The next line's job is to bring things under control and restore the original, appropriately relaxed atmosphere of the stanza; and the ironic "this fort" does the job very nicely. Actually, what's interesting here is the way the poet arrives at the intended statement that the bar is "home," disheartening as its accuracy may be. It takes him six lines, whose every word makes its hesitant contribution to the erection of the short verb "is" which is required for the emergence of that disheartening notion. This tells you about the complexity behind every "is" as well as about the author's reluctance to admit this equation. Also, you should pay attention to the deliberate assonance of "assume" and "home" as well as to the quiet desperation behind the word "furniture," which is our synonym for "home," isn't it? For this construction, "the furniture of home" in itself is a picture of the min. The moment the job is done, the moment you are lulled by this mixture of predictable meter and recognizable detail, this whole quest for solace goes up in smoke with "Lest we should see where we are," whose rather Victorian 'lest" sweetens the rest of the line's pill. And this Victorian echo takes you into "a haunted wood," where it's audible enough to justify the "never" of "Who have never been happy or good"—which, in its own right, echoes those schoolchildren at the end of the second stanza. This second echo simply reverberates the theme of the subconscious, and very timely so, because this theme is pertinent to the next stanza's understanding. On our way there, however, let's note the fairy-tale-like, distinctly English character of the last two lines, which not only reinforces the admission of human imperfection but helps that echo to fade into the opening of the next stanza. Well, let's have it.
7
The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart; For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have, Not universal love But to be loved alone.
"Windiest" is a very English expression here. But the old- country diction also steals in in the old-country notion of autumn which, to me, is responsible for this line's content, at least in part. Because September in New York, as you all know, is a hot and muggy time. In England, and in English poetic tradition, however, the name of this month is the very synonym of autumn. Only October could be better. The poet, of course, has in mind the political climate, but he sets out to describe it in terms of the actual—for the old country as well as for the rest of the realm in question, i.e., Europe—weather. Somehow this opening reminds me of Richard Wilbur's first stanza in his "After the Last Bulletins," with its description of the trash blown along the big city's streets by the cold wind. I may be wrong about this line because there is this "militant" that would be hard to fit into my reading of it. Still, something tells me to take this "windiest" first of all literally and only then in its derogatory function.
With "Important Persons shout" we are on the safer ground of externalizing our discontent. Together with "The windiest militant trash," this line, because of its vigorous subordinate clause, contains the always welcome promise of laying the blame on somebody else, on authority. But just when we are ready to fully enjoy its deriding air comes:
Is oot so crude as our wish . . .
which not only robs us of a scapegoat and states our own responsibility for the rotten state of affairs but tells us that we are worse than those we blame to the extent that "wish" assonates with "trash," failing to comfort us even with the equation of an exact rhyme. The next two lines usher in the most crucial statement made by the poet in this poem, and for all he saw in this era. "What mad Nijinsky wrote/ About Diaghilev ..," Well, in this city of ours, where ballet is a highbrow cum bourgeois equivalent of a ball game, it is, I presume, unnecessary to go into who is who here. Still, Nijinsky was the star of the legendary Ballet Russe in Paris in the teens and the twenties of the century, and that troupe was run by Sergei Diaghilev, a famous impresario responsible for a variety of breakthroughs in modern art, a sort of Renaissance man with a very strong personality, but first of all an aesthete. Nijinsky, whom he discovered, was his lover. Subsequently, Nijinsky got married and Diaghilev had his contract discontinued. Shortly afterward Nijinsky went mad. I am telling you all this not for its juiciness but in order to explain the pedigree of one word—actually of one consonant—farther down in the stanza. Actually there were several versions of why Diaghilev fired Nijinsky: because of dissatisfaction with the quality of his dancing, because there were signs of Nijinsky going mad earlier, because his very marriage illustrated that, and so forth. I simply don't want you holding a simplistic view of Diaghilev: partly because of the role his name plays in the poem, mostly because he was a unique man. For the same reasons, I don't want you to simplify Nijinsky either, if only because it's from his diary, which he wrote in a state close to madness, that Auden quotes verbatim at the end of this stanza. I recommend that diary to you very strongly—this book has the Gospels' pitch and intensity. That's why it is important "What mad Nijinsky wrote/ About Diaghilev."
So much for our who-is-who game. What madmen say about sane ones is usually of interest and often valid. "Is true" in "Is true of the normal heart" shows that Auden applies here, albeit unwittingly, the holy-fool principle: i.e., the idea that the holy fool is right. Nijinsky, after all, qualifies for a "fool" because he is a performer; for "holiness" we have here his madness as manifested in his writing, which indeed has a strong religious bent. The poet here, as you know, is not free of the latter himself: "the error bred in the bone/Of each woman and each man" denotes not only the subconscious effects of upbringing but also echoes the Bible; "each woman and each man" both confirms and obfuscates that echo. Concreteness here fights allusion. What adds to the validity of Nijinsky's statement, however, is his "foolishness" rather than his "holiness": for, as a performer, he is, technically speaking, an agent of "universal love." I suggest you see Auden's "Ballad of St. Barnaby," where he expands on this subject; it's very late Auden.
The error is of course selfishness that is very deep-seated in each one of us. The poet tries to zero in on the source of the tragedy, you understand, and his argument moves camera-like from the peripheral (politics) to the central (subconscious, instinct), where he encounters this craving not for "universal love I But to be loved alone." The distinction here is not so much between Christian and heathen or spiritual and carnal as between generous and selfish; i.e., between giving and taking; in a word, between Nijinsky and Diaghilev. Better still, between loving and having.
And watch what Auden is doing here. He comes up with the unthinkable: with a new rhyme for love: he rhymes 'love" and "Diaghilev"! Now, let's see how it happens. I bet he had this rhyme in mind for a while. The point is, though, that it's easier if "love" comes first and "Diaghilev" comes second. The content, however, forces the poet to put "Diaghilev" first, which presents several problems. One of them is that the name is foreign, and the reader may misplace the stress. So Auden puts a very short, reductive line, "About Diaghilev," after the regularly stressed "What mad Nijinsky wrote." Apart from the regularity of its beat, this line also acquaints the reader with the possibility of a foreign name and allows him to distribute stresses here whichever way he likes. This liberty paves the road to the trochaic arbitrariness of the next line, where "Diaghilev" goes virtually stressless. A reader then is quite likely to put the stress on the last syllable, which suits the author just fine, for it will amount to rhyming "lev" and 'love": what could be better?