2 of 8
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-Second Street.
Though the events which trouble Auden's spirit occurred across the Atlantic, he receives the news in New York; a certain geographical—and perhaps more than geographical—disconnection from the tragic events is essential to the poem's meditative structure. And, really, this is not wholly different from the situation of those gathered in New York's Town Hall a month ago, brooding on the events that had occurred at the southern tip of Manhattan Island a month before.
Casting his mind across the ocean, then, to the continent he had recently abandoned—largely because of the relentless pressures and expectations it held for him—Auden was moved to consider the question that one always considers in such situations: why did this horrible event happen? And his answer would become one of the two most famous moments in this very famous poem:
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.
This is basically the argument of John Maynard Keynes's book of 1919, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, only in simplified and moralized form: the countries that had placed such an enormous financial and moral burden on Germany with the Treaty of Versailles were responsible for the events of September 1, and only pedantry or manipulative political rhetoric could mask that responsibility. And Auden emphasizes that he speaks not for himself only: anticipating those pedants and politicians, he masses the wisdom of "the public" and "schoolchildren." The appeal is palpably democratic, but the tone hieratic; the prophetic here wells up from below, rather than descending from on high.
One can easily trace the links between this poem and the events of September 11 of this year, events which have caused so many to ask, "What have we done to these people to make them so angry at us?" As I listened over the Internet to Paul Muldoon reading the poem and noticed the forceful sonorousness—the slight but audible increase in emphasis—with which he uttered the words "Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return," I could hear in his voice the confidence of one who knows that the syllables he speaks carry prophetic force; and I could see in my mind's eye row after row of heads in a half-darkened hall nodding in sobered affirmation.
I said that this stanza constitutes one of the two most famous moments in the poem; the other comes in the penultimate stanza:
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.
Once again, I recall Paul Muldoon's voice assuming a certain weight and substance as this stanza came to its resonant close—the weight and substance appropriate to the prophetic utterance. And I imagine those many attentive heads nodding again, or perhaps bowing slightly, burdened by the difficult truth of Auden's charitable imperative.
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