What do you think this stanza is all about, anyway? At least, the first half of it? Well, to begin with, the author here shifts the focus from past history to die present. As a matter of fact, he went this way already in the last two lines of the previous stanza: "Mismanagement and grief:/ We must suffer them all again." This is the way the past closes. Here's how the present opens, and it's a bit ominous:
Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers ise Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man . . .
First of all, why are skyscrapers blind? Paradoxically enough, precisely because of their glass, because of their windows; i.e., they are blind in direct proportion to the number of their "eyes." Argus-like, if you wish. Next, right after these more terrifying than majestic blind skyscrapers comes the verb "use," which, apart from everything else, reveals the reason they've been erected. And it comes too soon and too abruptly, in all its inanimate power. And you are fully aware of what "blind skyscrapers" are capable of if they "use." However, they don't use anything or anybody but "their full height." You get here a terrific sense of redundant self-reliance very much pertinent to these structures. This description hits you not by its invention but by stealing from your expectations.
For you expect skyscrapers to be animated, presumably in a nasty way, as is the fashion in poetry. This mindless, dildo-display-like "use/Their full height," however, suggests that they do not act on the outside: presumably on account of their blindness. Blindness, mind you, is, in its turn, a fonn of neutrality. As a result, you sense the tautology of this air and these buildings, an equation neither part of which is responsible for the other.
The poet here, you see, is painting a cityscape, the New York skyline, as it were. Partly for the purposes of the poem, but mostly because of the keenness of his eye, he renders it as a paysage moralise (or demoralise, in this case). The air here is qualified by buildings that jut into it as well as by the politics of their builders and dwellers. Conversely, it qualifies buildings by reflecting on their windows and rendering them blind, neutral. After all, it's literally a tall order: to describe a skyscraper. The only successful job that comes to my mind is that famous line by Lorca about the "gray sponge." Auden is giving you here a psychological equivalent of post-Cubism, for, in fact, what the "full height" of these structures proclaims is not "the strength of Collective Man" but the magnitude of his indifference, which, for Collective Man, is the only possible emotional state. Keep in mind that this sight is new for the author, and keep in mind also that description and itemization are fonns of cognition, indeed of philosophy. Well, there is no other way to explain epic poetry.
This inanimate "strength of Collective Man" in a state of frightful passivity is the poet's main concern throughout the poem and surely in this stanza. Much as he appreciates the solidity of this republic (Collective Man, I take it, means this as well) into whose "neutral air" "Each language pours its vain/Competitive excuse," he recognizes in it the features of things that brought the whole tragedy about. These lines just as well could have been written on the other side of the Atlantic. "Competitive excuse" for doing nothing to stop Herr Hitler is, among other things, a snipe at the business world, although what prompts them as well as "Out of the mirror they stare I Imperialism's face I And the international wrong" is rather a terminological inertia that harks back to his Marxonian (from Marx and Oxford) period; more so than the conviction that he has found real culprits. In any case, "Out of the mirror they stare" suggests not so much those looming monstrosities as those who can meet their glances in the mirror. And this means not so much "them," whom it's customary to blame, as "us," who are, after all, not even so smug in this "euphoric dream," which we can afford, having erected these invincible structures that grew out of the Depression.
"'September 1, 1939" is first and foremost a poem about shame. The poet himself, as you remember, is under some pressure for having left England. This is what helps him to discem the aforesaid faces in that mirror: he sees there his own. The speaker now is no longer a reporter; we hear in this stanza a voice shot through with the lucidity of despair over everyone's complicity in the events this date unleashed, and over the speaker's own impotence to make that Collective Man act. On top of that, Auden, a newcomer to American shores, probably must have felt uncertain as to his moral right to urge the natives to act. Curiously enough, toward the second part of this particular stanza, the rhymes are getting somewhat shabby, less assertive, and the whole tone becomes neither personal nor impersonal, but rhetorical. What began as a majestic vision dwindles to the aesthetics of John Heartfield's photo-montages, and I think the poet senses it. Hence the deft, muffled lyricism of the opening lines of the next stanza, of this love song for the interior.
6
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The mu&c must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To nwke this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
It's a real morsel, this stanza; a terrific verbal photograph: not Heartfield but Cartier-Bresson. "Out of the mirror they stare" paves the road to "Faces along the bar," because you can see those faces only in a bar mirror. In contrast with the public-placard diction in the last lines of the preceding stanza, this is a private voice: for this is a private, an intimate world that doesn't require explanations. An enclosure, an epitome of security: a fort indeed. Someone said about Auden that whatever he was writing about, he always kept an eye on civilization. Well, it would be more accurate to say that he always kept an eye on whether it's safe where he or his subjects are, whether the ground's firm. For every ground is a ground for suspicion, so to speak. And if this stanza is beautiful, it's beautiful because of the underlying uncertainty.
Uncertainty, you see, is the mother of beauty, one of whose definitions is that it's something which isn't yours. At least, this is one of the most frequent sensations accompanying beauty. Therefore, when uncertainty is evoked, then you sense beauty's proximity. Uncertainty is simply a more alert state than certitude, and thus it creates a better lyrical climate. Because beauty is something obtained always from without, not from within. And this is precisely what's going on in this stanza.
For every description is an externalization of the object: a step aside so as to see it. That's why the comfort that the poet describes in the firs t lines of this stanza is all but gone by its end. "Faces along the bar I Cling to their average day" is quite safe, perhaps with the exception of the verb "cling," but it sits at the beginning of the second line, far away from any emphatic position, so we let it go at that. "The lights must never go out, I The music must always play" are soothing too, except that those two "musts" alert you to a possibility that too much is taken for granted. In "The lights must never go out" one detects not so much a conviction that bars should stay open all night as a fidgeting hope that there won't be military blackouts. "The music must always play," through its combination of understatement and naivete, tries to obscure that uncertainty, to prevent it from developing into anxiety that threatens to become audible in the self-conscious, faltering tone of "conventions conspire"—for the piling up of these two lengthy Latinate words indicates too much rationalization for the cozy place that this bar is.