Month: September 2023

Listening to a terrific programme about W H Auden on BBC Radio.

It’s full of reminders of why Auden’s poetry is so rich and memorable as well as thoughts and reflections – some from recordings of Auden himself – that make you sit up a little straighter.

There are his poems of course. Even familiar ones – like As I Walked Out One Evening – suddenly strike you afresh:

‘O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.’

And reflections on his art too. Asked about reading about reading we hear Auden quoting Dr Johnson as saying (something like) ‘the aim of writing (and all arts) is to enable readers a little better to enjoy life and a little better to endure life’, Auden adds ‘and then the arts are our chief means of communication with the dead…’

This is one of Hockney’s famous sketches of Auden’s famously craggy face. Listen to the programme to hear Hockney’s reflections on that rugged exterior:

I’d never come across a poem of his called Refugee Blues – still immediate, contemporary:

Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.

Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you’ll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.

In the village churchyard there grows an old yew,
Every spring it blossoms anew:
Old passports can’t do that, my dear, old passports can’t do that.

The consul banged the table and said,
“If you’ve got no passport you’re officially dead”:
But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.

Went to a committee; they offered me a chair;
Asked me politely to return next year:
But where shall we go to-day, my dear, but where shall we go to-day?

Came to a public meeting; the speaker got up and said;
“If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread”:
He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me.

Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky;
It was Hitler over Europe, saying, “They must die”:
O we were in his mind, my dear, O we were in his mind.

Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin,
Saw a door opened and a cat let in:
But they weren’t German Jews, my dear, but they weren’t German Jews.

Went down the harbour and stood upon the quay,
Saw the fish swimming as if they were free:
Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.

Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;
They had no politicians and sang at their ease:
They weren’t the human race, my dear, they weren’t the human race.

Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,
A thousand windows and a thousand doors:
Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.

Stood on a great plain in the falling snow;
Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro:
Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.

The programme can be found here.