His Law can’t look, the leaves are so thick.
Rosetta is Jewish; her God is the God of Israel; and her last great speech repeatedly refers to Israel’s history of exile, captivity, and wilderness wandering—of homelessness, of being unable to return to the scene of past comfort and security. (And of course this history had just reached its terrifying nadir in the Nazis’ destruction of Europe’s Jews, to which Rosetta refers quite directly, in one of the most moving passages in the whole poem.) That the gates of Eden are guarded by angels with flaming swords; that there is really no place to hide from God what we have done; that “the Innocent Place” is forever lost— these are her realizations as her part in the poem draws to a close.
In the prose prologue to the poem Auden tells us that Rosetta’s “favorite daydream” was one in which she “conjured up, detail by detail, one of those landscapes familiar to all readers of English detective stories, those lovely innocent countrysides inhabited by charming eccentrics with independent means and amusing hobbies to whom, until the sudden intrusion of a horrid corpse onto the tennis court or into the greenhouse, work and law and guilt are just literary words.” Auden was a great lover of detective stories—“if I have any work to do, I must be careful not to get hold of a detective story, for once I begin one, I cannot work or sleep till I have finished it”—and considered that he and his fellow addicts shared a distinctive trait: “I suspect that the typical reader of detective stories is, like myself, a person who suffers from a sense of sin.” For Auden the classic detective story is a parable of the Fall and of our hopes for being restored to a state of innocence. The phrase “state of grace” recurs in Auden’s treatment of the subject: the primary conceit of the detective story is that the whole society in which it takes place is innocent until an act of murder “precipitates a crisis” by destroying that innocence. This brings law into play, “and for a time all must live in its shadow, till the fallen one is identified. With his arrest, innocence is restored, and the law retires forever.” (After listening to a radio report on the progress of the war, Malin’s first thought is: “A crime has occurred, accusing all.”)
One can see from this description—quoted from an essay Auden wrote during the composition of The Age of Anxiety, and which interprets Rosetta’s daydream—that the detective story is a distinctively Arcadian form of wishfulfillment dream. The Arcadian wants to see his or her ideal society as having been perfect and innocent; and (still more) wants to believe that that original state can be perfectly restored, can become again just what it was. In some of the earliest drafts of the poem (the ones in which the characters are identified simply as Civilian, Doctor, Girl, and Merchant Seaman) the poem’s narrative was conceived of as a detective story. A brief outline reads,
The murder
The stories of the suspects
The exposure of their lies (contradiction and fresh evidence)
The discovery of the murderer.
The notion was abandoned but still echoes in the poem in various ways—not just in Rosetta’s fantasy,
but also in the great lament or “Dirge” of Part Four in which the characters dream of a great father figure—“some Gilgamesh or Napoleon, some Solon or Sherlock Holmes”—who can embody the Law, enforce its strictures, and thereby restore the society to its primal innocence.
These are, for the poet and his characters alike, enormously tempting fantasies. Their centrality to the poem accounts for its dedication to
John Betjeman, a poet deeply sensitive to the Arcadian appeal of certain English places and landscapes, and, for one known as a “light” poet, capable of deceptively powerful presentations of his ideal worlds and the emotions they prompted in him. (Betjeman was a master of “topophilia,” love of place, Auden believed, which requires a degree of “visual imagination” that Auden felt he lacked. “It is one of my constant regrets that I am too shortsighted, too much of a Thinking Type, to attempt this sort of poetry.” Yet there is much topophilic verse in The Age of Anxiety.) Equally important, the times and places dear to Betjeman were dear to Auden too: they shared a love of Victoriana when that period of English history was scorned by almost all their peers. “Betjeman is really the only person who really understands many of the things that are important to me.... That’s really my world—bicycles and harmoniums.” And, he added, “That’s why he got” the dedication of The Age of Anxiety.
Primarily through Rosetta’s reminiscences, Auden clearly and powerfully presents the appeal of this Victorian Eden—but equally clearly and powerfully identifies it as a fantasy: not truly historical, and not a legitimate way of resolving “our predicament.” (“Betjeman is really a minor poet, of course,” he told Ansen, and that judgment is rooted in Auden’s perception that Betjeman failed to see that the world he so vividly imagined in his verse was, if partly real, also partly a nostalgic fantasy.) This is clear even in the characters’ own descriptions of what they want, as in Rosetta’s selfmocking wish: “may our luck find the Regressive road to Grandmother’s House.” The Arcadian temptation is in the end just as deceptive as the Utopian one of the “new barbarians.”
Auden had largely traditional views about women, so it is not surprising that he would associate the woman of this party with Feeling, with the heart. But it is surprising that he associates Rosetta so closely with himself. A few years before writing this poem he had told Stephen Spender that he was a pronounced “Thinking-Intuitive type,” which should relegate Feeling to a clearly subordinate place; and yet the connections between Auden and Rosetta are obvious, and go well beyond their shared Arcadian passion for detective stories. She seems to have grown up in Birmingham, as did Auden; the landscapes she idealizes are largely associated with the Pennine range of northern England,
which Auden often identified as his Eden. Moreover, partly as a result of his experimental heterosexual affair with Rhoda Jaffe
— who was Jewish and who in other respects likely served as a model for Rosetta— Auden was reading deeply in Jewish thought in this period and told friends that he was contemplating converting to Judaism.
But Auden remained a Christian, and if some of his interests and traits are refracted through Rosetta, others are manifest in Malin. Though Malin’s outer life seems to have been based on that of John Thompson, a Canadian medical intelligence officer whom Auden met during the war and with whom
he became friends, Auden himself was also interested in science and medicine—his father was a physician, and his early interests were almost wholly scientific and technical. He had even gone up to
Oxford planning to read in the sciences. Malin is also the one Christian among the four characters of
the poem, and near the end Auden gives him a long meditative reflection on the God of Jesus Christ that echoes Rosetta’s preceding, still longer, and distinctively Jewish meditation; the two soliloquies
are the clearly matching bookends of the poem’s concluding pages.
(In his long poems of the forties Auden becomes less and less straightforward about expressing his Christian beliefs. “For the Time Being” is openly biblical and deeply theological; “The Sea and the Mirror,” though its prime subject is the relationship between Christianity and Art, never directly mentions God; and The Age of Anxiety is virtually without religious reference until its closing pages.
In later life he would often say, “Orthodoxy is reticence,” but even as he was working on The Age of Anxiety he wrote in an introduction to a collection of Betjeman’s poems that in “this season, the man
of good will will
wear his heart up his sleeve, not on it.”)(EK:
see also)
As for Quant and Emble, Auden suggests that their innermost lives are largely closed to him. The poem leaves Emble passed out on Rosetta’s bed, the first of the four to fall silent. Given the small role that Sensation played in Auden’s psychological makeup, this cannot be surprising; but Quant, as
Auden’s fellow Intuitive, might be expected to play a significant role at the end. Yet with a brief comment on his stumble at the door of his house, in a “camp” idiom Auden enjoyed— “Why, Miss ME, what’s the matter?”—“he opened his front door and disappeared.”
Thus Auden gives over the substance of the closing sections to Thinking and Feeling.
So two speak at length; one disappears with a joke; one is unconscious. The Four Faculties do not become, again, One; they remain separate and disproportionate. It might not be immediately obvious why the poem brings them together at all.
In fact, though, the four have embarked on a joint quest—more than one quest, perhaps. It would be
helpful at this point to have an overview of the structure of the poem. It has six parts:
Part One: Prologue
Part Two: The Seven Ages
Part Three: The Seven Stages
Part Four: The Dirge
Part Five: The Masque
Part Six: Epilogue
The Prologue introduces us to the characters and introduces them to each other. At Rosetta’s suggestion, they move from the bar to a booth so that they might “Consider...the incessant Now of / The traveler through time.” What does it mean to be a human being living temporally? This question leads to Part Two, The Seven Ages.
The reference, of course, is to the famous speech by Jaques in Shakespeare’s As You Like It (EK: русские переводы "
Как вам это понравится").
Malin, the clear leader here, introduces each Age in language that echoes and revises that of
Jaques: “
At first, the infant, / Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms” becomes “Behold the infant, helpless in cradle and / Righteous still”; at the end, Jaques’s “second childishness and mere oblivion, / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything” is revised thus:
His last chapter has little to say.
He grows backward with gradual loss of
Muscular tone and mental quickness...
But while Jaques delivers his picture of human development and decline as a monologue,
Malin’s introductions of the Ages—most of which are longer than Jacques’s whole speech—generate responses from each of the other characters, who find in Malin’s wordpictures opportunities for disagreement or alteration or addition, in registers of fear or excitement or despair. Auden’s version of the Seven Ages is thoroughly polyphonic and is the means by which these characters first begin to emerge as distinct types. (The means of characterization here, and throughout much of the poem, are not those of the novelist but rather those of the taxonomic psychologist, and this is an ancient tradition: more than two thousand years before Jung,
Theophrastus wrote On Moral Characters, the first extant set of “character sketches”: the Faultfinder, the Talkative Man, the Slanderer. Similar modes of characterization are common in medieval poetry and drama, from Prudentius’s Psychomachia to Everyman. Auden’s practice here is far closer to Theophrastus or Everyman than to Tolstoy.)
As they meditate on their tour of each human being’s personal history, the four realize that they have further exploration to do together. It is Quant who, after another glimpse of his image in the bar’s mirror, decrees that Rosetta (“peregrine nymph”) must be the one to lead them in this quest for understanding:
O show us the route
Into hope and health;
give each the required
Pass to appease the superior archons;
Be our good guide.
And so they enter, together, a kind of dream vision. This is Part Three, the Seven Stages, which Auden introduces in this way: “So it was now as they sought that state of prehistoric happiness which, by human beings, can only be imagined in terms of a landscape bearing a symbolic resemblance to the human body.”
Already there are difficulties. Is it really true that a “state of prehistoric happiness”—that Arcadian vision once more—“can only be imagined in terms of a landscape bearing a symbolic resemblance to the human body”? If so, why? No explanations are forthcoming. And as the reader joins the characters in moving through this landscape, it is often impossible to understand how what they see relates to the features of any human body we are familiar with. No wonder, as Edward Mendelson has commented, “the shape of the Edenic quest in ‘The Seven Stages’ has baffled even Auden’s most sympathetic readers.”
When Alan Ansen shared his own bafflement soon after the poem’s publication, Auden professed surprise. He thought that by adding the linking passages in prose that are dotted throughout the poem, he had done his readers a considerable favor. The symbolic structure of “The Seven Stages,” he said, is “really quite straightforward.... It’s all done in the
Zohar.” It is hard not to suspect that Auden was pulling Ansen’s leg, for surely he understood as well as anyone that little in the Zohar is straightforward.
The Zohar (or The Book of Splendor) is perhaps the greatest Jewish mystical text. It was written in the thirteenth century in Spain by Moses de León, who attributed the work to a second century Palestinian rabbi, Shimon bar Yohai. Only a few concepts from this immensely variegated work are relevant to Auden’s poem. The Zohar inherits from earlier Kabbalistic writings the notion of the ten sefirot or “lights”—attributes of God, emanations of his power and thought. But it goes further by associating each of the sefirot with some part of the human body: Hesed (Mercy) is linked with the right arm, Hod (Majesty) with the left leg, Tiferet (Beauty) with the torso, and so on.(EK:
See also!!!)
In “The Seven Stages” Auden is not borrowing this structure so much as riffing on it. His sefirot, if we may call them that, are seven in number rather than ten, and seem to be not attributes of God but rather forms of human desire for the ideal and the innocent. By associating his scheme with the Zohar, Auden may be suggesting that all such quests are, ultimately, quests for God; but if so, this notion is but vaguely indicated. The poet seems to be working more generally in the painterly tradition of the
paysage moralisé or “moralized landscape”—a conceit he knew very well. (EK:
Paola Marchetti 'Auden landscapes') By superimposing this symbolic framework upon the Kabbalistic one of the body’s sefirot, and then portraying the encounter with this imagined world as a kind of quest-narrative, Auden layers genre upon genre with extraordinarily rococo flourishes. “Really quite straightforward” indeed.
The development of “The Seven Stages” certainly follows the model of the quest-narrative but transforms that genre radically. In an essay (EK: "K's Quest") he wrote while working on The Age of Anxiety, Auden offers an interesting overview of the various kinds of quest-narrative—fairy tale, Grail quest, and so forth—from which it seems clear that the proper variety for “The Seven Stages” is the “
Dream Quest”: “The purpose of the journey is no object but spiritual knowledge, a vision of the reality behind appearances, [by which] the dreamer when he wakes can henceforth live his life on earth.” The other kinds of quest may have some role to play in the poem, but this seems to be the chief model. Yet this dream constantly verges on nightmare. The landscapes here are as unsettling and ambiguous as those confronted by Browning’s protagonist in “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower
Came” (a poem Auden surely had in mind as he wrote), but this is not a solitary quest. The four friends — we may now call them that — are able to converse with one another, to share impressions
of their temporary world. And yet they do not experience a common vision. In the Zohar the rabbis and their conversational partners tend to be of one mind and one heart; again and again Moses de León’s characters are overwhelmed by a sense of gratitude for being able to participate in such enlightening conversation. Not so Quant and Malin and Rosetta and Emble. One by one they describe what confronts them, and it is often difficult to know whether they are experiencing the same thing: is the “tacit tarn” Rosetta sees identical with the “salt lake lapping” Quant hears? Do Malin’s “kettle moraines” surround the same body of water, or does he perceive a different landscape? Emble’s vague statement that “The earth looks woeful and wet” offers little help.
As they proceed through their landscape, they twice split into pairs: first Rosetta and Emble separate from Quant and Malin; then, later, Quant goes with Rosetta and Malin with Emble. It is noteworthy that Malin and Rosetta never go together. The four travel, at various times, on foot and by car, by rail and through air, on a trolley car, on bicycles and a boat; near the end they run a race. In all this they have, the narrator says, “a common goal”; Rosetta calls it “our common hope” even as she decrees a temporary parting.
In this quest led by the “peregrine nymph,” while none of the characters understand the full meaning of anything they encounter—any more than the reader does—their feelings come into harmony and perhaps even unison. This occurs even though their general inclinations do not fundamentally alter:
in the race they run during the Seventh Stage, Auden writes that “as they run, their rival natures, by art comparing and compared, reveal themselves.” But their shared experience, at this low point in their quest, is a vague awareness of being accused (EK: Кьеркегор "Перед Богом мы все виновны"), of falling under some dire judgment—a judgment whose rightness they all acknowledge. (The point of the epigraph of the whole poem, from the Dies Irae, becomes sharper here.) Each confesses sins that, collectively, amount to a brief anatomy of pride. In a 1941 review of Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man, Auden had written of “
the temptation to sin, [which] is what the psychologist calls anxiety, and the Christian calls lack of faith.” At this point the characters experience a reinterpretation of their own condition: what had been named psychologically as “anxiety” comes home as a moral and spiritual predicament, “the temptation to sin.”
This is bad news, but not as bad as it sounds. These events take place—as Auden decided, or decided to inform his readers, just before sending the poem to the publisher—on “
the night of All Souls.” Auden had learned from the maverick historian
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy that the great significance of that date on the Church’s calendar is that it acknowledges and celebrates the “universal democracy of sinners under judgment”: Quant, Malin, Rosetta, and Emble have, more or less consciously, joined
that democracy.
Each, having seen his or her innermost self with disturbing clarity, has the same impulse: to flee into the nearby forest to hide and reflect. (Similarly, Adam and Eve, after “their eyes were opened,” “hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden.”) They “vanish down solitary paths, with no guide but their sorrows, no companion but their own voices. Their ways cross and recross yet never once do they meet.” And when they are finally reunited, it is only in order to confront their utter failure—and, still more important, the illusory nature of their whole quest. “Their journey has been one long flight” from the real world, and that world confronts them now. At this moment of sad recognition they awake and find themselves back in the bar.
Their cab ride from the bar to Rosetta’s apartment—this is the action of Part Four, “The Dirge”—is therefore somber. They have learned that they cannot save themselves, that they have no resources by which they might be healed of their anxiety; but they also discern that they will not be saved by “some semidivine stranger with superhuman powers, some Gilgamesh or Napoleon, some Solon or Sherlock Holmes.” (It may well be that the war they are living through, which had been promoted in large part by the German cult of the Führer, has ended such dreams for them.) For the loss of that hope they utter a collective lamentation.
In light of these dismal events it is perhaps surprising that the action of Part Five, “The Masque,” is an improvised and symbolic wedding ceremony. But, as the narrator tells us, “In times of war even the crudest kind of positive affection between persons seems extraordinarily beautiful, a noble symbol of the peace and forgiveness of which the whole world stands so desperately in need.” So even the “quite casual attraction” that has arisen between Emble and Rosetta “seemed and was of immense importance.” The “and was” indicates that the narrator has no wish to dismiss this refuge: when there is meaning in nothing else there can be meaning in love. And all four desperately hope for this meaning to be real and strong, and to be the foundation—somehow—for the restoration of social order and the achievement of “the millennial Earthly Paradise.” Having abandoned, in light of the catastrophic failure of their quest for “that state of prehistoric happiness,” the Arcadian return, they now become Utopians of the heart, seeking through love the positive energies necessary to achieve some future perfection. (Even, or especially, when those energies are deflected they have great creative potential: Auden was thinking of the power of sublimation when, in his
elegy on Freud, he wrote of “Eros, builder of cities.”)
But there is a reason Auden calls this part a masque: it is a piece of self-consciously artificial play-acting. Surely Quant knows this and laughs at it when he builds “a little altar of sandwiches” and “invoke[s] the Queen of love.” Yet all four seem utterly committed to the ritual as it unfolds, and when Quant and Malin depart, their well-wishing is both sincere and superficial. It is a sign, perhaps, of how little progress they have made except in mutual affection. But that is, by Auden’s lights, significant progress indeed.
That they are indeed “play-acting” in this scene lies near the heart of the matter. Auden told Theodore Spencer that one of
his goals in this poem was “
to devise a rhetoric which would reveal the great vice of our age which is that we are all not only ‘actors’ but know that we are (reduplicated Hamlets) and that it is only at moments, in spite of ourselves, and when we least expect it, that our real feelings break through.” Thus the importance of what was at that stage in composition the epigraph to the entire poem, from the highly mannered comic novelist Ronald Firbank (1886–1926): “‘Oh, Heaven help me,’ she prayed, to be decorative and to do right.’” It could be said that the great challenge for the “reduplicated Hamlets” of this poem is to learn how to be decorative and do right.
Auden believed that certain vital spiritual truths could be expressed, indirectly, through comedy, in ways that would be impossible through more straightforward means. Thus he wrote of P.G.Wodehouse’s character Jeeves, “So speaks comically—and in what other mode than the comic could it on earth truthfully speak?—the voice of Agape, of Holy Love.” But this is an unusual notion; it is understandable that Theodore Spencer, reading a draft of the poem, objected to the quotation from Firbank as frivolous. To this protest Auden replied: “Reluctantly, I agree with you. The Firbank epigraph must go. I think it very serious but no one else will unless I write an essay to explain why.” In the end he simply moved the epigraph to “The Masque,” where, despite its apparent lack of fit with a section that ends with a meditation on the genocide of Europe’s Jews, it properly belongs. (Only with this move did the quotation from the Dies Irae take its place at the head of the work.)
And Auden eventually wrote that essay: in 1961 he gave a radio talk on “Ronald Firbank and an Amateur World,” in which he strove to explain the virtue of treating, as Firbank does, both religion and sex as games, as having a distinctive human value when played by amateurs. Games are characterized, in Auden’s view, by their arbitrariness, their freedom from the constraints of necessity.
“The Masque” is both a religious and a sexual game, exhilarating for the participants as long as it lasts. But when it ends, it leaves them in a mood of reflective selfassessment.
So, paradoxically, it is in the artificiality of game playing that we are most likely to be surprised by “our real feelings”: we find them when we are patently not looking for them. But this “breaking through” of truth is an unpredictable experience, and the anxieties and illusions of daily life can quickly reclaim their sovereignty over us. Whether this meeting on “the night of All Souls” will make a significant difference to the lives of the four temporary friends cannot be known, but there is no reason to think that any of them will meet again. In the Epilogue we are told, “Quant and Malin, after
expressing their mutual pleasure at having met, after exchanging addresses and promising to look each other up some time, had parted and immediately forgotten each other’s existence.”
Have they been altered by their shared visionary experience? Certainly by the poem’s end they are less the Theophrastian types they seemed to be at the start and more individual—but in a distinctive sense of that word. In yet another essay written during the composition of The Age of Anxiety, Auden claimed that “
The term ‘individual’ has two senses, and one must be careful in discussion to find out in which sense it is being used. In the realm of nature, ‘individual’ means to be something others are not, to have uniqueness: in the realm of spirit, it means to become what one wills, to have a
self-determined history.” It is not clear whether all of the characters in this poem have achieved full individuality, “in the realm of spirit,” during the course of their evening, and there is no guarantee that anything they do achieve will last; but no careful reader of the poem will be content to see any of
them as simply a Jungian type.
As noted earlier, in their last appearances in the poem, Emble sleeps on Rosetta’s bed, and Quant disappears behind his door. But Rosetta and Malin—the first at the end of Part Five, and the second in the brief Epilogue—are left to face, with a frightened nakedness, their God. One and the same God, Auden would say, though worshipped under two Covenants: the characters’ meditations rhyme closely. They are sinners in the hands of a God who may, or may not, be angry— whose love is often indistinguishable from anger—but who in any case cannot be evaded or deceived.
In 1942 Auden had
written,
The difference between a genuine Judaism and a genuine Christianity is like the difference between a young girl who has been promised a husband in a dream and a married woman who believes that she loves and is loved.
The young girl knows that the decisively important thing has not yet happened to her, that her present life is therefore a period of anticipation, important not in itself but in its relation to the future....
To the married woman, on the other hand, the decisively important thing has already happened, and because of this everything in the present is significant....
Few traces of this view—which depends on the belief that the coming of the Messiah is “the decisively important thing,” a belief more central to Judaism as a religion with biblical roots than to Judaism as a modern cultural practice—remain in The Age of Anxiety. Rosetta’s great speech is built around the idea that something utterly decisive happened long ago: a covenant made by the Lord God with the people of Israel. And what has happened since is the complex and painful working-out of a covenantal bond that seems to cause pain on both sides. (It is probably important that this meditation is the conclusion of “The Masque,” which as we have seen focuses largely on the contrastingly trivial and ephemeral connection between Rosetta and Emble.) Rosetta’s knowledge that the God of Israel never wavers in his commitment is as disturbing as it is reassuring: modifying one of Israel’s great songs of consolation, Psalm 139, she thinks,
Though I fly to Wall Street
Or Publisher’s Row, or pass out, or
Submerge in music, or marry well,
Marooned on riches, He’ll be right there
With His Eye upon me. Should I hide away
My secret sins in consulting rooms,
My fears are before Him; He’ll find all,
Ignore nothing.
Rosetta’s soliloquy is full of biblical references, almost all of them to episodes of exile and captivity; and she acknowledges the most recent and horrific captivity under Nazi Germany. Wondering “who’ll be left” at the end of a history of persecutions and pogroms, she an only sigh and repeat the ancient Shema: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one God.”
Rosetta’s speech is saturated by the details of history—her own and that of her people—but Malin’s meditation is more philosophical. He is concerned with God’s great abstractions: “His Good,” “His Question,” “His Truth.” (As Auden wrote in a letter to a friend, Quant’s “defence against the contemporary scene is to make it frivolous where Malin tries to see it sub specie aeternitate”—from the perspective of eternity.) Yet in substance his thoughts are identical to Rosetta’s:
In our anguish we struggle
To elude Him, to lie to Him, yet His love observes
His appalling promise; His predilection
As we wander and weep is with us to the end,
Minding our meanings, our least matter dear to Him...
These believers, then, share a discomfort and a consolation: discomfort that all the dark things they have just learned about themselves in their dreamquest are known, and known perfectly, by their God; and consolation that none of that diminishes the divine love. Having experienced with their two companions the transmutation of “anxiety” into “the temptation to sin,” they take the further step their nonreligious companions could not: they recognize their own lack of faith and repent of it.
Near the end of “The Sea and the Mirror” Caliban conjures up a vision of “the greatest grandest opera rendered by a very provincial touring company indeed.” (EK: See also Alan Jacobs "Shaming The Devil: Essays In Truthtelling - Auden's happy eye") The members of this company fail in every possible way, and do so spectacularly, but, Caliban says, it is at that moment that “we are blessed with that Wholly Other Life from which we are separated by an essential emphatic gulf.... It is just here, among the ruins and the bones, that we may rejoice in the perfected Work that is not ours.”
Something similar happens to Malin and Rosetta: in the emphatic failure of their Arcadian quest; in the recognition that no great “semi-divine stranger with superhuman powers” will arrive to rescue them; in the acknowledgment that their wedding masque, with its Utopian vision of love conquering all, was but a brief if pleasant fiction, they come to the end of themselves and the beginning of the knowledge of God. For the moment at least, they experience something deeper and stranger than anxiety. It is too resigned to be happiness; but it is a kind of peace.
Auden understood, profoundly, that literary forms are ways of discerning the world: each of them reveals some aspect of experience while concealing others. (Things can be said in the epic that cannot be said in satire, and comedy discerns truths to which tragedy is blind.) It is for this reason that his longer poems display an almost encyclopedic variety of poetic forms and genres, none more
so than The Age of Anxiety. We get a warning of what is to come in the poem’s subtitle: “A
Baroque Eclogue.” The eclogue is a classical form, associated since Virgil with the meditations of shepherds—usually in groups. (The Zohar is actually an odd kind of eclogue, with rabbis rather than shepherds: the characters drift through Israel, pausing to rest under trees so they can converse about matters divine, in almost exactly the way that Arcadian shepherds lie about on hillsides contemplating the beauty of local shepherdesses.) This setting means that the eclogue is also a bucolic form, which makes it odd that it should be attached to a poem that begins and ends in New York City; but given the unpopulated visionary landscapes the characters move through, we cannot
think the description merely ironic.
Auden calls the poem a baroque eclogue, and that is still more curious, given the elaborate ornamentation we associate with that tradition: it offers anything but the simplicity and cleanness of
line we associate with the “classical.” Yet the description is apt: the verse of The Age of Anxiety is nothing if not ornamented, and the poet seems to take joy in the ornamenting. (Auden once wrote that one of his tests of a critic’s good taste was a genuine liking for “conscious theatrical exaggeration, pieces of Baroque flattery like Dryden’s welcome to the Duchess of Ormond.”)
But this is just the beginning of complications. The primary verse form of the poem is a fourbeat line, with three alliterations per line. Beowulf is often mentioned in descriptions of this verse, but the form preceded Beowulf in Anglo-Saxon verse and would last hundreds of years afterward. (Its last great master was the anonymous author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and other poems, who was probably a contemporary of Chaucer. Indeed, Sir Gawain, with its passage through symbolic landscapes and its scenes of temptation, is one of the works that most powerfully underlies The Age of Anxiety. Auden himself associated the versification with another great medieval poem, Piers Plowman.) The poem contains several lyrics that draw on other medieval forms, including some from Old Norse, a language in which he was deeply interested. But the reader is just as likely to come across parodies or pastiches of the novelty songs that the jukeboxes and radios of the 1940s offered in
large doses. (Auden complained to Alan Ansen about the impossibility of escaping them, in the diners of Swarthmore as much as in the dives of Manhattan.)
So, just as we find a rich thematic layering in this poem—concepts from the Zohar overlapping with the paysage moralisé tradition, and all bonded to a dream-quest—we see a similar layering of technical elements from the ancient world, the Middle Ages, the early modern, and the utterly contemporary. To some extent these multiple variations are simply a function of Auden’s technical brilliance and the delight he took in exhibiting it; but there are more important reasons for such overwhelming complexity. Chief among them is Auden’s conviction, already noted, that “the great vice of our age... is that we are all not only ‘actors’ but know that we are.” We are “reduplicated Hamlets” in that we are eternally and pathologically selfconscious— we are always, like Quant at the
outset of the poem, peering into our mirrors. In the introduction to John Betjeman’s verse mentioned earlier, Auden writes, “For better or worse, we who live in this age not only feel but are critically conscious of our emotions—there is no difference in this respect between the highest of highbrows and the most farouche of soda jerkers—and, in consequence, again for better or worse, a naïve rhetoric, one that is not confessedly ‘theatrical,’ is now impossible in poetry. The honest manly style is today only suited to Iago.” With this point in mind, one understands better why Auden dedicated this poem to Betjeman.
In The Age of Anxiety, therefore, Auden forcibly explores the manifold varieties of artifice; he multiplies forms and genres dizzyingly. If “reduplicated Hamlets” prefer to discreetly observe themselves in an elegant pier glass, Auden offers instead a funhouse hall of mirrors. The counterpart to Quant’s opening look at himself in the bar is this dark thought from Malin’s concluding soliloquy: “one / Staggers to the bathroom and stares in the glass / To meet one’s madness.” (Hamlet again: “You go not till I set you up a glass / Where you may see the inmost part of you.”) Images are repeatedly and variously warped; the characters grow disoriented, dizzy, and faint. In the midst of this
constant change Rosetta and Malin find only one still point.
The strategy that Auden pursues here has its risks, and it is tempting simply to say that it didn’t work. The Age of Anxiety is not widely read and has never been fully understood. A book with such complexly intertwining themes probably should not feature such complexly intertwining techniques—even (or especially) if one of its chief concerns is the danger of artificiality. One can sympathize with the reader who says to the poet, “Physician, heal thyself.”
Moreover—and this is clearly a related point—the experiences of the characters here are abstract and intellectual to the highest degree. Less than a decade after writing this poem, Auden would write of Kierkegaard that “
a planetary visitor might read through the whole of his voluminous works without discovering that human beings are not ghosts but have bodies of flesh and blood”—but one could almost say the same of the four characters of The Age of Anxiety. The body that has the greatest role in the poem is the symbolic one he borrowed from the Zohar and made more obscure. As Edward Mendelson has commented, “Auden’s efforts to write a poetry of the body were frustrated by his insistence on writing about symbols of the body rather than the body itself.”
This defect he would soon remedy: the poems he would produce in the next decade are constantly absorbed in contemplation of human embodiment. But The Age of Anxiety remains a vitally important poem— in some ways a great one. It is surely his most ambitious work: formidably complex as his previous two long poems are, their themes are more bounded. “For the Time Being” meditates on the entry of the Divine into history; “The Sea and the Mirror” on the relationship between art and religious belief. These are large concerns, to be sure, but delimited. The question of what makes for an age of anxiety, on the other hand, is vaster and more amorphous: the condition itself must be described, and its etiology traced. A common anxiety manifests itself differently in those with and without religion; and for both groups alike it is fed by political, social, familial, and personal disorders. In The Age of Anxiety Auden tries to account for all of these, and if he falls short, that is a necessary result of such comprehensive ambition.
The poem quickly captured the imagination of its cultural moment, and not just because its title provided a terse and widely applicable diagnostic phrase. Thanks in part to some glowing early reviews— the most notable of them being Jacques Barzun’s commendation in Harper’s—and a profile of the poet that appeared in Time magazine the week of the poem’s publication, it was reprinted four times within two years of its first appearance. The Age of Anxiety received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1948, and inspired Leonard Bernstein’s Symphony no.2 for Piano and Orchestra, The Age of Anxiety (1949)—an attempt to render the plot and tone of the poem in musical terms, without words. Jerome Robbins choreographed a ballet set to Bernstein’s symphony (1950); Auden, who never cared for ballet, reportedly especially disliked this one.
A stage version of the poem was presented in New York by the Living Theater Studio in 1954, but Auden seems to have had no involvement in it. However, in 1960 an undergraduate group at Princeton, Theatre Intime, staged an abridged version of the poem, with narration played through a television on stage, and Auden was sufficiently pleased by this adaptation that he agreed to serve as
one of those televised narrators. (In the printed program he is identified as “Communicator.”) So the poem has proven capable of vivid representation, in multiple forms and genres.
In 1953 Auden would write of the moment when, each morning, we emerge from our private worlds: “Now each of us / Prays to an image of his image of himself.” The Age of Anxiety is an extraordinarily acute anatomy of our selfimages, and a diagnosis of those images’ power not just to
shape but to create our ideas. And it contains some of Auden’s most powerful and beautiful verse: the
compressed lyric “Hushed is the lake of hawks,” the great Dirge of Part Four, the twin final speeches of Rosetta and Malin. This poem, for all its strangeness and extravagant elaboration of theme and technique, deserves a central place in the canon of twentieth-century poetry.
