However, the name contains that strange to an English ear, or eye, sound gh, which somehow should be taken care of. The culprit of its strangeness is the position of h after g.
So it appears that the poet should find a rhyme not for "lev" only but for "ghilev" or, rather, "hilev" as well. And so he does, and it is "have" in "Craves what it cannot have." Terrific line, that: the energy of "Craves" hits head- on the wall of "what it cannot have." It's of the same pattern as "For the error bred in the bone," which is awfully strong. Then the author momentarily relaxes his reader in "Of each woman and each man." Then he makes you pay for that relaxation with this monosyllabic "Craves what it cannot have," whose syntax is so tough it's almost strained; i.e., it's shorter than natural speech, shorter than its thought, or more final. Anyway, let's get back to 'have," for it has far- reaching consequences.
You see, to rhyme "Diaghilev" with "love" straight would mean to equate them, about which both the poet and the reader could have some qualms. By interjecting "have" Auden scores a terrific hit. For now the rhyme scheme itself becomes a statement: "Diaghilev-have-love" or rather, "Diaghilev cannot have love." And "Diaghilev," mind you, stands here for art. So the net result is that "Diaghilev" gets equated with "love," but only via being equated with "have," and "having," as we know, is opposite to "loving," which is, as we remember, Nijinsky, which is "giving." Well, the implications of this rhyme scheme are profounc' enough to give you vertigo, and we've spent too much time on this stanza already. I wish, though, that at home you'd analyze this rhyme on your own: it may yield, perhaps, more than the poet himself had in mind to reveal while using it. I don't mean to whet your appetite, nor do I intend to suggest in the first place that Auden was doing all this consciously. On the contrary, he went for this rhyme scheme instinctively or, if you like this word better, subconsciously. But this is precisely what makes it so interesting to look into: not because you are getting into someone's subconscious (which in the case of a poet barely exists, being absorbed or badly exploited by the conscious) or his instincts: it simply shows you to what extent a writer is the tool of his language and how his ethical notions are the sharper, the keener his ear is.
On the whole, the role of this stanza is to finish the job of the previous one, i.e., to trace the malaise to its origins, and indeed Auden reaches the marrow.
Naturally enough, after this, one needs a break, and the break comes in the form of the next stanza, which employs less pointed thinking and a more general, more public level of diction.
8
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?
This is, perhaps, the least interesting stanza in the poem, but it is not without its own jewels. Its most attractive job is the two opening lines describing the journey from the subconscious to the rational, i.e., ethical, existence, from sleep to action, from "dark" not to light but to "life." As for its rhymes, the most suggestive here is "dark-work-wake," which is quite functional considering the stanza's content. It's the assonant rhyme all along, and it shows you the possibilities this sort of rhyming contains, for as you arrive at "wake" after "dark," you realize that you can develop "wake" into something else as well. For example, you can go "wait-waste-west," and so on. As for the purely didactic aspect of this "dark-work-wake," the "dark-work" bit is more interesting because of "dark's" probable double significance. This reminds me of a couplet in Auden's "Letter to Lord Byron":
Manis no center of the Universe,
And working in an office makes it worse.
Which—I mean the "Letter"—is your only chance to be "happy" if not "good."
Metrically, the first six lines of this stanza are doing a lovely job of conveying the sense of train movement: you have a very smooth ride in the first four of them, and then you are getting jolted first by "will" and again by "more," which reveal the origins of each emphasis as well as the likelihood of delivering on these promises. With "And helpless governors wake," the meter regains equilibrium, and after the wallowing "To resume their compulsory game" the stanza is slowed down by three rhetorical questions, the last of which brings that train to a complete halt: "Who can release them now, I Who can reach the deaf, I Who can speak for the dumb?"
Now "The dense commuters" are presumably what "to be loved alone" results in: a herd. As for "conservative" applied here to "dark," this is yet another example of the typical, for Auden, blinding proximity of definition, like "neutral air" a couple of stanzas before, or "necessary murder" in an absolutely marvelous poem of this period called "Spain." These juxtapositions of his are effective and memorable because of merciless light—or rather dark—their parts normally cast upon one another; i.e., it's not only murder that is necessary, but necessity itself is murderous, and so is conservativeness dark. Therefore the next line's "ethical life" emerges as a double put-down: because you expect "ethical light." The standard positive locution all of a sudden is defamiliarized by apprehension: 'life" is a leftover of "light." On the whole the stanza depicts a dispirited mechanical existence where "governors" are not in any way superior to the governed and neither are able to escape the enveloping gloom which they spun themselves.
And what do you think is the source, the root of all these conjunctions of his? Of things like that "necessary murder," "artificial wilderness" in "The Shield of Achilles," "important failure" in the "Musee des Beaux Arts," and so forth, and so forth? Yes, it is an intensity of attention, of course; but we are all endowed with this ability, aren't we? To yield results like these, this ability clearly should be enhanced by something. And what does enhance it in a poet, and in this poet in particular? It is the principle of rhyme. What is responsible for these blinding proximities is the same mechanism of instinct that allows one to see or to hear that "Diaghilev" and 'love" do rhyme. Once that mechanism is set in motion, there is nothing to stop it, it becomes an instinct. Itshapes your mental operation, to say the least, in more ways than one; it becomes your mode of cognition. And this is what makes the whole enterprise of poetry so valuable for our species. For it is the principle of rhyme that enables one to sense that proximity between seemingly disparate entities. All these conjunctions of his ring so true because they are rhymes. This closeness between objects, ideas, concepts, causes, and effects—this closeness, in itself, is a rhyme-, at times, a perfect one, more frequently an assonance; or just a visual one. Having developed an instinct for these, you may have a better time with reality.