NewPhilosophermost resounding dichotomies of 20th
century poetry:
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.“We must love one another or die.”
It’s a line that has commanded desper-
ate assent at times of crisis, ever since
it was written. It was one of the first
responses to the attacks of September
11 read on National Public Radio in
America in 2001. Yet its pairing of
love or death, spoken to a world on
the brink of war, was one that Auden
himself had turned against by the time
it came to his 1945 Collected Poems. In
that edition, he omitted the stanza
entirely. By 1964, when Auden was
in his late fifties, he altered the line
to “we must love one another and die”
when allowing September 1, 1939 to
be reprinted in a Penguin anthology.
The poem was, an accompanying note
explained, “trash which [the author] is
ashamed to have written”.
Studying Auden when I was a
young man, barely out of my teens,
I couldn’t understand his older self ’s
rejection of his younger self ’s exalta-
tion of poetry and love. It seemed a
strange act of violence for this crag-
faced elder poet to censor his youth
in the name of honesty. And per-
haps it was. Childless, Auden knew- as he wrote in his elegy of the poet
WB Yeats, who died in 1939 – that
he would become his admirers. The
poetry he wished them to know him
through was the poetry of honesty
hard-won in age; a poetry of bril-
liantly careful disillusionment.
He was both right and wrong, I
think. Right, that we must love one an-
other and die: that the two are bound
together, and that the first is not an
alternative to the second. Wrong, that
we can reach back through time and
rewrite the faults of youth: that we
can send wiser versions of our own
young selves into the future. Even our
words escape us, granting immortality
not to their author but to whichever
ghosts the world wishes their author
to have been.
As Solomon concluded in Far From
The Tree, perhaps the most difficult task
of love is learning to set ourselves aside,
privileging our children’s future ahead
of our own best hopes. “We must love
them for themselves, and not for the best
of ourselves in them, and that is a great
deal harder to do. Loving our own chil-
dren is an exercise for the imagination.”
Imagination: that envisioning of a
world without us in it, a world we will
never see. It is imagination more than
philosophy that teaches us how to die- a better task for poets than for phi-
losophers. Or rather, it is imagination
that teaches us how to think and feel
outside the confines of a single life, to
see other lives for what they are – and
to love them above whatever we wish
them to be.
We must die, this much is certain.
Yet nobody and nothing obliges us
to love one another. Love is learned,
practised, handed down. It’s not
enough, because nothing is. But it is
the first and the last thing we have.
Loving and letting go
“Mum always liked convenience
so has asked to be microwaved.”