And in the beginning of this particular poem there is this "dive," and it's quite likely that this dive is responsible for the rest of it. He surely likes this word if only because he never used it before. But then again he thinks, "Humph, back there in England they might think that I am just kind of slumming, in the sense of language; that I am simply rolling these new American morsels over my tongue." So then, first of all, he rhymes "dives" with "lives," which is in itself telling enough, apart from animating an old rhyme. Secondly, he qualifies the word by saying "one of the dives," thereby reducing the exoticism of "dives."
At the same time, "one of the" increases the humbling effect of being in a dive in the first place, and this humbling effect suits well his reporter's posture. For he positions himself fairly low here: physically low, which means in the midst of things. That alone boosts the sense of verisimilitude: the guy who speaks from the thick of things is more readily listened to. What makes the whole thing even more convincing is "Fifty-second Street," because numbers after all are seldom used in poetry. Most likely, his first impulse was to say, "I sit in one of the dives"; but then he decided that "dives" may be too linguistically emphatic for the crowd back home, and so he puts in "on Fifty-second Street." This somewhat lightens the matter, since Fifty- second Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues was at the time the jazz strip of the universe. Hence, by the way, all that syncopation that reverberates in the half-rhymes of those trimeters.
Remember: it is the second, and not the first, line that shows where your poem is to go metrically. It also informs an experienced reader as to the identity of the author, i.e., whether he is American or British (an American second line, normally, is quite bold: it violates the preconceived music of the meter with its linguistic content; a Briton, normally, tends to sustain the tonal predictability of the second line, introducing his own diction only in the third or, more likely, in the fourth line. Compare the tetrametric— or even pentametric—jobs of Thomas Hardy with E. A. Robinson, or better still, with Robert Frost). More importantly, though, the second line is the line that introduces the rhyme scheme.
"On Fifty-second Street" performs all these jobs. It tells you that it's going to be a poem in trimeters, that the author is hard-hitting enough to qualify as a nativc; that the rhyme is to be irregular, most likely assonant ("afraid" coming after "street"), with a tendency to expand (for it is "bright" that in fact rhymes with "street" via "afraid," which widens into "decade"). To Auden's British audience, the poem starts in earnest right here, with this amusing yet very matter-of-fact air that "Fifty-second Street" creates, in a fairly unexpected fashion. But the point is that by now our author isn't dealing only with Britons; not anymore. And the beauty is that this opening cuts both ways, since "dives" and "Fifty-second Street" inform his American public that he speaks its language as well. If one bears in mind the immediate aim of the poem, this choice of diction is not surprising at all.
Some twenty years later, in a poem written in memory of Louis MacNeice, Auden expresses a desire to "become, if possible, a minor Atlantic Goethe." This is an extremely significant admission, and the crucial word here is, believe it or not, not Goethe but Atlantic. Because what Auden had in mind from the very outset of his poetic career was the sense that the language in which he wrote was transatlantic or, better still, imperiaclass="underline" not in the sense of the British Raj but in the sense that it is the language that made an empire. For empires are held together by neither political nor military forces but by languages. Take Rome, for instance, or better still, Hellenic Greece, which began to disintegrate immediately after Alexander the Great's own demise (and he died very young). What held them for centuries, after their political centers collapsed, were magna lingua Grecae and Latin. Empires are, first and foremost, cultural entities; and it's language that does the job, not legions. So if you want to write in English, you ought to master all its idioms, from Fresno to Kuala Lumpur, so to speak. Other than that, the importance of what you are saying may not go far beyond your little parish, which is perfectly commendable, of course; what's more, there is that famous "drop of water" (which reflects the entire universe) approach to comfort you. That's fine. And yet there is every chance for you to become citizens of the Great English Language.
Well, this is, perhaps, demagoguery; but it won't hurt. To get back to Auden, I think, one way or another, the above considerations played their role in his decision to leave England. Also, his reputation at home was already very high and presumably the prospect facing him was to join the literary establishment: for in a carefully stratified society there is nowhere else to go, and nothing beyond. So he hit the road, and the language extended it. In any case, for him that empire was stretched not only in space but in time as well, and he was ladling from every source, level, and period of English. Naturally, a man who was so frequently charged with fishing out of the OED very old, obscure, dated words hardly could ignore the safari America was offering.
At any rate, "Fifty-second Street" rings enough of a bell on both sides of the Atlantic to make people listen. In the beginning of every poem, a poet has to dispel that air of art and artifice that clouds the public's attitude to poetry. He has to be convincing, plain—the way, presumably, the public itself is. He has to speak with a public voice, and all the more so if it is a public subject that he deals with.
"I sit in one of the dives I On Fifty-second Street" answers those requirements. What we get here is the level, confident voice of one of us, of a reporter who speaks to us in our own tones. And just as we are prepared for him to continue in this reassuring fashion, just as we've recognized this public voice and have been lulled into regularity by his trimeters, the poet plummets us into the very private diction of "Uncertain and afraid." Now, this is not the way reporters talk; this is the voice of a scared child rather than of a seasoned, trench-coated newsman. "Uncertain and afraid" denotes what?—doubt. And this is precisely where this poem—indeed poetry in general, art in general—starts for reaclass="underline" in, or with, doubt. All of a sudden the certitude of that Fifty-second Street dive is gone and you get the feeling that perhaps it was displayed there in the first place because he was "uncertain and afraid" in the very beginning: that's why he clung to their concreteness. But now the preliminaries are over, and we are in business indeed.
As we go line by line, we should examine not only their content and function in the overall design of a poem but also their individual independence and stability; for if a poem is there to last, it better have decent bricks. In that light, the first line is a bit shaky, if only because the meter is just introduced and the poet knows it. It has an air of natural speech and is quite relaxed and humble because of the activity it describes. The main thing is that it doesn't prepare you for the next line; neither metrically nor in terms of content. After "I sit in one of the dives" everything is possible: pentameter, hexameter, a couplet rhyme, you name it. "On Fifty-second Street," therefore, has a greater significance than its content suggests, for it locks the poem into the meter.
The three stresses of "On Fifty-second Street" render it as solid and straight as Fifty-second Street itself. Although sitting "in one of the dives" doesn't jibe with a traditional poetic posture, its novelty is rather provisional, as is everything that has to do with the pronoun ''1.'' "On Fifty- second Street," on the other hand, is permanent because it is impersonal and also because of its number. The combination of these two aspects reinforced by the regularity of the stress gives the reader a sense of confidence and legitimizes whatever may follow.