9
By now the poem is seventy-seven lines long, and apart from the content, its mass itself requires a resolution. That is, depiction of a world becomes, in its own turn, a world. So when the poet here says "All I have is a voice," it cuts many ways and doesn't just offer a lyrical relaxation to the ethical tension. The seventy-eighth line reflects not only the author's despair over the human condition as it is depicted but his sense of the futility of depiction. Despair alone would be more palatable, for there is always a chance to resolve it through anger or resignation, which are both promising avenues for a poet; well, anger especially. The same holds for futility also, for, by itself, it may be just as rewarding if treated with irony or sobriety.
Stephen Spender once wrote about Auden that good as he was at providing a diagnosis, he'd never presume to offer a cure. Well, "All I have is a voice" cures, because by changing tonality, the poet changes here the plane of regard. This line simply is higher pitched than all its predecessors. In poetry, as you know, tonality is content, or content's result. As pitches go, altitude determines attitude.
The important thing about the seventy-eighth line is the shift from impersonal objectivity of description to highly personal, subjective note. After all, this is the second and basically last time that the author employs "1." And this T is no longer wrapped in a newsman's trench coat: what you hear in this voice is incurable sorrow, for all its stoical timbre. This T is sharp and is echoed in a somewhat muffled way by 'lie" in the next line's end. Still, remember that both high-pitched i's come immediately after the "deaf" and "dumb" of the previous stanza, and this creates a considerable acoustic contrast.
The only thing that controls that sorrow here is the beat; and "sorrow controlled by meter" may do for you as a provisional definition of humility, if not of the entire art of poetry. As a rule, stoicism and obstinacy in poets are results not so much of their personal philosophies and preferences as of their experiences in prosody, which is the name of the cure. This stanza, as well as this whole poem, is a search for a reliable virtue which in the end brings the searching party to itself.
This, however, is jumping a bit ahead. Let's proceed in a proper fashion. Well, as far as rhymes are concerned, this stanza is not so spectacular. "Voice-choice-police" and "lie (authority )-sky-die" are all right; a better job is done by the poet in "brain-alone," which is suggestive enough. What's more suggestive, though, is "folded lie I The romantic lie in the brain." Both "folded" and 'lie" are used twice within the space of two lines. Now, this is obviously done for emphasis; the only question is what's emphasized here. "Folded" of course suggests "paper" and "lie" therefore is the lie of a printed word, most likely the one of a tabloid. But then we are given a qualifier in "the romantic lie in the brain." What's qualified here is not the "lie" itself, although we have here a different epithet preceding it, but the brain that lies in folds.
It is rather sobriety, of course, and its by-products that are audible in "All I have is a voice" than the irony which is, nonetheless, discernible in the controlled anger of "the folded lie." Still, the seventy-eighth line's value lies neither in despair's and futility's separate effects, nor in their interplay; what we hear in this line most clearly is the voice of humility, which has, in the given context, stoic overtones. Auden isn't just punning here; no. These two lines simply paraphrase that "error bred in the bone / Of each woman and each man." In a sense, he opens the bone and shows us that lie (error) inside. Why does he do this here? Because he wants to drive home the idea of "universal love" versus "to be loved alone." "The sensual man-in-the- street" as well as "Authority" and "the citizen" or "the police" are simply elaborations of the "each woman and each man" theme, as well as spin-offs of the argument for the United States' isolationist posture at the time. "Hunger allows no choice I To the citizen or the police" is simply a commonsense way of arguing the existence of the common denominator among people, and it is placed appropriately low. Auden goes here for a typically English no-nonsense locution—precisely because the point he tries to make is of a very elevated nature; i.e., he appears to think that you can argue things like "universal love" best if you use down- to-earth logic. Apart from that, he, I believe, enjoys the deadpan, no-exit state of mind whose blinding proximity to the truth creates such a statement. (Actually, hunger allows a choice: to get hungrier; but that's beside the point.) At any rate, this hunger business offsets possible ecclesiastical association of the next, most crucial for the entire argument, line: "We must love one another or die."
Well, this is the line because of which the author subsequently scrapped the whole poem from his corpus. According to various sources, he did so because he found the line presumptuous and untrue. Because, he said, we must die anyway. He tried to change it but all he could come up with was "We must love one another and die," which would be a platitude with a misleading air of profundity. So he scrapped it from his postwar Collected, and if we have it now in front of our eyes, it's because of his literary executor, Edward Mendelson, who compiled a posthumous Viking edition and whose introduction to it is the best piece on Auden I've ever seen.
Was Auden right about this line? Well, yes and no. He was obviously extremely conscientious, and to be conscientious in English is to be literal. Also, we should consider the benefit of hindsight in his revising this line: after the carnage of World \Var II, either version would sound a bit macabre. Poetry isn't reportage, and its news should be of a permanent significance. In a sense, it could be argued that Auden pays a price here for his posture at the beginning of the poem. Still, I must say that if this line seemed to him untrue, it was through no fault of his own.
For the actual meaning of the line at the time was, of course, "\Ve must love one another or kill." Or "we'll be killing one another in no time." Since—after all, all he had was a voice and this wasn't heard or heeded—what followed was exactly what he predicted: killing. But again, given
World War Il's volume of carnage, one could hardly enjoy proving oneself a prophet. So the poet chooses to threat this "or die" literally. Presumably because he felt he was responsible for failing to avert what had happened, since the whole point of writing this poem was to influence public opinion.
10
This, after all, wasn't the benefit of hindsight only. The evidence that he didn't feel very secure about this line's prescription is felt in the opening of the next stanza: "Defenceless under the night . . ." Paired with "Our world in stupor lies," this is tantamount to an admission of failure to persuade. At the same time, "Defenceless under the night" is the most lyrical-sounding line in the poem and surpasses in the height of its pitch even "All I have is a voice." In both cases, the lyricism stems from the feeling of what he terms in "In Memory of \V. B. Yeats" ''human un- success," from his own "rapture of distress" here in the first place.
Coming right after "We must love one another or die," this line has a sharper personal air and leaps from the level of rationalization to that of pure emotional exposure, into the domain of revelations. Technically speaking, "We must love another or die" is the end of the mental road. After this, there is only a prayer, and "Defenceless under the night" climbs there in its tonality if not yet in its diction. And as though sensing that things may slip from under his control, that the pitch approaches a vibration of wailing, the poet undercuts himself with "Our world in stupor lies."
Yet no matter how hard he tries to pull his voice down in this as well as in the subsequent four lines, the spell cast by "\Ve must love one another or die" gets reinforced almost against his own will by "Defenceless under the night" and won't go away. On the contrary, it penetrates his defenses at the rate at which he builds them. The spell, as we know it, is an ecclesiastical one, i.e., imbued with a sense of infinity; and words like "everywhere," "light," "just," thanks to their generic nature, echo that sense unwittingly and in spite of reductive qualifiers like "dotted" and "harmonic." And when the poet comes closest to having his voice completely harnessed, that spell breaks through with full lyrical force in this breathtaking cross between plea and prayer: