“Here on the cropped
grass of the narrow ridge I stand” (Auden)
The poem is a burden upon Empire, concluding
with the Christian exhortation to “Love one another.”
Westward
is Wales
The central image of the first stanza is the
place of “the retired and rich;” the opposite of this is “a
sailor’s country.”
thinking
of a crime
The second stanza is Audenesque in its
peculiar inner construction on “crime,” which throws “the
perfect setting of our meditations” into some disarray.
While
we were kissing
Next is a description of economic depression
not in accord with nature.
A digit of the crowd.
Emerging from this, he considers the
consequences.
Deaf
to the Welsh wind now
And finds a more objective
viewpoint.
before
the Cambrian alignment
This suggests the overthrow prepared by “The
high thin rare continuous worship Of the self-absorbed.”
the
image of the reconciler
The seventh stanza figures first the fate of
Greece (“The civilization of the delicate olive”) and then of Rome,
ending in “The cell, dividing, multiplied desire,” which is to say
the splitting of the Empire into the nations of Europe. Then come
the most extraordinary lines of this extraordinary poem, which tersely posit
the fate of those nations: “And raised instead of death the image Of the
reconciler.”
the
thunder mutters
Now begins the burden proper, formally
echoing Eliot. Falsehood, death, luxury and idleness are its tenor.
Playing
at fathers
And it ends in “foolish graves.”
to
return alive
Finally, Auden is brought to a clear
statement of his position, or situation, or dilemma. He quotes a position and a
situation from two other writers in the last stanza, and to his dilemma finds
the Gospel a ready help.