Eclogue, 1947

THE AGE OF ANXIETY (138 pp.)--W. H. Auden--Random House ($2.50).

Though U.S. readers may still think of Poet Wystan Hugh Auden as an Englishman in exile, he has been a U.S. citizen since May 1946. As a U.S. man of letters, Auden at 40--Old Oxonian, old leftist intellectual, Wandervogel, versifier extraordinary, theological lyricist--is a figure of great oddity, and of considerable importance. The Age of Anxiety, subtitled "A Baroque Eclogue," glitters with evidence of both.

In the eclogues of Theocritus and Virgil, shepherds met in bucolic settings and conversed in polished verses. In Auden's eclogue, three men and a woman fall into a wartime conversation--in nine-syllable lines--in a Manhattan bar. They are: Quant, a sardonic shipping clerk; Malin, a medical intelligence officer in the Canadian Air Force; Rosetta, a department store buyer; Emble, a good-looking young naval officer. It is All Souls' Night.

Souls in Wartime. News bulletins on the radio remind them that the war is going on as they drink. Malin remembers a bombing mission:

Untalkative and tense, we took off

Anxious into air ; instruments glowed,

Dials in darkness, for dawn was not yet;

Pulses pounded; we approached our target . . .

But at high altitudes, hostile brains

Waited in the west, a wily flock

Vowed to vengeance in the vast morning,

--A mild morning where no marriage was,

And gravity a god greater than love . . .

They talk about the war and the world they live in until at Rosetta's suggestion they sit at a booth, where the dialogue becomes first a conscious and then a dream exploration of what they know or can remember of human life--the Seven Ages of Man, that end in senescence and death:

He is tired out;

His last illusions have lost patience

With the human enterprise.

The end comes; he

Joins the majority, the jaw-dropped

Mildewed mob and is modest at last.

When the bar closes, Rosetta invites the three men to her apartment for sandwiches and a nightcap. She and Emble are attracted to each other, and all four, in their alcoholic glow, feel the exciting promise of this union. But when Rosetta returns after seeing Quant and Malin to the door, she finds Emble passed out cold on her bed. The promise of love was an illusion. The poem ends, as it began, in the loneliness and frustration of all four characters, for Auden is preaching a revulsion from all temporal goods, including human love; the only thing to hold out for is the ultimate mercy of Christ.

Stunts in Drottkvaet. With his alliterative, hit-and-thump verse Auden has returned to the earliest tradition of English poetry--Anglo-Saxon--for a terseness and toughness that his own poems have lacked since the '30s. Incidental stunts include a dream song in the style of Finnegans Wake and an eight-line Drottkvaet, a complex Scandinavian verse form. But The Age of Anxiety is the best knit of Auden's longer works; his Bright Ideas, which have always had a way of stealing the show, this time wait for their cues. For the first time, too, Auden has created characters who are not only types but individuals.

In U.S. letters Auden's position is beginning to be as influential as that of his friend in England who also traded countries, St. Louis-born T. S. Eliot. Both wrote militantly anti-religious poems at one period of their development, but are now Anglo-Catholics. Auden is a shock-headed Briton with chewed fingernails and schoolboy charm, whose love of language is so active that he is never quite sure he doesn't write entirely for fun. He feels and says that good U.S. writers are too inhibited to admit "the basic frivolity in art."

"People don't understand that it's possible to believe in a thing and ridicule it at the same time," says Auden. "It's hard for them, too, to see that a poem's statement of belief is no proof of belief, any more than a love poem is a proof that one is in love."

Auden is settled for the summer on Fire Island--off New York's Long Island --where he owns a tar-paper-covered shack near a sand dune. On one wall of his littered study Poet Auden keeps an immense map of Alston moor in Cumberland below the Roman Wall, his childhood country, whose limestone quarries, fells and valleys--and mining machinery --have persisted as bleakly beautiful imagery in all his work.

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