rainer emig
history of civilization from an all-seeing elevated perspective, seemingly untouched
byevents and changes, yet in a position of authority that is here, for the first time,
also marked as a threat. The supposedly neutral perspective of impersonal universal
history contains at least the potential for violence, while it may at the same time be
a defence.
It is telling that the first occurrence of words related to struggle happens in the
context of religion, first of heresy, then of tavern feuds concerning theology. Into
this idea of history as a line of events, ‘Spain 1937’ places a turning-point in the
guise of the Reformation. This is not merely a personal reference point for Auden’s
lifelong struggle with his religious affiliation. It also provides an interesting analogy
to the Spanish Civil War as a supposed turning-point in the (then still budding)
history of the twentieth century, a turning-point towards either communism or
fascism, as many—including Auden—regarded it.^11 Nonetheless, religion also
means religion, even and particularly in the context of Auden’s view of the Spanish
conflict. It is well documented that he was shocked by the aggression towards the
Church, its representatives and symbols, a reaction that strongly attested to his
ultimately bourgeois world-view, in which the Establishment (as the typically British
conglomerate of politics, patriotism, and Anglicanism) also stood for certainty.^12
In Spain, however, the (Catholic) Church had more visibly and blatantly than in
Britain become associated with the deprivation and exploitation of the lower classes,
especially landless peasants. Yet, while Spain is shockingly enough nowhere in sight
in the opening six stanzas of ‘Spain 1937’, the specifically British upper-middle-class
values that shaped Auden and many of his generation, often promoted by lectures
on (precisely) universal history and universal values, often leading straight to ‘the
adoration of madmen’, are exposed, ridiculed, and seemingly discarded. Yet who
can speak in their stead—and from what position?
It is striking that after its rather histrionic and impersonal opening the poem
suddenly introduces the figure of the poet, and a very Romantic poet at that,
alone among pines near waterfalls and a leaning tower. Auden generally disliked
the Romantics (except Byron), especially in their expression of political claims for
poetry, like Shelley. It is therefore not surprising that the poet in ‘Spain 1937’ does
not have a poetic answer to the dichotomy between yesterday’s past and today’s
struggle. Instead he narcissistically prays to his vision and wishes for ‘the luck of the
sailor’, which means for a safe escape from the mess that surrounds him.
The poet is not alone in making demands, rather than offering positions and
action. He is accompanied in the subsequent stanzas by an investigator, by the poor,
and even by the nations. All of them address a higher force, an even more elevated
one than the poet’s self-centred vision. This is none other than an upper-case
(^11) See Norman Page,The Thirties in Britain(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), 82–105, esp. 87.
(^12) Auden mentions his shock at the closure of churches and the absence of priests in James Albert
Pike (ed.),Modern Canterbury Pilgrims: The Story of Twenty-Three Converts and Why They Chose the
Anglican Church(London: A. R. Mowbray, 1956), 41.