September 1, 1939

This poem has haunted me for years ever since I read it for the first time shortly after September 11, 2001. According to this morning's Writer's Almanac it "became one of Auden's most famous poems, but in later years he rejected it. He refused to give permission for it to be in anthologies, and when he did include it, he either changed 'We must love one another or die' to 'we must love one another and die,' or he took out the stanza entirely.."

Have to wonder why. Got any clues? By my sights that and tends to lend a mobius twist to that already remarkable line. But to consider taking it out? Even rejecting his work entirely? That gives me pause. What was he thinking? Sounds like it was something of a torment for him. Well, he was a poet for Christ's sake. And an Anglican at that. Anglicans eat ambivalence like popcorn.

The line that especially rings for me is the error bred in the bone... not universal love, but to be loved alone. Talk about adding a mobius-loopy twist to things. Got me thinking about double helixes (DNA among others) and alternate universes. Flesh and Spirit. When all I really want to do at the moment is have a little lighter-hearted fun with my friends - in the face of it all. Go figure. In the world we shall have tribulation. But be of good cheer...

There yet remaineth a place for good old-fashioned pretzels and beer. And thou. Blithe and bonny and bon vivant. As my 11 year old daughter Maggs recently wrote, "Yay! I'm... be! Yay!!"

It was on this day in 1939 that Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and World War II began. How tempting is it now to reduce the world to a worry bead.

September 1, 1939 by W.H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
and darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism¹s face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow,
"I will be true to the wife.
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages;
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

-- W. H. Auden