The pacifist pull of W.H. Auden

I recently pulled my Collected Poems of W.H. Auden from the shelf. For the last five or six years, my favorite poem by far has been the achingly horrifying O What Is That Sound? With its two voices suddenly reduced to one, its lilting refrain and strict adherence to verse form, this poem demands to be read out loud or even set to music. It is a picture of abandonment that is dramatic, dynamic, and enormously effective.

On this recent evening, when I returned to Auden for the first time in several months, I stumbled across the poem James Honeyman, a poem which illustrated to me again what I loved so much about O What Is That Sound? Both works, penned in the mid-late 1930s, are indisputably political products of Auden's deep-seated pacifism in the face of the Spanish Civil War and impending Second World War. Unlike many political poets, however, Auden remains deeply invested in form, and in a prettiness of language that never bows to the ugliness of content. In fact, it is this tension, between appealing form and repulsive content, that is the key to Auden's power. James Honeyman, in particular, makes use of simply formulaic verses. Like O What Is That Sound, it disarms the reader with its tripping rhythm and attractive images (a "ten-shilling chemistry set", or a small child who sits at a party dreamily dissolving sugar in his tea), pulling said recipient toward a moment of terrifying violence, which the poem's protagonist must confront alone.

After the idyll of content and form established in the early verses, that moment of confrontation shocks the reader, takes her by surprise and abrades her sensibilities, which have been finely tuned to the peaceful opening stanzas. This switch, contained in rigorously designed verses, portrays the fiendishness of violence, and its embeddedness in society, with unsurpassed accuracy. As we know all too well, violence is not a breaking of societal forms or norms, but the result of conforming to them and pursuing them to their natural conclusion. If we do not pay attention, we too must die (and we know why) by Honeyman's N.P.C.