AUTUMN 2005 195–208 VOLUME 54 ENGLISH

In Solitude, for Company: The City

in W. H. Auden’s Horae Canonicae

Tom Duggett

[T]he development of every poet’s mind consists largely in the adequate growth and
analysed growth of the particular images he tends to use.

Charles Williams, The Image of the City and other essays (1958: 93)

W. H. Auden was, throughout his career, very much a civic poet. The voice that in
the thirties called for ‘The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder’
required to ‘build the just city’ (‘Spain’) was, despite Auden’s repudiation of this
phrase (Hecht 1993: 131), the same voice that in the post-war years acknowledged
that the ‘courtesies of the city’ (‘Sext’) could only be bought in blood.1 Philip
Larkin famously pronounced that Auden, in leaving ‘Europe and the fear of war
. . . abandoned his audience together with their common dialect and concerns’,
and suffered ‘irreparable’ damage to his poetry (1983: 125). This essay will argue,
however, that Auden’s later work constitutes what Stan Smith has called

neither a quietist cult of waiting for the millennium, nor a recantation of his radical
past . . . [but] . . . rather, a translation into a new discourse of those impulses which
lay behind his thirties writing. (Smith 1985: 176)

If, as Charles Williams says, the development of a poet’s mind consists in the
‘adequate growth and analysed growth of the particular images he tends to use’,
then Auden’s ‘new discourse’ can usefully be approached through a consideration
of the continuity and the ‘growth’ (whether healthy or morbid) of his imagery
across his poetic career. In this essay I will explore a single element of Auden’s
imagistic palette: the image of the City. I will attempt, through a close reading of
© Copyright The English Association 2005
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the 1950’s sequence Horae Canonicae, both to establish the pervasiveness of that
image in the sequence and to argue for its importance as an interpretative crux for
the poetry. Simultaneously, I will seek to adumbrate the Christian philosophy and
history – and philosophy of history – that informs Auden’s specifically Christian
civic discourse. In doing this, I will focus on the work of two Christian thinkers
who were both personal and intellectual influences on Auden: Reinhold Niebuhr
and Charles Williams.

II
Punctuality, History, and Monasticism (‘Prime’, ‘Terce’,
‘Nones’)

Horae Canonicae are canonical hours, defined by the OED as ‘the times of daily
Christian prayer appointed in the breviary’. Auden was temperamentally inclined
towards an interest in monastic observance. Edward Mendelson records that
‘Auden in his later years made a theatrical display of punctuality’ (1999: 310), and
the poet identified himself as belonging to the ‘characterological type’, ‘The
Punctual Man’ (1963: 140). Writing in The Dyer’s Hand, Auden goes on to
comment:

I have heard it suggested that the first punctual people in history were the monks – at
their office hours. It is certain at least that the first serious analysis of the human
experience of time was undertaken by St. Augustine, and that the notion of punctu-
ality, of action at an exact moment, depends upon drawing a distinction between
natural and historical time which Christianity encouraged if it did not invent. (1963:
140)

Monastic observance is, Auden suggests, both harbinger and progenitor of the
modern secular obsession with time. He would have found this ‘distinction
between natural and historical time’ formulated in Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Nature
and Destiny of Man as definitive of Judeo-Christian metaphysics. According to
Niebuhr, Christianity inherited from Judaism a belief in the essential meaningful-
ness of history, as a teleological rather than a cyclical process:

Human history is rooted in the natural process, but it is something more than either
the determined sequences of natural causation or the capricious variations and
occurrences of the natural world. It is compounded of natural necessity and human
freedom. Man’s capacity to transcend the natural flux gives him the possibility of
grasping a span of time in his consciousness and thereby of knowing history. (1943: 1)
 THE CITY IN W. H. AUDEN’S HORAE CANONICAE 197

Christianity adds to Judaism the belief that God has become incarnate in Christ and
died for the sins of the world. The Crucifixion thus takes on an awful double
significance as an action accomplished in ‘natural’ time, which is yet the revelation
and validation of a supernatural teleology that intersects with the moral neutrality
of nature. History is the action of consciousness upon ‘natural’ time, and Christian
history is the ‘span of time’ that pivots around the point of the Crucifixion. ‘Nones’
dramatises this Christian notion that one precise moment of history was the
revelation of the meaning of all history, and that all prior and subsequent history
recapitulates that moment:

. . . behind the wonder

Of tow-paths and sunken lanes,
Behind the rapture on the spiral stair,
We shall always now be aware
Of the deed into which they lead . . .
Be listening for the cry and stillness
To follow after: wherever
The sun shines, brooks run, books are written,
There will also be this death.

The sense of history – a consciousness of a scheme that ‘transcend[s] the natural

flux’ – is the condition of punctuality, the measure by which an ‘exact moment’
can be known to be such, and according to which action at that moment can be said
to be meaningful. In Nones, all things ‘lead’ into the ‘deed’ of the Crucifixion, and
even the objectively neutral facts of the sun shining and brooks running are
tinctured with a subjective consciousness of ‘this death’. But if punctual action
depends upon an overarching historical consciousness, it is also the case that a
Christian interpretation of ‘history’ depends upon punctuality-as-ritual as a con-
tinual endorsement and ratification of its own essential meaningfulness. Monastic
observance of the canonical hours is premised upon an anamnesis of Christ’s
ministry; the regularity of which observance serves to establish one’s precise
correlation with that temporal locus, and thereby to validate the historical contin-
uum between two ‘natural’ moments. Thus, to be punctual, to perform an action
that is consciously achieved at a given point along an historical axis, is to instantiate
and to perpetuate the Judeo-Christian myth of the meaningfulness of history. Or,
as Edward Mendelson says,

[t]o be punctual is to affirm responsibility to an order larger and greater than oneself,
an order that requires an exacting homage from those whose isolating acts violate it.
(1999: 310)

Monastic observance provides Auden with an apt metaphor for the process
whereby punctuality turns time into history: a full observance of the eight canon-
ical services – celebrated at three-hourly intervals throughout the day – would
198 ENGLISH

entail perpetual wakefulness, perpetual consciousness in a direct line back to the

Crucifixion. Nor is this simply a devout formality, for it has been actual monastic
practice to attempt to realise the possibility of such an unbroken wakefulness. In his
book on The Gothic Enterprise, Robert A Scott notes that the medieval monks at
Cluny ‘went beyond a mere recitation of the daily offices and found ways of
praying around the clock by spelling one another through each twenty-four-hour
cycle’ (2003: 57). While the individual monk was to be allowed to rest, neverthe-
less this form of ‘watching’ reduces sleep to an inconvenience to be accommodated
rather than a restorative to be celebrated, in a general rule that aims at a continual
collective consciousness. The project of monasticism was, on this view, to culti-
vate a corporate insomnia.
Auden, writing in The Dyer’s Hand, suggests that the effect of insomnia is to
destroy self-determination, to make a person more impressionable and thus
controllable:

[I]f you really wish to destroy a person and turn him into an automaton, the surest
method is . . . simply to keep him awake, i.e. in an existential relation to life without
intermission. (1963: 103)

The permanent ‘existential relation to life’ that Auden envisages is synonymous

with consciousness and civilization, as they are both emblematised in monasticism;
it is the imposition of order upon chaos, of history upon time. But it is destructive,
presumably, because it entails a denial of the unconscious, of the illogic of nature.
‘Nones’ contains a nightmarish, apocalyptic image of the effect of such a denial.
The repressed unconscious ‘fronde’ of ‘Prime’ obtrudes upon consciousness, and
makes of the continuous ‘existential relation’ a waking phantasmagoria:

Bread will melt, water will burn,

And the great quell begin, Abaddon
Set up his triple gallows
At our seven gates, fat Belial make
Our wives waltz naked . . .

The imagery here is allusively rich: invoking Lady Macbeth’s ‘great quell’ (Macbeth
I. vii. 72) and the fallen angels of Paradise Lost. The reference to ‘fat Belial’
reproduces in microcosm the overall image in this stanza of perversion; in Milton’s
catalogue of devils in Paradise Lost,

Belial came last, than whom a spirit more lewd

Fell not from heaven, or more gross to love
Vice for itself. To him no temple stood
Or altar smoked; yet who more oft than he . . .
. . . filled
With lust and violence the house of God?
(I, 490–500)
 THE CITY IN W. H. AUDEN’S HORAE CANONICAE 199

Belial is a figure for the mendacity and perversion that Auden associates with an
excess of consciousness, with the ‘lying, self-made city’ (‘Prime’). He is also
Milton’s embodiment of the deceitful rhetorician and poet:
. . . he seemed
For dignity composed, and high exploit,
But all was false and hollow, though his tongue
Dropped manna, and could make the worse appear
The better reason . . .
(II, 110–114)

James Fenton, discussing Auden’s ‘Spain’, writes of Auden as

a rhetorician. He knew himself to be a rhetorician of the highest powers, and, when
he saw the power he had, he recoiled from it in deep horror. And as he recoiled, he
filled his followers with dismay, since they could not see the furies that he saw. They
saw [only] the beauty of the rhetoric of Spain, that astonishingly simple device of
repetition and change between ‘yesterday’, ‘today’, and ‘tomorrow’. (2001: 218)

Auden realized like Milton that the poet occupies an ambiguous position with
regard to truth and social obligation. In ‘Terce’ the poet is implicated in the
Crucifixion as, presumably, its apologist. He ‘Does not know whose Truth he will
tell’; the smooth elision of the relative ‘whose’ with the absolute ‘Truth’ being
both exemplary and expository of poetry’s persuasive, deceptive power. Belial’s
presence at Auden’s imagined apocalypse thus betrays, perhaps, his perception
that the poet’s job is the creation of lying, self-made cities in verse.
The vision in ‘Nones’ of the apocalypse ‘sooner than we would choose’
suggests, then, that an excess of consciousness is destructive of human freedom and
choice. By avoiding the scheme of eight canonical services, Auden not only gains
access to the more suggestive number seven, but he also allows for sleep, ‘restor-
ing / The order we try to destroy, the rhythm / We spoil out of spite’. In so doing
he undermines the hard-won hegemony of consciousness, and causes the linear
logic of history to accommodate a natural circularity. The day he describes is every
day, and its eventual apprehension of ‘the sense of many relationships between
men and women woven into a unity’ (Williams 1958: 92), of the ‘Authentic City’
(‘Winds’), is not a permanent safety on the far side of the Kierkegaardian abyss, but
only a temporary stay against the inevitable resumption of
. . . my historical share of care
For a lying self-made city,
Afraid of our living task, the dying
Which the coming day will ask.
(‘Prime’)

The opposite view might be taken, that the leap into faith is irrevocable; as
Humphrey Carpenter says, quoting Kierkegaard, ‘Nor can this choice, once made,
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be shaken: ‘‘By a leap, faith takes man beyond all rational thought into a new
world’’’ (1981: 286). ‘Lauds’ does seem to imply that the faithful wake into a new
consciousness; waking earlier than in ‘Prime’ they attain perhaps the full knowl-
edge of ‘the youngest day’ (‘Compline’), of Kierkegaard’s ‘new world’. However,
Horae Canonicae’s emphasis on natural circularity – where another day is inevitably
to come – precludes the possibility of a final resolution. Its pathos lies in the sense
of the perennial fall from a nevertheless attainable perfection. History must always
be resumed.
The connection envisaged in ‘Prime’ between the resumption of self-
consciousness and responsibility for the city is epitomised in its governing image of
the body-as-city. This trope, so beloved of ancient philosophy, and of power
apologetics through the ages, appeared famously in ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’,
the dying Yeats being likened to an eerily deserted city: ‘The squares of his mind
were empty, / Silence invaded the suburbs’. Anthony Hecht comments: ‘When he
dies, the metaphor of human body/body politic fails at the same time’ (1993:
142). Accordingly, the integrity of the metaphor in ‘Prime’ expresses the inalien-
able connection between life and the city, self-consciousness and history. Arche-
typically, city gates form a portal to, and a barrier with, the wilderness beyond.
The most famous gates in literature are those of Troy, but Auden’s treatment
suggests further those of Milton’s heaven, ‘self-opened wide, / On golden hinges
turning’ (Paradise Lost V, 254–5; italics added):
Simultaneously, as soundlessly,
Spontaneously, suddenly
As, at the vaunt of the dawn, the kind
Gates of the body fly open
To its world beyond, the gates of the mind,
The horn gate and the ivory gate,
Swing to, swing shut . . .

The ‘rebellious fronde’ (like Satan, an insurrectionary power) is ‘quelled’ in

unconscious anticipation of the murderous act encountered in ‘Nones’. Even
before breath is drawn and ‘Paradise / Lost’ – the enjambment of the phrase
expressing the certain and irrevocable consequence of the assumption of self-
consciousness – the innocent body is yet implicated in an act of repression of ‘our
victim’, and the ‘wronged flesh’ of ‘Nones’ is to this extent its own ‘assassin to be’.
The semi-conscious ‘Adam still previous to any act’ may be innocent, but the
potential for sin is implicit in the very fact of his individuation.
In the complex process of the resumption of consciousness, conveyed by the
profusion of adverbial prelude (‘Simultaneously, as soundlessly, / Spontaneously,
suddenly. . .’), something almost paradoxical occurs whereby the mind is closed
simultaneously with its resumption of control over the body. There is no paradox,
however, because the ‘city’ of the mind is not identical with the ‘city’ of self-
consciousness: the ‘I’ is the product of a violent suppression of the ‘unwashed tribe
of wishes’ (‘Compline’), an assertion of the sovereign ego over the ‘fronde’:
 THE CITY IN W. H. AUDEN’S HORAE CANONICAE 201

Recalled from the shades to be a seeing being,

From absence to be on display,
Without a name or history I wake
Between my body and the day.

The separate faculties of mind and body are forcibly commingled as self-
consciousness in a union that is detrimental to both: ‘this ready flesh’ may be ‘my
accomplice now’, but it is also ‘My assassin to be’ – as much a rival as an agent of
the will. A numinous threat sounds in the obsessive weight of internal rhyme:
The eager ridge, the steady sea,
The flat roofs of the fishing village
Still asleep in its bunny,
Though as fresh and sunny still are not friends
But things to hand . . .
(Italics added)

Randall Jarrell comments of Auden’s use of this and other devices that ‘Auden was
like someone who keeps showing how well he can hold his liquor until he becomes
a drunkard’ (1971: 137). I want to suggest, conversely, that the internal rhyme
here is not evidence of flawed or degenerate technique, because the sense of a
perpetual echo, of a voice confirming itself, is expressive of the need of the speaker
for certainties. Niebuhr writes that evil results
from the fact that men seek to deny or to escape prematurely from the uncertainties
of history and to claim a freedom, a transcendence and an eternal and universal
perspective which is not possible for finite creatures. (1943: 3)

The human attempt to impose order and hierarchy is simultaneous with the
assumption of history, self-consciousness and responsibility for the city. Just as
‘Nones’ pictures rhyme as a variety of spurious prophecy – the predictability of a
murderous deed ‘revealed to a child in some chance rhyme / Like will and kill’
(‘Nones’) – so here internal rhyme articulates the desire of the waking subject to
reduce the world to intelligibility.
In the brief moment of Edenic innocence, all perceptions had been undif-
ferentiated:
. . . next
As a sheet, near as a wall,
Out there as a mountain’s poise of stone,
The world is present, about;

but these are now merely ‘things to hand’, formulated in relation to one another.
By imposing an order that does not occur naturally – by creating a feeling of
inevitability and inter-connectedness through rhyme – the speaker enacts and
manifests the Fall.
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III
The Prince of this world (‘Sext’, ‘Vespers’, ‘Lauds’)

The assumption of history is inalienably associated with responsibility for the

secular ‘lying self-made city’, and thus with complicity in its guilt. As Humphrey
Carpenter notes, Auden

had long accepted the Christian doctrine of the Fall as . . . a representation of a fact
of human psychology: he saw it, he said, as a symbol of the point in history where
Man developed self-consciousness and became aware of the possibility of freedom
and autonomy. (1981: 298–9)

In Auden’s treatment, coming to self-consciousness, ‘Between my body and the

day’ is thus an enactment of the Niebuhrian doctrine of historical action as the locus
of the Fall:

The real problem of history is the proud pretension of all human endeavours, which
seeks to obscure their finite and partial character and thereby involves history in evil
and sin. (Niebuhr 1943: 26)

The process of functional subordination and mechanical integrity whereby the city
is created is therefore simultaneously a process whereby the ideal City is lost and
obscured. Auden defined civilization as

a precarious balance between . . . barbaric vagueness and trivial order. Barbarism is

unified but undifferentiated; triviality is differentiated but lacking in any central
unity; the ideal of civilization is the integration into a complete whole and with the
minimum strain of the maximum number of distinct activities. (1973: 8)

In ‘Sext’ the ‘vocation’, the ability to engage in differentiated activity, is acknowl-

edged to be the agent of judicial death, but also seen as a means of transcending
oneself:

. . . when,

from a glance at the jury, the prosecutor

knows the defendant will hang,

their lips and the lines around them

relax, assuming an expression,

not of simple pleasure at getting

their own sweet way but of satisfaction
 THE CITY IN W. H. AUDEN’S HORAE CANONICAE 203

at being right, an incarnation

of Fortitudo, Justicia, Nous.

The last word here, ‘Nous’, means – according to the OED – ‘the mind or
intellect’. ‘Nous’ also denotes ‘common sense; practical intelligence’ in colloquial
English (OED), and Auden must intend this derived meaning, since what he is
describing is in fact the practical application of intelligence. It seems likely that
Auden was familiar with a subtler meaning of the word, however:

In the thought of Plotinus, nous is not so much the rational principle in the soul as the
power of self-consciousness. The nous does not contemplate the world, nor even the
rational principle underlying the phenomenal reality. It contemplates itself until it is
united and becomes identified with the ‘Authentic Being’ of the final ‘Good’ about
which one must ‘not even say that it has intellection’, for that ‘would be dividing it.’
(Niebuhr 1943: 13)

Charles Williams had written of ‘the best maxim of the desired City’ as ‘feeling
intellect’ and ‘intellectual love’ (1958: 101–2); and Auden’s ‘Memorial for the
City’ has as epigraph the doctrine of Juliana of Norwich that the ‘City of God’ is
ordained to the faithful ‘In the self-same point that our soul is made sensual’ (which
is another expression of ‘intellectual love’). The nous of Plotinus is virtually
synonymous with these ideals of the City. In Auden’s hands, the word becomes
partially ironic: the ‘courtesies of the city’ are by no means identical with ‘the final
‘‘Good’’’. However, Auden speaks of the city as in some sense an ‘incarnation’ of
the nous, an active form of its principle; as God becomes incarnate in Christ, so
Agape accommodates itself to Eros.2 The secular city is necessary for the act of
exchange which is the Crucifixion: Christ taking all sins upon himself. Auden
wrote of Agape:

Not the least puzzling thing about it is that most of the experiences which are closest
to it in mode, involving plurality, equality and mutuality of human persons, are clear
cases of diabolic possession, as when thousands cheer enthusiastically for the Man-
God, or cry bloodthirstily for the Crucifixion of the God-Man. Still, without it, there
might be no Church.(1973: 70)

The crowd enacts ‘Fortitudo, Justicia, Nous’, then, by seeing not mere accidents of
appearance but ‘an epiphany of that / which does whatever is done’. It is conceived
in ‘Sext’ as an earthly manifestation of the City in a manner analogous to the virtual
identity of Agape with ‘diabolic possession’:

. . . the crowd rejects no one, joining the crowd

is the only thing all men can do.

Only because of that can we say

all men are our brothers,
204 ENGLISH

superior, because of that,

to the social exoskeletons: When

have they ever ignored their queens,

for one second stopped work

On their provincial cities, to worship

The Prince of this world like us,

at this noon, on this hill,

in the occasion of this dying.

Auden employs a deliberate ambiguity to great effect: ‘The Prince of this world’ is
a phrase that might be taken to denote either Christ or Satan – Christ as the
revealed God of ‘this world’, and Satan as the tyrant of the fallen creation. Auden
has made clear that in his usage (and in theological usage generally) the latter sense
is active:

When the New Testament speaks of ‘The Prince of this world,’ it certainly does not
mean the Prince of the Cosmos . . . By this world is meant, I should guess, Leviathan,
the Social Beast. (1973: 43)

However, this denial of equivocation in the phrase demonstrates that the former
sense – Christ as the ‘Prince of this world’ – remains active enough to require what
is rather an equivocal (‘I should guess . . .’) refutation. If diabolic possession
approaches the experience of Agape, then in the worship of the ‘Prince of this
world’ at the moment of Christ’s crucifixion – the primordial act of sympathetic
love – the crowd may very well see an epiphany in which perpetrator and victim,
Leviathan/Satan and Christ, are confounded. In this act the promise of the City of
God is simultaneous with its denial by the earthly city in the act of murder.
Properly speaking, therefore, it is not Satan whom the crowd worships, but
‘physical force [which] is the Prince of this world’ (Auden 1963: 83). The crowd –
in the act of murder – worships itself in a parody of the nous, which surpasses ‘the
social exoskeletons’ of apparently more social creatures like ants because of its
gratuity. Because human beings are not specialised, our functional specialisation is
an act of choice (to be memorialised in ‘monuments’ and ‘odes’), as Auden states
explicitly in his essay ‘Pride and Prayer’:

Choice of attention – to attend to this and ignore that – is to the inner life what choice
of action is to the outer. In both cases man is responsible for his choice and must
accept the consequences. As Ortega y Gasset said: ‘Tell me to what you pay
attention, and I will tell you who you are.’ (Hecht 1993: 387)

Thus the ‘incarnation’ of intelligence in the nous enables one to become a morally
responsible subject and to transcend the accidental nature of community through
 THE CITY IN W. H. AUDEN’S HORAE CANONICAE 205

the action of choice. As Charles Williams writes, only by the action of what
Wordsworth called ‘feeling intellect’ can ‘the accidents of propinquity . . . be-
come the web of the City’ (Williams 1958: 101–2), and the earthly city is in the
main only an ‘accident of propinquity’. But in the epiphanic moment of the
Crucifixion, murder is seen transfigured as a manifestation and incarnation of
the ‘power of self-consciousness’, of the collective choice by virtue of which ‘we
[can] say/ all men are our brothers’.
The ‘social exoskeletons’ can never become the City because they cannot
choose not to pay attention to their queens, and to undertake a gratuitous act; but
the human capacity for choice, for punctual and intellectual action, by facilitating
the possibility of sin, holds promise therefore of redemption. Free will is para-
mount: there is an intimation of the City in even the greatest iniquity of the
crowd.
In ‘Vespers’ (S: 74) Auden expands further upon the notion of two (or more)
levels of significance being incorporated within the same worldly action. For while
‘Vespers’ as the title of the service at 6 pm derives from the identification of
‘Venus as the evening star’ (OED), Venus is both morning and evening star –
appearing in its opposite aspects as Lucifer and Hesperus respectively. The two
Anti-types who meet in the poem are therefore figured as the two halves of the
‘civil twilight’, two sons of Venus – and thus, putatively, two aspects of Eros.
Lucifer is the Utopian, a son of the morning: he looks forward to a ‘New
Jerusalem’, but Lucifer being ‘The Prince of this world’ (‘Sext’) personified, his
dream extends only to ‘some august day / of outrage when hellikins cavort through
ruined drawing- / rooms’. By contrast, Hesperus – with whom the speaker is
identified – the Arcadian son of the evening, looks back regretfully on lost
innocence. The counterpointing of the two figures is further complicated by the
temporal polarity of their respective dreams. The figure of the evening dreams of
the Miltonic morning of mankind; that of the morning (of the new dawn) looks
forward to the evening – the perfection gained through ‘The blood-dimmed tide’
of a Yeatsian second coming.
Clearly, Auden is a partisan of Eden: his ‘apostasy’ from the Communist
cause and conversion to Christianity aligning him against the secular utopianism of
his ‘Anti-type’. However, as Stan Smith points out, Auden’s sympathies as a
Christian cannot be quite so absolute:

[B]iography can deceive . . . though these two meet at a crossroads and pass, they are
also figuratively the two thieves on the cross, one of whom was saved. It was not, one
might remember, the dream of Eden, of an impossible return to innocence, that
brought salvation to one of the thieves . . . but a wish to enter into the Kingdom.
(1985: 185)

Indeed, the implacable opposition between the two ‘Anti-types’ resolves itself
within the poem as in fact a type of collusion in the murder necessary for the
creation of the city. Their meeting might ‘look to any god of crossroads’ simply
206 ENGLISH

like a chance encounter; that is to say, that to the Lares – tutelary deities of place in
Roman pagan tradition – such an ‘intersection’ between two ‘life-paths’ can have
only a ‘natural’ and accidental character, an event delimited by its temporal and
geographical specificity. But since a Christian consciousness entails that
‘wherever/ The sun shines . . ./ There will also be this death’ (‘Nones’), the
meeting must also have a second level of significance as a historical event, part of
the continuum that begins with the Crucifixion and the two thieves. The apparent
opposition of Arcadian and Utopian is actually an expression of what Charles
Williams called ‘co-inherence’ (1950: 10) rather than of a fundamental
Manicheism:

a rendezvous between accomplices who, in spite of

themselves, cannot resist meeting

to remind the other (do both, at bottom, desire truth?) of

that half of their secret which he would most like to forget . . .

However, the two ‘Anti-types’ are intent solely upon the building of a ‘secular
wall’: it is upon death and murder, that ‘arcadias, utopias, our dear old / bag of a
democracy, are alike founded’, and neither partisan is identical with the penitent
thief since they owe allegiance only to the earthly city.
‘Lauds’, a poem in the Spanish cossante form (Fuller 1998: 462), is a morning-
song. It recapitulates the innocence of semi-consciousness in ‘Prime’, with the
benignity and inter-related harmony of the world about conveyed by the repetition
of identical lines in varying conjunctions:

Already the mass-bell goes dong-ding;

The dripping mill-wheel is again turning:
In solitude, for company.

God bless the Realm, God bless the people;

God bless this green world temporal:
In solitude, for company.

The dripping mill-wheel is again turning;

Among the leaves the small birds sing:
In solitude, for company.

Anthony Hecht observes that

The defiant inversion of ‘ding-dong,’ undertaken purely for the sake of the rhyme is
. . . disconcerting. It is disturbing to find one set of conventions violated for the sake
of another. (1993: 400)
 THE CITY IN W. H. AUDEN’S HORAE CANONICAE 207

This seems to me slightly to miss the point – which Hecht himself makes
(1993: 399) – that the form of consciousness present in the poem is precisely
one in which the normal order is suspended: faith takes the individual
into Kierkegaard’s ‘new world’ (Carpenter 1981: 286). Auden’s periphrasis might
be read as indicating a reversion of the temporal flow: the ‘mass-bell’ ringing
backwards and perhaps leading ‘company’ backwards into a state of grace.
Certainly the revival of the ‘obsolete machinery’ – ‘the dripping mill-wheel is
again turning’ – seems to place the poem back in the Edenic innocence of paradise
regained.
However, the poem’s total lack of either particular actions or persons
betrays its universality as that of the oneiric state, outside which no return to Eden
is possible. Nor is the New Jerusalem achieved, for the daily round dictates that
history must once more be resumed in ‘Prime’; but in a vision of Agape, isolation
is temporarily transcended, and the poet is aware of the ‘infinite value’ (Auden
1973: 69) of other lives. He remains a finite creature in solitude, but he is also with
company, in the spectral City.

IV

The image of the City in Auden’s poetry of the 1950s is, to borrow a phrase from
Charles Williams, ‘not a thing that can be easily defined, for . . . poetry cannot be
turned into anything but itself’ (1958: 100). Auden’s final gnomic utterance at the
conclusion of ‘Horae Canonicae’ is perhaps the most vivid realization in his poetry
of the ideal City, while it is simultaneously the formulation of the philosophy of
co-inherence: a metaphysic of interdependence and community, a concealed City
gained by the acceptance and transcendence of solitude.
Where Horae Canonicae locates the Fall and the origin of evil in the world it
therefore also locates redemption; Eros is not the antithesis but the condition of
Agape, and the awareness of individuality is the route to a knowledge of commu-
nity. It is this co-inherence, the commonality of ‘Our Weakness’ that allows Adam
‘to cry O felix culpa’ (‘Memorial for the City’). The New Jerusalem is promised on
the irretrievable loss of innocence.
The City of Horae Canonicae is an abstracted, but not therefore an etiolated,
one. Great complexity of thought lies behind the simple, balanced paeons with
which Auden concluded the sequence; they are the resolution of the claims of the
world and of a faith which reaches beyond the world, promising a ‘soul . . . made
sensual’ (Williams 1958: 224) and the earthly city redeemed:

Men of their neighbours become sensible;

God bless the Realm, God bless the people:
In solitude, for company.
University of St Andrews
 208 ENGLISH

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Notes
1. All quotations of Auden’s poetry are taken from the Selected Poems (1979). I employ no
apparatus for such quotations.
2. Auden believed in the essential identity of Eros and Agape. He complained in the journal
Theology that
there has been a tendency to see the notion of love as Eros or desire for getting and the notion of
love as Agape or free-giving as incompatible opposites and to identify them with Paganism and
Christianity respectively. Such a view seems to me a revival of the Manichean heresy which
denies the goodness of the natural order. (Fuller 1998: 412)
Randall Jarrell likens the change from Eros to Agape in Auden’s later poetry to a mutation effected
by ‘the unearthly radiation of Grace’, adding:
After making up this rather derisive simile I was astonished to find Auden, in something I hadn’t
read before, using it seriously: Agape is ‘Eros mutated by Grace.’ (1971: 159)

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