The whole idea of the stanza is to pit "accurate scholarship" (which is yet another version of "clever hopes") against the plain ethics of "Those to whom evil is done/ Do evil in return." These basics are public knowledge: it's something that even schoolchildren know; i.e., it's something that belongs in the subconscious. In order to hammer this into the heads of his audience, he has to offset one diction with another since contrast is what we comprehend most. So he plays the manifest sophistication of Linz/ Luther/imago versus the breathtaking simplicity of the last two lines. By the time he gets to "a psychopathic god," he is somewhat exasperated with his effort to be fair to the opposite side's argument as well as with the necessity of containing the actual sentiment. And so he breaks into this oratorical "I and the public know," unleashing the vowels and bringing in the word that explains everything: schoolchildren.
No, he isn't juxtaposing cunning and innocence here. Nor does he practice analysis without a license. Of course he knew the works of Freud (as a matter of fact, he read them quite early, before he entered Oxford). He is simply introducing the common denominator that binds us to Hitler, for his audience—or his patient—is not a faceless authority but all of us to whom this or that evil was, at some point, done. Hitler, according to Auden, is a human phenomenon: not just a political one. Therefore he uses the Freudian approach, as it promises a shortcut to the root of the problem, to its origin. Au den, you see, is a poet who is interested most of all in cause-and-effect interplay, and Freudianism for him is but a means of transportation: not destination. Also, if not primarily, this doctrine like any other simply expands his vocabulary: he ladles from every puddle. What he achieves here then is more than just a snipe at "accurate scholarship's" ability to explain human eviclass="underline" he tells us that we all are quite evil, for we empathize with these four lines, don't we? And do you know why? Because this quatrain sounds, after all, like a most coherent rendition of the concept of Original Sin.
But there is something else to these four lines. For, by suggesting that we all are capable of becoming Hitlers, they steal somewhat from our resolve to condemn him (or the Germans). There is almost an air, however faint, of "who are we to judge?"—do you sense it? Or is it just my nostrils? And yet I think it is there. And if it is there, how would you explain this air?
Well, first of all, it's only September 1, 1939, and most of the enterprise hasn't yet taken place. Also, the poet could have been hypnotized enough by the effectiveness of those four lines (they also give an impression of having come off easily) to overlook the nuance. But Auden wasn't that kind of a poet, and on the other hand, he knew what modern warfare is like, having been to Spain. The most plausible explanation is that, after Oxford, Auden spent quite a lot of time in Germany. He traveled there several times, and some of his sojourns were long and happy.
The Germany he visited was the Germany of the Weimar Republic—the best Germany there ever was in this century, as far as your teacher is concerned. It was quite unlike England in terms of both misery and vivacity, for the population consisted of those who—defeated, crippled, impoverished, orphaned—survived the Great War, whose first casualty was the old imperial order. The entire social fabric, not to mention economy, was completely undone, and the political climate was that of high volatility. To say the least, it was unlike England, as regards its atmosphere of permissiveness, as regards the phenomenon loosely called decadence; especially as regards the visual arts. It was the period of the great outburst of Expressionism: the "ism" of which the German artists of the period are considered the founding fathers. Indeed, speaking of Expressionist art, whose chief visual characteristics are broken lines, nervous, grotesque deformity of objects and figures, lurid and cruel vividness of colors, one can't help thinking of World War II as its greatest show. One feels as though the canvases of those artists had wandered out of their frames and projected themselves across the land mass of Eurasia. German was also the language of Freud, and it was in Berlin that Auden got to deal with that great doctrine at close range. Well, to make a long story short, I'd recommend to you Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories, for they capture the atmosphere of both the place and the period a lot better than any movies you might have seen.
Hitler's rise to power, to be sure, spelled an end to nearly all that. In the eyes of European intellectuals, his advent was, at the time, not so much a triumph of will as a triumph of vulgarity. For Auden, who was a homosexual and who originally went to Berlin, I think, simply for boys, the Third Reich was also something like a rape of those youths. The boys were to become soldiers and kill or get killed. Or else they would be ostracized, incarcerated, and so forth. In a sense, I think, he took Nazism personally: as something totally hostile to sensuality, to subtlety. Needless to say he was right. The cause-and-effect man, he was quick to realize that in order to produce evil, the ground must be fertilized. His perception of the German developments was sharpened and aggravated by his firsthand knowledge that the evil had already been done to all those people before any Nazis ever surfaced. By that I suppose he means the peace of Versailles and that these boys were themselves children of war who had suffered its consequences: poverty, deprivation, neglect. And he knew them all too well to be surprised at them behaving nastily, with or without the uniform; he knew them well enough not to be taken aback by their "evil in return," provided there were congenial circumstances in which to do that evil.
Schoolchildren, you see, are the most menacing lot; and both the army and the Polizeistaat repeat the structure of a school. The point is that for this poet school was not only the "formative experience." It was the only social structure he ever went through (as a pupil and as a teacher); therefore it became for him the metaphor for existence. Once a boy, I suppose, always a boy; especially if you are English. That's why Germany was so clear to him, and that's why on September 1, 1939, he doesn't feel like condemning the Germans in blanket fashion. Besides, every poet is a bit of a Fiihrer himself: he wants to nile minds, for he is tempted to think that he knows better—which is only a step away from thinking that you are better. To condemn is to imply superiority; given this opportunity, Auden chooses to express grief rather than to pass judgment.
These reservations, based in part on offended sensuality, reveal a despairing moralist whose only means of self-control is the iambic trimeter; and this trimeter pays him back with the reticent dignity it contains. Now, one doesn't choose one's meter; it's the other way around, for meters have been around longer than any poet. They start to hum in one's head—partly because they have been used by somebody one has just read; mostly, however, because they are themselves equivalents of certain mental states (which include ethical states )—or they contain a possibility of curbing a certain state.
If you are any good, you try to modify them formally by, say, playing with a stanzaic design or shifting a caesura around—or through the unpredictability of the content; by what you are going to stuff these familiar lines with. A lesser poet would repeat the meter more slavishly, a better one would try to animate it if only by giving it a jolt. It is possible that what set Auden's pen in motion here was W. B. Yeats's "Easter 1916," especially because of the similarity in subject matter. But it's equally possible that Auden had just reread Swinburne's "In the Garden of Proserpine": one may like tunes in spite of their lyrics, and great men are not necessarily influenced by their equals only. In any case, if Yeats used this meter to express his sentiments, Auden sought to control them by the same means. Hence, for you, not the hierarchy of poets but the realization that this meter is capable of both jobs. And of a lot more. Of practically everything.