Things Worth Remembering: September 1, 1939 The poem W. H. Auden wrote in response to the outbreak of World War II achieved a newfound fame in the wake of 9/11. By Douglas Murray
Welcome back to Douglas Murray’s Sunday column, Things Worth Remembering, where he presents passages from great poets he has committed to memory—and explains why you should, too. To listen to Douglas read from W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” click below:
I want to turn today to the question of W. H. Auden and what happened to him just as the world was going mad.
Auden was hardly the only one left disoriented—shattered—by the outbreak of World War II, but I think his response to the war—his poem “September 1, 1939”—offers a uniquely powerful illustration of what happens to us when everything we think we know becomes uncertain.
The poem receded for decades—in no small part because Auden didn’t care for it—but after the attacks of 9/11, it achieved a newfound fame. It was especially popular in New York City, where the Twin Towers once stood, and because that’s where Auden wrote it. As he says in the poem’s opening lines:
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
That is a good opening.
What comes next is even more grabbing:
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
It’s a perfectly said, deeply appealing line. Who doesn’t want to feel like the poet—smoking a cigarette in a dive on 52nd street, drink and pen in hand—proclaiming boldly in the face of titanic, historical forces?
Perhaps the line that grabbed New Yorkers in 2001 was the end of that first stanza.
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
The poem goes on for another eight stanzas.
That’s where Auden gets derailed. Within a few stanzas, there’s mention of Luther and Linz and Thucydides. Then Nijinsky. Then Diaghilev. It’s not name-dropping for name-dropping’s sake, but a kind of conversation between Auden and Auden.
Soon, the poet’s proclamations become childlike:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Which seems true and simplistic. Was evil done to the Germans at Versailles after World War I? Is this the only reason they invaded Poland, triggering World War II?
Then there’s the line that ultimately caused Auden to turn on his own poem. The penultimate stanza starts well (All I have is a voice / To undo the folded lie), but then it finishes disastrously: We must love one another or die.
This became so popular, or trite, that even Lyndon Johnson used it on the campaign trail. By then, Auden had pulled “September 1, 1939” from his Collected Poems. He thought the line phony, and he was right.
Whatever he felt in that dive on 52nd Street, it soon became clear that death and destruction and the forces of evil could not care less about how much or how little one loves.
Perhaps he was embarrassed by his naivete, even his pacifism—which was so ineffectual, even actively destructive, in the midst of so much bloodshed. For most of his life Auden was aware of the fact that poetry makes nothing happen. “In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil—no lyric has ever stopped a tank,” the Irish poet Seamus Heaney once declared. And yet, as Heaney concluded: “In another sense, it is unlimited.”
Auden’s poem seems to have been created just before that realization landed—before he fully absorbed the fact that poetry is the wrong medium for a manifesto. Still the poem ran on—and away from him.
Plenty of poets, like musicians, have mixed feelings about their greatest hits. They become frustrated with their repetition. But on this occasion, Auden clearly had a moral objection, too. He had an ear for the insincere or the overblown, and it was a criticism he could apply to his own work as well as toward the work of others.
All that being said, there is one stanza at the end of the poem—which has now found its way back into his Collected Poems—that I could not do without.
It is the great culmination of a contestable poem, and now, sadly, or predictably, it feels more resonant than at any other moment in my life—perhaps even more than in the weeks and months after September 11.
Written a continent away by someone who would never see any of the conflict, it was, in any event, an attempt by a man in the middle of the twentieth century to find an attitude toward the hell that was about to happen.
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
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