w.h. auden | The Gad About Town

A Moonless Night

Posted on December 17, 2015 by Mark Aldrich

At once sarcastic and tender, W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” asks us to imagine a night sky empty of stars:

Looking up at 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 More Loving One,” W.H. Auden, 1957

I might very well like a starless sky and call it sublime or subtle in its black-on-black nuance, the poet declares, and not mourn the sight of a supernova, which is after all the explosive death of a star, and I may not notice the absence of one should it simply blink out, but in all matters, “If equal affection cannot be,/Let the more loving one be me.”

In all matters attracting my human attention, be it the night sky or my beloved’s face, let the more loving one be me.
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‘September 1, 1939’

Posted on September 1, 2015 by Mark Aldrich

Shortly before his death, the poet W.H. Auden told talk-show host (and former politician) Richard Crossman, “Nothing I wrote prevented one Jew from being gassed or stalled the war for five seconds.”

At first glance, this places the bar very high for the role of a writer in the affairs of the world, but it is simply a stark assessment of the reality that a writer has no say in the practical matters of life and death. He is not saying that words do not matter but is instead drawing the boundary between where they do matter and where they can not. Writers are makers and not doers, not “men of action,” Auden also liked to say.

One of his most famous poems is September 1, 1939, written to mourn the outbreak of World War II. The title is of course the date Germany invaded Poland. It was written quickly, allegedly that day, was not heavily edited, and published in The New Republic soon after. Auden came to reject the poem and he refused three times to include it in the three editions of his Collected Poems that he oversaw.

He told Crossman that the poem possessed rhetoric that was “too high-flown.”
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‘It was Easter as I walked …’

Posted on April 5, 2015 by Mark Aldrich

Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible. […] Poems about Good Friday have, of course, been written, but none of them will do.—W.H. Auden, “A Certain World”