price we

have to pay”.

The cataphoric reference of “so” signifies that probably “there are no fortunes to be

told”. This statement is thematically central in the poem, for it turns out to be a discourse on

the impossibility of predicting and knowing an impersonal and mysterious ‘Will’ according

to which events occur: leaves decay, human beings live their lives, laugh and weep, love

grows between lovers and turns into a vision and the like. Even time provides no answer to

questions such as:

If we should weep when clowns put on their show,

and
If we should stumble when musicians play …

Time will say nothing but (other than) what the speaker has been telling the implied

addressee (probably his lover). What he is telling is that nothing can be foretold or told about

the invisible ‘Will’ which is unknowable. But on the other hand, if this is the case, why is the

speaker then telling about the inability to tell anything worthwhile? Why is he engaged in a
discursive exercise which is circular in its logic and basically futile? This is because as he

says, he loves the addressee:

Because I love you more than I can say

If I could tell you I would let you know
The whole effort on the part of the speaker is to suggest that the “When”, “Why” and

“Where” are controlled by the powerful “Will” is futile, for ‘Time can not say anything

neither “fortunes can be foretold” nor the speaker could tell even if he possesses these

knowledge of ”When”, “Why” and “Where’.

Here “If I could tell you” is a pre-posed unreal condition, suggesting a wish on the

part of the speaker to “let” the addressee know what he needs to be known. The line “If I

could tell you I would let you know” has been repeated in lines 3, 9, 15 and 19. This shows

even though the speaker knows the refusal of Time to explain “When”, “Why” and “Where”

of events happening, still he continuously persists to let the addressee or his lover know about

the uncertainty, the mystery that the future holds in store. Line 18 is repeated as in line 1, 6

and 12, but in a questioning form. The line repeated in 1, 6 and 12 is “Time will say nothing

but I told you so”. But in line 18, the modal “will” and the “noun” has been transposed. The

same sentence now turns out to be a rhetorical question without expecting any answer.

The circularity in the logic of the poem is well demonstrated by the repetition of the

same lines in the end of the poem, with which the poet had started it. Towards the end “Time

will say nothing” turns out to “Will Time say nothing but I told you so?”

The speaker is aware of the refusal of Time to say anything about the future. Still he

asks “Will Time say nothing?” without expecting any answer to the question.

In this poem we find two uses of “if”. One as in the following lines:
 If we should weep………..
If we should stumble………

In the case of these two lines “if” expresses simple conditionals. In the second case, “if”

results in a pre-posed unreal conditional expressing a wish as in the line:

If I could tell you I would let you know

In the last stanza the clauses and hypothetical meanings in the following lines:

Suppose the lions all get up and go,

And all the brooks and soldiers run away,

These show that Time is unwilling to tell us the reasons for the natural phenomenon taking

place in the world. Along with this it also can not provide us any answer to these hypothesis

and suppositions.

As “there are no fortunes to be told”, life continues to be sustained by hopes, beliefs,

hypothesis and suppositions.

5.2.6 Analysis-6

The Shield of Achilles

She looked over his shoulder

For vines and olive trees,
Marble, well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hand had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.

A plain without feature, bare and brown,

No blade of grass, no sigh of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down;
Yet, congregated on that blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots, in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.

Out of the air a voice without a face

Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place;
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed,
Column by column, in a cloud of dust,
They marched away, enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

She looked over his shoulder

For ritual pieties,
White flower-garlanded heifers,
Libation and sacrifice:
But there on the shining metal
Where the altar should have been
She saw by his flickering forge-light
Quite another scene.

Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot

Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot;
A crowd of ordinary decent folk
Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.

The mass and majesty of this world, all

That carries weight and always weighs the same,
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help, and no help came;
What their foes liked to do was done; their shame
Was all the worst could wish: they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.

She looked over his shoulder

For athletes at their games.
Men and women in a dance
 Moving their sweet limbs,
Quick, quick to music;
But there on the shining shield
His hands had set no dancing-floor
But a weed-choked field.

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,

Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
The girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who’d never heard
Of any world where promises were kept
Or one could weep because another wept.

The thin- lipped armorer

Hephaestos hobbled away;
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.

"The Shield of Achilles" was first published in the year 1952. The title of the poem

was also taken by Auden as the title of his collection of poems which he published in 1955.

The poem is Auden’s meditations upon Homer’s the Iliad in the form of an ekphrasis. The

context of the poem is that the Homeric narrative is interrupted while Hephaestus makes

Achilles new armor for Achilles' mother, the goddess Thetis, to carry to her son. He has lost

his armour, and needs some new armour to fight. But re-entering the war means he will die

soon, so he has chosen to die as he seeks to avenge the death of his friend Patroclus. Auden’s

poem develops the contrast between the war-torn modern world, and the horror of its

devastation, the impersonality of the totalitarian state on the one hand, and the Homeric world

where, even amid warfare, imagination, peace, harmony, plenitude and joy prevail, according

to Auden’s imagination. The target of Auden is not Hephaestus, nor Thetis, but Achilles, the
“Iron-hearted man-slaying” hero, who embodies the maniacal, retributive frenzy of the war

that is ultimately self-destroying.

Auden uses two different stanza forms, one consisting of shorter lines, the other of

longer lines. The stanzas with shorter lines describe the making of the shield by the god

Hephaestus, and report the happy and fulfilling scenes of happiness, peace and fulfillment

that Achilles' mother, Thetis, expects to find engraved on the shield. However, in Auden's

version, Hephaestus does not make comply with her wish.

A close look at the syntactic aspect of the stanzas reveals some patterns that become

conspicuous, and these patterns match the dynamics of Thetis’s expectations and

Hephaestus’s portrayal of the reality, which are like points and counter-points within and

across stanzas. Let us first look at the following stanzas that serve as counterpoints to what

Thetis’s expectations have been:

But there on the shining metal

His hand had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead. ( Stanza 1)
Yet, congregated on that blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,. ( Stanza 2)

But there on the shining metal

Where the altar should have been
She saw by his flickering forge-light
Quite another scene. ( Stanza 4)

But there on the shining shield

His hands had set no dancing-floor ( Stanza 7)
 Three of the counterpoints to Thetis’s expectations begins with the clausal coordinator

“But” , and one begins with “Yet”. The introduction of these in each case brings about

interesting changes to the normal syntactic sequences through transformations, which can be

reconstructed thus:

Kernel sentence(Stanza 1)

His hand had put instead an artificial wilderness and a sky like lead there on the shining

metal.

(fronting of the prepositional phrase)

There on the shining metal his hand had put instead an artificial wilderness and a sky like

lead.

(clausal coordinator addition transformation)

But there on the shining metal his hand had put instead an artificial wilderness and a sky like

lead.

Kernel sentence(Stanza 2)

An unintelligible multitude stood, congregated on that blankness.

( fronting of the prepositional phrase)

Congregated on that blankness, an unintelligible multitude stood.

(subject-verb transposition)

Congregated on that blankness, stood an unintelligible multitude.

(Clausal coordinator addition transformation and addition of comma)

Yet, congregated on that blankness, stood an unintelligible multitude.

Kernel sentence(Stanza 4)

She saw by his flickering forge-light quite another scene where the altar should have been

there on the shining metal

( fronting of the prepositional clause)

Where the altar should have been there on the shining metal she saw by his flickering forge-

light quite another scene

(clausal coordinator addition transformation)

But where the altar should have been there on the shining metal she saw by his flickering

forge-light quite another scene

Kernel sentence(Stanza 7)

His hands had set no dancing-floor there on the shining shield.

(fronting of the prepositional clause)

There on the shining shield his hands had set no dancing-floor there.

( clausal coordinator addition transformation)

But there on the shining shield his hands had set no dancing-floor.

The shifting of the positions of the syntactic elements brings about the delaying of the

subject, and the semantic effect of thematization takes place whereby the prepositional

phrases that signify locations become visually conspicuous and arresting. In fact what is

hoped for and what is visualized become more important than Hephaestus and Thetis, the

people who engrave and watch the scenes.

In addition, shifting of syntactic constituents through transformation is a stylistic

choice, as the prepositional locative phrases at the end are carried over to the front, what

remains after the Subject-noun clause of the sentence has interesting semantic possibilities. In

Stanza 1, for example, the objects of the verb “put” such as “artificial wilderness” and “a sky

like lead” do propel the narrative to tell us what the nature of artificiality is like, and why the

sky is like lead. Hence the need of the next stanza arises, where the war-ravaged featureless,
bare and brown plain is no doubt an artificial wilderness, not the Biblical wilderness that saw

the trial and rescue of Jesus, nor the wilderness that Israelites crossed to enter the promised

land. The sky is lead like because it lacks transparency and the power to blazon the signs of

salvation from Heaven as have been narrated in the Bible in Exodus, Matthew, Revelation

etc.

In Stanza 2, because of the fronting, as the ‘unintelligible multitude” which remains

towards the back is specified in terms of “million eyes”, and “a million boots, in line”, these

NPs function synecdochically so as to signify the disembodiment and dehumanization of the

human( soldiers) in the artificial wilderness under a leaden sky, waiting for “signs”, which

are also disembodied, as these are broadcast by the radio. The divine sanction and oracular

authority warranting the truth value of such sign has been replaced by ‘statistics”.

Because of the transformation and fronting so described earlier, stanza 4 ends with

“quite another scene”, which is elaborated in the next couple of stanzas as the killing of three

men, reminding us ironically of the crucifixion of Christ with other two people. Similarly,

“But there on the shining shield / His hands had set no dancing-floor ( Stanza 7) leads on to a

“weed-chocked field”, which enacts a scene of gratuitous violence and the banality of evil.

The vast panorama of futility and death caused by a war fought in the present time is

essentially wasteful and emptied of meaning, grace and hope. It is a visual representation of a

modern dystopian wilderness that offers no possibilities rest, relief or redemption either in

the classical, pagan sense through ritualized pieties, sacrifice and libation, or in the Christian

sense through Crucifixion. The stark negative power of such a dystopian condition of

existence is borne out well through the foregrounding of phrases with negative determiners

and pronouns throughout the poem. The effect of dreariness is produced by the following

phrases:”No blade of grass”, “ no sigh neighborhood”, “ neither moved nor spoke”, “Nothing

to eat and nowhere to sit down”, “No one was cheered and nothing was discussed, no

dancing-floor. “…And could not hope for help, and no help came”.
 In the same vein the foregrounding of noun phrases with the following structures

like NP + PP is cited as follows:

A plain without feature…

A million eyes… without expression…
Voice without a face

These portray a Limbo like landscape, a morally condemned state of human existence, without any

hope of redemption. A distinct sense of absence of purpose in the world is described by disjoined

declarative sentences with finite verbs in the form of simple past tense:

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,

Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
The girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him…

The lack of logical linking devices among these sentences serving as propositions

contributes to the meaninglessness and coherence of this world, which is murderous, pitiless

and not obligated to redeem pledges and fulfil promises. In such a word moral choice and

ethical action of avenging the death of Patroclus war on the part of Achilles becomes

valueless, and he is reduced to a figure on the shield: “Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles”, a

highly compound nominalized phrase, similar to the structure of others figures, i.e., “Marble,

well-governed cities”, “White flower-garlanded heifers”, “ the shining shield”, “ dancing-

floor”, “a weed-choked field. These structures are results of nominalizing transformational

rules applied to clauses and sentences at Deep Structure level.

The above discussion reveals that all the foregrounded features are stylistic choices,

consciously exercised by Auden to structure meaning, manipulate focus and thematize

various issues.

***
 CONCLUSION

The conclusion is very brief. I do not wish to make a statement of what I have done in

the foregoing chapters for the risk of being repetitive. I shall only gesture towards

possibilities of stylistic research on Auden as may be envisaged in future.

The thesis, as is evident, is very limited in scope. The stylistic analysis offered is

also narrow in scope in so far as it explicates meanings of the poems more or less in a new

critical mode, using linguistic terminology. But stylistics as a discipline has acquired a great

deal of complexity and richness. For example, Stanley Fish has developed a model of stylistic

analysis which he calls “Affective Stylistics”. It is a phenomenological view of the responses

of the reader and his/her affective engagement with a poem. The focus diverts from the

externalities of a poem to the receptive dynamics of the reader. One may possibly apply the

theoretical insight of Stanley Fish to the analysis of Auden’s poems and explain how the

reader is moved and informed by poetry reading. This kind of work is a possibility that can be

explored in future.

One may as well isolate some problematic of Auden’s poetry such as his negotiation

between a disturbingly private libidinal self and public performance. In doing so, one can

analyze the linguistic resources of the poetry that facilitate such negotiations. Auden’s

dramatic verses and operas can also be interpreted from the stylistic point of view to gain a

rich of perception of his mind and art.

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