The German-born American historian and political philosopher Hannah Arendt, in a tribute to the British-American poet W H Auden titled ‘Remembering W H Arden’ published in the New Yorker in January 1975, quotes the following lines from Auden’s ‘In memory of W B Yeats,’ written in September 1939:
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark
and…
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face
The poem begins thus:
Earth receives an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.
Arendt, for her purposes, picked the above lines from two separate verses which I believe deserve to be reproduced in full (in fact the entire poem as well as his ‘Spain, 1939’ call out for reproduction and wide circulation given today’s ‘news of the world.’). That will have to wait. The full verses are as follows:
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;
And…
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Eighty four years have passed since Auden wrote this and 48 since Arendt wrote her New Yorker piece. How far have we come, we must ask. Indeed, to re-frame the question, ‘have we remained sequestered in idolatry and delusion, numbed by tragedy and the pity invoked, appalled and rendered impotent by intellectual disgrace while the rabid dogs of empire bark and bite?’
I didn’t know of Auden’s tribute to Yeats. I didn’t know Hannah Arendt knew Auden and wrote about him a couple of years after he died. I was just looking for a poem by Auden because I wanted to accurately quote the last two lines, which, interestingly, Arendt had also commented on.
The poem is titled ‘Spain, 1939.’ I came across the poem more than 30 years ago in a bookshop in Cambridge. It was in what was probably a truncated or edited version of Authors take sides on the Spanish Civil War, put together by Nancy Cunard, I believe. On a related note, Cecil Woolf and John Bagguley replicated the exercise with regard to the Vietnam War. It was published in 1967 as Authors take sides on Vietnam. A third collection, this time on Palestine, was edited by Ru Freeman and published in 2016, Extraordinary Rendition: American writers on Palestine.
Spain, 1939. Yes, the same year. The last lines:
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 or pardon.
Years later I read somewhere that having come across one of his books containing the poem, Auden had marked the last two lines and commented, ‘this is wrong.’ Arendt says that Auden had later said of these lines, ‘to say this would be to equate goodness with success.’
The popular notion that there are no winners in war is a lie. There are always beneficiaries in the before, during and after of all wars. Just ask those who believe they lost. Auden buries the pessimism, at least in his recantation. Unfortunately it’s the pessimism that lived on along with the poem.
Life, on the hand, is longer than wars and outlives warriors. There are those who come later to pick up fallen flags and carry them to tomorrows they hope would be better.
The poet Larry Levis (1946-1996) puts it poignantly in The Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems. In the title poem, ‘Elegy with a darkening trapeze inside it,’ Levis writes about a woman:
Every revolution ends, or it begins, in memory:
Someone remembering her diminishment & pain, the way
Her scuffed shows looked in the pale light,
How she inhaled steel filings in the grinding shed
For thirty years without complaining once about it,
How she might have done things differently. But didn’t.
How it is too late to change things now. How it isn’t.
It isn’t too late. Never is it too late. Those who say ‘this is the last opportunity,’ forget that time is longer than life. I would not wish hopelessness on anyone, even those whose defeat brought relief to me for the sheer brutality of their beliefs and practices. No, I would not wish it on the citizens of Israel either.
The most terrible sequestering is allowing regret to imprint the conviction that the heart is too weak. If indeed there are seas of pity locked and frozen in each eye, there can also be mountains and rivers of resolve in those very eyes that forbid freezing. We can be sequestered in hate. We can also be sequestered in love, community and solidarity. The nightmare of the dark can be bested by sunlit dreams. That’s how it has always been. And that’s why we are here now in the way we are, bludgeoned but unconquered.
Therefore the world will never be emptied of poetry; not as long as hearts beat, as long as compassion and integrity fuel the feet, as long as intellectual honesty rises against intellectual disgrace, and as long as there are children who are delighted by paper boats and urge stray kites to fall at the feet of friends who have not given up on flight.
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www.malindawords.blogspot.com.
