"Waves of anger and fear" clearly echoes the poet's own state of mind in "uncertain and afraid." In any case, it is the latter that conditions the former, as well as "obsessing our private lives." The key word in this line obviously is "obsessing" because apart from conveying the importance of those news broadcasts/ rustling tabloids, it introduces a sense of shame that runs through the entire stanza and casts its hissing sibilant shadow upon "our private lives" before we catch the meaning of the statement. Thus the posture of a reporter who speaks to us and about us conceals a self- disgusted moralist, and "our private lives" becomes a euphemism for something quite unspeakable; for something that bears responsibility for the stanza's last two lines:
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Here we sense once again British diction, something that smacks of a drawing room: "unmentionable odour." The poet, as it were, gives us two euphemisms in a row: an epithet and an object, and we almost see a wriggled nose. The same goes for "offends." Euphemism, generally, is inertia of terror. ^bat makes these lines doubly horrid is the mixture of the poet's real fear with a roundabout locution, aping his audience's reluctance to call a spade a spade. The disgust that you detect in these two lines has much less to do with the "odour of death" as such and its proximity to our nostrils than with the sensibility that used to render it "unmentionable."
On the whole, this stanza's most important admission, "uncertain and afraid," has at the source not so much the outbreak of war as the sensibility that precipitated it and whose diction the last two lines emulate. Don't make the mistake of regarding them as a parody: not at all. They simply do their job in the author's drive to bring everybody and everything into the focus of collective guilt. He simply tries to show what that civilized, euphemistic, detached diction and everything that is associated with it result in, which is carrion. Now, this is of course a bit too strong a sentiment to end a stanza with, and the poet decides to give you a bit of breathing space; hence that "September night."
And although this "September night" has gone somewhat astray because of what's been done to it, it's still a September night and, as such, it evokes rather tolerable allusions. At this point, the poet's strategy is—apart from his overall desire to be historically precise—to pave the road for the next stanza: we shouldn't forget about considerations like this. So he gives us here a mixture of naturalism and high lyricism that stabs you both in the heart and in the plexus. The last thing in the stanza, however, is the voice of the heart, albeit a wounded one: "the September night." It doesn't constitute a great deal of relief: still, one senses that there is someplace to go. Let's see, then, where it is that our poet is taking us, after reminding us with "September night" that what we are reading is a poem.
3
The second stanza starts with a deliberate, I'd say pedantic surprise of "Accurate scholarship can/Unearth the whole offence/From Luther until now/ . . ." Surely you expected anything but this: after "September night." You see, Auden is the most unpredictable poet. In music, his counterpart would be Joseph Haydn. With Auden, you don't foresee the next line even if the meter is the most conventional. And that's the way to do the job . . . Anyway, why do you think he starts here with "accurate scholarship"?
Well, he begins a new stanza, and his immediate concern and purpose is to change the pitch, in order to escape the monotony which the repetition of structural design always promises. Secondly, and more importantly, he is fully aware of the preceding sentence's gravity, of its effectiveness, and he doesn't want to continue in that authoritative fashion: he is simply mindful of the authority of a poet who, in the eyes of the audience, is a priori right. So what he tries to demonstrate here is his capacity for objective, dispassionate discourse. "Accurate scholarship" is evoked here to dispel any possibility of a romantic, poetic shadow supposedly cast by the first stanza's diction over the ethical argument in progress.
This pressure for objectivity, dryness of tone, etc., has been both the curse and the blessing of modem poetry. It choked quite a lot of throats; Mr. Eliot's would be one, although the same force made him a superb critic. What's good about Auden, ^ong other things, is that he proved to be capable of manipulating this pressure to suit his lyrical ends. Here he is, for instance, speaking in this cool, pedantic voice: "Accurate scholarship can/Unearth the whole offence . . ." and yet you sense under the mask of objectivity the badly controlled anger. That is, the objectivity here is the result of controlled anger. Note that. And note also the pause after "can" that sits at the end of this line and rhymes rather faintly with "done," which is too far away to reckon with. After this pause, "unearth" comes as a false emphatic verb; it's a bit too elevated and casts considerable doubt over this scholarship's ability to unearth anything.
The metronome-like distribution of stresses in both lines reinforces the absence of emotion peculiar to scholastic undertakings, but a keen ear pricks up at "the whole offence": the dismissal here isn't exactly academic. Perhaps it's done to offset the aforesaid aloofness of "unearth," though I doubt it. The poet resorts to this colloquial dismissive intonation most likely to convey not so much the possible imprecision of this scholarship's findings as its gentlemanly, detached posture, which has very little to do with its very subject; neither with Luther nor with "now." By this time, the entire conceit—Oh yeah, we can be logical—that sustains this stanza starts to get on the author's nerves, and in "has driven a culture mad" Auden finally lets himself go and releases the word that twitched for too long on the tip of his tongue: "mad."
:\1y hunch is that he loved this word dearly. As everyone whose mother tongue is English should: this word covers a lot of ground—if not all of it. Also, "mad" is very much English-schoolboy diction, which, for Auden, was a sort of sancta sanctorum; not so much because of his 'happy childhood" or his experience as schoolmaster as due to every poet's craving for laconism. Apart from being apt in denoting both the state of the world and that of the speaker's mind, "mad" heralds here the arrival of a diction fully deployed by the end of this stanza. But let's get to the next line.
"Find what occurred at Linz." I bet you know more about Luther than about what occurred at Linz. Well, Linz is the city in Austria where AdoU Hitler, known also as Adolf Schiklgruber, spent his childhood; i.e., went to school, got his ideas, and so forth. Actually he wanted to become a painter and applied to the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts but was turned down. Too bad for fine arts, considering this man's energy. So he became a Michelangelo in reverse. Well, we'll return to this business of war and painting later. Now let's watch the lexical content of this stanza: here we are on to something interesting.
Let's assume that what we've said about that high- school aspect of "mad" is accurate. The point is that "what occurred at Linz" also refers to a high-school experience: that of young Schiklgruber. Of course, we don't know what exactly did happen there, but by now we all have bought that notion of "formative years." The next two lines, as you probably see, are "What huge imago made/A psychopathic god." Now, "imago" comes straight out of psychoanalytic lingo. It means an image of a father-figure that a child fashions for himself in the absence of the real father— which was young Adolfs case—and that conditions a child's subsequent development. In other words, here our poet grinds scholarship into the fine dust of psychoanalysis which we inhale nowadays unwittingly. Note also the beauty of this triple rhyme connecting "mad" and "god" via the assonant "made." Very subtly but relentlessly the poet is paving the road to the last four lines of this stanza, which every living person has to tattoo in his/her brain.