Well, back to the mines. Why do you think the third stanza starts this way:
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Exiled Thucydides knew All that a speech can say About Democracy . . .
A stanza, you see, is a self-generating device: the end of one spells the necessity of another. This necessity is first of all purely acoustical and, only then, didactical (although one shouldn't try to divorce them, especially for the sake of analysis). The danger here is that the preconceived music of a recurrent stanzaic pattern tends to dominate or even determine the content. And it's extremely hard for a poet to fight the dictates of the tune.
The eleven-line-long stanza of "September 1, 1939," is, as far as I can tell, Auden's own invention, and the irregularity of its rhyme pattern functions as its built-in anti- fatigue device. Note that. All the same, the quantitative effect of an eleven-line-long stanza is such that the first thing on the writer's mind as he starts a new one is to escape from the musical predicament of the preceding lines. Auden, it should be noted, must work here exceptionally hard precisely because of the tight, epigrammatic, spellbinding beauty of the previous quatrain. And so he brings in Thucydides—the name you are least prepared to encounter, right? This is more or less the same technique as putting "accurate scholarship" next to "the September night." But let's examine this line a bit closer.
"Exiled" is a pretty loaded word, isn't it? It's high-pitched not only because of what it describes but in terms of its vowels also. Yet because it comes right after a distinctly sprung preceding line and because it opens the line which, we expect, is to return the meter its regular breath, "exiled" arrived here in a lower key . . . Now, what in your opinion makes our poet think of Thucydides and of what this Thucy- dides "knew"? Well, my guess is that it has to do with the poet's own attempts at playing historian for his own Athens; all the more so because they are also endangered and because of his realization that no matter how eloquent his message—especially the last four lines—he, too, is doomed to be ignored. Hence this air of fatigue that pervades the line, and hence this exhaling feeling in "exiled"—which he could apply to his own physical situation as well, but only in a minor key, for this adjective is loaded with a possibility of self-aggrandizement.
We find another clue to this line in Humphrey Carpenter's splendid biography of Auden, where its author mentions the fact that our poet was rereading Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War about this time. And the main thing about the Peloponnesian War, of course, is that it spelled the end for what we know as classical Greece. The change wrought by that war was indeed a drastic one: in a sense, it was the real end of Athens and all it stood for. And Pericles, in whose mouth Thucydides puts the most heartbreaking speech about democracy you will ever read —he speaks there as though democracy has no tomorrow, which in the Greek sense of the word it really hadn't—that Pericles is being replaced in the public mind, almost overnight—by whom? By Socrates. The emphasis shifts from identification with community, with the polis, to individualism—and it is not such a bad shift, except that it paves the road to subsequent atomization of society, with all the attendant ills ... So our poet, who has at least geographical reasons to identify with Thucydides, also realizes what change for the world, for our Athens, if you will, looms on the horizon. In other words, he also speaks here on the eve of war but, unlike Thucydides, not with the benefit of hindsight but in real anticipation of the shape of things—their ruins, rather— to come.
"All that a speech can say" is, in its wistfulness, a self- contained line. It sustains the fatigue-laden personal link with Thucydides, for speech can be disdained only by those who master it: by poets or historians. I'd even add that every poet is a historian of speech, although I'd resent having to clarify this remark. At any rate, in "speech" we have obviously a reference to the funeral oration that Thucydides put in the mouth of Pericles. On the other hand, of course, a poem itself is a speech, and the poet tries to compromise his enterprise before someone else—a critic or events— would do that. That is, the poet steals from your "so what" reaction to his work by saying this himself before the poem is over. This is not a safeguarding job, though; it's indicative neither of his cunning nor of his self-awareness but of humility, and is prompted by the minor key of the first two lines. Auden is indeed the most humble poet of the English language; next to him even Edward Thomas comes off as haughty. For his virtues are dictated not by his conscience alone but by prosody, whose voice is more convincing.
Watch for that "About Democracy," though! How reductive this line is! The emphasis here is of course on the limited—or doomed—ability of speech as such: an idea that Auden has dealt with in a thorough fashion already in his "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," where he states that ". . . poetry makes nothing happen." But thanks to this reductive, off-hand treatment of the line, the doom spreads onto "democracy" as well. And this "democracy," on top of everything, rhymes both as consonants and visually with "say." In other words, the hopelessness of a "a speech" is compounded by the hopelessness of its subject, be it "democracy" or "what dictators do."
What's interesting in this line about "dictators" is its more vigorous—by comparison with "about Democracy"—distri- bution of stresses, which, however, highlights less the author's resentment of dictators than his attempt to overcome the gravity of increasing fatigue. Watch also this technique of understatement in "dictators do." The euphemistic nature of this conjunction gets exposed through the almost unbearable syllabic superiority of the noun (dictators) over the verb (do). You sense here the great variety of things a dictator is capable of, and it's not for nothing that "do" (which plays here the role of "unmentionable" in the first stanza) rhymes with "knew."
"The elderly rubbish they talk/To an apathetic grave ..." is certainly a reference to the aforesaid funeral oration of Pericles. Yet it's a bit more worrisome here because the distinction between the historian's (and by the same token, the poet's) speech and what's delivered by tyrants is blurred. And what blurs the distinction is "apathetic," an epithet more suitable for a crowd than for a grave. On second thought, it's suitable for both. On third, it equates "crowd" with "grave." "An apathetic grave" is, of course, your vintage Auden with his definitions' blinding proximity to an object. It's not the futility of dictators, therefore, that the poet is concerned with here but the destination of speech par excellence.
Such an attitude to one's own craft could again, of course, be explained by the author's humility, by his self-effacing posture. But you shouldn't forget that Auden landed in New York just eight months earlier, on December 26, 1938, the very date the Spanish Republic fell. The sense of helplessness which presumably overcame this poet (who had issued by that time more and better warnings against the onslaught of Fascism than anyone else in the field) on this September night simply seeks solace in the parallel with the Greek historian who dealt with the phenomenon at hand no less extensively, two millennia ago. In other words, if Thucydides failed to convince his Greeks, what chance is there for a modern poet, with his weaker voice and bigger crowd?