Auden As A Poet of Nature
Auden As A Poet of Nature
Auden As A Poet of Nature
Auden’s poetry is filled with surprising metaphors and alarming conceits which he
uses both to explore the beauty and wonder of the natural world, and to
illuminate upon the human condition. The central themes of some Auden’s poetry
are the anonymous, impersonal world of nature.
This is seen with perhaps its greatest complexity in “In Praise of Limestone”,
included in part in Passage Two. On its most literal level, this poem is an
imaginative exploration of the limestone landscape that Auden was living in at the
time of writing the poem, in provincial Italy. Here, as in a number of his other
descriptive poems such as “Look stranger, at this island now”, Auden makes
masterful use of imagery and alliteration to create, in combination with each
other, a vivid and vibrant sense of the land for his reader. Indeed, the land seems
almost alive, seen through Auden’s use of personification when he describes the
“chuckle” with which the “springs…spurt out everywhere”, or the “ravine whose
cliffs entertain/The butterfly and the lizard” (my emphasis). Yet this description is
not solely there for aesthetic purposes. In only the third line of the poem, Auden
employs the imperative “mark” to instruct his reader to observe the land along
with him, something which he then encourages, through his vivid depiction of the
“rounded slopes”, describing their “fragrance” on the “surface”, and then taking
his reader deeper into a “secret system of caves and conduits”. The lulling rhythm
of these words is achieved through the repetitive “c” and “s” sounds of the latter
phrase, along with the gentle instructions Auden delivers to his reader to “mark”
and “hear” (an approach also taken in “Look stranger”). These verbs already
connote a sense that something is to be learnt through the landscape, that careful
observation is required, and such careful observation is what Auden both
provides and facilitates through this poem. Through such description, Auden
draws his reader into the land itself, taking them on a beautiful and discursive
tour both over the surface of the land, and then into its core, into the “secret
system of caves and conduits” and what is revealed there.
It is in this dissecting approach to the landscape that Auden differentiates himself
from, say, a more traditional nature poet, or even the Romantics, as it are not
with nature that Auden is primarily concerned. Though this poem, along with
many others like it, is infused with a deep sense of the love of nature, Auden
establishes from the poem’s outset that this discourse on limestone is not merely
an aesthetic one, rather a kind of complex assay of the human condition, a little
like a poetic geologist examining not the nature of rocks, but the nature of those
that live upon the rocks. This notion is presented from the very start with the
speculative sentence, “If it form the one landscape that we the inconstant
ones/Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly/because it dissolves in water”.
Here, Auden’s focus is shifted from the subject of the poem, the “limestone” the
poem is written “in praise of”, to what this “landscape” suggests of humanity.
Even the absence of the word “limestone” in the opening sentence, merely
implied by the second word, “it”, signals a somewhat counter-intuitive focus for
the poem. Though this opening sentence then leads into the masterly description
of the land that we have previously discussed, Auden is not concerned here with
the land, rather with the human affinity that is felt for it, an affinity that he
includes himself in through the use of “we”. What Auden means by “we the
inconstant ones” is not something that he elucidates on in this passage, although
the implication of the phrase is made clear through the paradoxical idea of these
“inconstant ones” being “consistently homesick for” a limestone landscape –
perhaps this precise landscape, or perhaps, in Auden’s case, one quite like it.
Though the idea of the “inconstant ones” suggests an inability to stay put, it
seems that their one “consistency” is their homesickness for this landscape – not,
let us note, a “consistent” return to this landscape, but a “consistent” yearning for
it, over other landscapes. Here Auden already begins to dissect the human
condition with alarming clarity, identifying the kinds of human foibles that he is
also concerned with in his discussion of the inconstant, indecisive modern
“commuters” of “September 1, 1939”, suggesting an inability to remain faithful or
firmly grounded, in spite, perhaps, of best intentions.
It is this tension within humanity that limestone seems to best signify, through
the paradox that, though firm and “forming” the landscape, there is an
inconstancy to limestone itself, “because it dissolves in water”. The land also, it
seems, boasts the advantage of “short distances” and “definite places”,
suggesting a simplicity that is attractive to those who do not wish to commit to
much; the land, confined to a small area, brings with it a certain reliability,
achieved through centuries of sedimentary development, and is firm enough,
“definite” enough, to compensate for the unreliability of its “inconstant”
inhabitants. Indeed, the land also provides a suitable “background” for vanity to
parade itself, the perfect setting for “the nude young male” to “display […] his
dildo”. The playfulness of this description precludes any sense of its being
judgmental, along with the affectionate tone of Auden’s question, “What could be
more like Mother[?]”, bringing with it a knowingness, and a loving acceptance of
over-indulgence and foppery. Nevertheless, there is a quiet condemnation in the
“nude young male’s” unquestioning assumption that, “for all his faults, he is
loved”, a concept that seems to jar somewhat with the acceptance of the
previous phrase. Indeed, Auden’s tone subtly implies that this assumption is a
mistaken one, that the creation of a landscape solely to indulge vanity is no noble
feat, aligning it with a “child’s wish/To receive more attention than his brothers”.
Here Auden once again raises similar concerns to those explored in his earlier
work, “September 1, 1939”, a poem which connects the outbreak of war with a
desire to have “not universal love/But to be loved alone”; or, in this case, to be
loved more than others. In this complex conceit, Auden both employs the “nude
young male” as a signifier of the natural opulence and splendour of the land, the
seeming self-indulgence of such an unnecessarily beautiful landscape, yet also
connects this with the same human inconstancy and vanity that he elsewhere
explores and, at times, criticizes.
Moving from the, quite literally, terrestrial descriptions and conceits of “In Praise
of Limestone”, to the almost lullaby-like quality of a later poem, “The More Loving
One”, we see both a similar approach to the natural world, and yet a startlingly
contrasting aesthetic and ethos. “The More Loving One” creates an interesting
bookend with “This lunar beauty” in the examined selection of Auden’s poetry,
both being poems which consider the heavenly bodies as points of discussion for
the nature of human relationships. Where “This lunar beauty” did so in an
elliptical, almost otherworldly manner, “The More Loving One” is curiously “down
to earth”. Gone is the vivid imagery and descriptive language of “In Praise of
Limestone” or “Look stranger”. Also, where “This lunar beauty” employed
obscurely incomplete phrases and a contracted, seemingly abbreviated rhythm,
the language of “The More Loving One” is direct and simple. The repetitive
rhyming structure, achieved through stanzas of two rhyming couplets, provides
an immediacy and certainty that “This lunar beauty” deliberately avoids.
Moreover, Auden’s word choices are strategically colloquial and, at times, crude,
a quality found more often in his later work, from the “dildo” of “Limestone” to
the “whoop it up” of his 1969 poem on the “Moon Landing”. Here, the stars “do
not give a damn”, and do not care if the narrator “go[es] to Hell”, both words,
“damn” and “Hell” providing startlingly direct conclusions to their rhyming
partners “am” and “well”. When Auden chooses to use a simple and
straightforward rhyming and rhythmic scheme, we know that it is a deliberate
choice, as his versatility as a poet is one of his most remarkable qualities. “The
More Loving One” is no exception to this. Auden’s blunt word choices combine
with the repetition and consistency of the rhyming scheme to achieve a playful,
albeit slightly cynical, reflection on the stars, not carrying with it the
otherworldliness of “This lunar beauty”. Indeed, where “This lunar beauty”
suggested that the formlessness and otherness of the “lunar beauty” left daytime,
on earth, seeming more a “loss” than a “gain”, in “The More Loving One” Auden
“look[s] up at the stars”, but concerns himself with matters “on earth”. The stars
serve as a perfect metaphor for unrequited love given their disconnection from
humanity, and indeed their lack of human understanding or emotion. Thus, where
the human affinity for a “limestone landscape” served as the basis for Auden’s
metaphor in that poem, here it is a sense of disconnectedness between earth and
the heavens that provide Auden with this poem’s conceit. In both these poems,
we see the manner in which Auden is concerned not so much with the “sublime”
in nature, but the way in which nature, and our connection with, or disconnection
from, it can illuminate upon the deeply human issues of self love, fidelity and
connectedness between people.