Tag: W H Auden

From a Railway Carriage by Robert Louis Stevenson

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

The poem From a Railway Carriage appeared in Robert Louis Stevenson’s collection A Child’s Garden of Verses, published in 1885.

From their very beginning, railways seem to have inspired more poems than any other form of transport. The fleeting glimpse of something seen from a train window then gone forever features in quite a lot of them.

The first verse here captures that familiar sensation of the landscape moving while the passenger stays still. It’s worth remembering that when this poem was published, a train journey was the only experience of travelling at speed that was available to the ordinary person.

The fast-paced rhythm captures the speed of the train. A similar rhythm was used by W H Auden for the later and more famous Night Mail. The poet Christopher Reid has suggested that Auden might have been influenced by Stevenson’s poem.   

Railway journeys are rich in metaphorical possibilities for the poet. We use the metaphor of life as a journey all the time now. Perhaps that has its origin in railway poems.

From a Railway Carriage by Robert Louis Stevenson

Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;
And charging along like troops in a battle,
All through the meadows the horses and cattle:
All of the sights of the hill and the plain
Fly as thick as driving rain;
And ever again, in the wink of an eye,
Painted stations whistle by.

Here is a child who clambers and scrambles,
All by himself and gathering brambles;
Here is a tramp who stands and gazes;
And there is the green for stringing the daisies!
Here is a cart run away in the road
Lumping along with man and load;
And here is a mill and there is a river:
Each a glimpse and gone for ever!

Brussels in Winter by W H Auden

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

It’s turned so cold that what we would normally expect in January seems to have arrived a bit early.

It has put me in mind of this 1938 poem by W H Auden. There are lots of poems about snow but fewer about winter. This one captures very well that sense of dislocation and transformation that the freezing weather brings, but winter here is a political metaphor as well.

As so often with Auden, who was writing about the 1930s, one feels that nothing has really changed, or that history is repeating itself.

I love that line near the end, “A phrase goes packed with meaning like a van”. It describes not only what this poem does, with its intensity and compression of language, but what poetry in general does, I think.

Brussels in Winter by W H Auden

Wandering through cold streets tangled like old string,
Coming on fountains rigid in the frost,
Its formula escapes you; it has lost
The certainty that constitutes a thing.

Only the old, the hungry and the humbled
Keep at this temperature a sense of place,
And in their misery are all assembled;
The winter holds them like an Opera-House.

Ridges of rich apartments loom to-night
Where isolated windows glow like farms,
A phrase goes packed with meaning like a van,

A look contains the history of man,
And fifty francs will earn a stranger right
To take the shuddering city in his arms.

 

Epitaph on a Tyrant by W H Auden

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

Only a week or two ago, this short poem by W H Auden could be filed away as a piece of twentieth century history. Suddenly, it is topical all over again.   

I re-discovered it when I watched the 2003 BBC series, Cambridge Spies, in which it is featured. “Is he talking about Hitler?, asks the character who reads it aloud. It was published in Auden’s 1940 collection, Another Time. Certainly, at the end of the 1930s, or in Auden’s words, “that low, dishonest decade”, most readers in Britain would probably have taken it as referring to Hitler, Franco or Mussolini.

The irony in a drama about Guy Burgess, Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt, is that as dedicated anti-fascists, they failed to see that in offering their clandestine services to Stalin, they were collaborating with a dictator of equal ferocity.

Epitaph on a Tyrant by W H Auden

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.