To Dream Again

‘Learn from your dreams what you lack.’ – W.H. Auden, The Sea and the Mirror

Interviewed late in life, W.H. Auden agreed to sign the interviewer’s copy of his new volume. After doing so, Auden began to leaf through the pages. Pen in hand, he made spontaneous revisions. A word changed here. A word deleted there. This was of published work that had gone through several drafts already. Auden was always providing a new version of his writing. Nothing was ever decided.

Yet there could be authority in his words. Sir, No Man’s Enemy. Surely it is the Johnsonian imperative that gives these lines their magisterial insistence. Even if we read no further than the opening lines of an Auden poem we feel we are in the presence of an uncommonly arresting response to the world. Good lines do not make of themselves good poetry, but the least we can say on first glancing at Auden is that he wrote many good lines. There is more to say, of course. He wove patterns of language into a coherent poetry. The memorable turns of phrase are exact and incisive. They say so much:

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm.

This seems to tell us a great deal about the author. A whole life is revealed in its attitudes to love. The confession is intentional of course. To begin so elegiac a poem in celebration of human love is devastating. Such frankness breaks the bounds of expectation. A cynic might write so cruelly about love in ...