unwriting the good fight History, Time described as operator and organizer (in Auden’s typically clinical
language).From this History the investigator demands answers, the poor relief, and
the nations intervention. In the four stanzas that outline these attitudes, the Spanish
Civil War eventually moves closer, though it is still represented in general and
generalizing shapes. Regional demarcations and factionalism, even machismo, are
alluded to as a background to the conflict in the investigator’s stanza. Yet although
he looks at the local, the small, and the large, his concern is with something
that will become central in the rest of the poem: ‘the lives of my friends’. The
poor understandably represent deprivation and social injustice as one cause of the
Civil War. The nations once again stand for the outside perspective (including
class-bound British views), and are consequently treated less respectfully when they
request (in a typical conglomerate of conventional religiosity, Freudian patriarchal
authoritarianism, and naive trust in progress and technology) the intervention of
adeus ex machinain the form of ‘a dove or|a furious papa or a mild engineer’.^13
The three positions are, moreover, analogous to conservative appeasement, fascist
authoritarianism, and socialist technophilia.
The nations also bundle the individual perspectives of poet, investigator, and
poor. Auden’s view of nationhood is here again an entirely pragmatic one. He
sees its role not so much as historical destiny or mission, but as a shaping of
individual needs and an ordering of individual anxieties. Different types of nation
are represented through animal symbolism. The sponge is associated with the
city-state, and might refer to antiquity and the Middle Ages, when being a citizen
meant to be free and (at least theoretically) equal. Shark and tiger are associated with
the violent territorialism, expansionism, and competitiveness of military empires.
Finally, the quaint robin is used as an emblem of the ‘plucky canton’, a Swiss-style
form of nation that thrives on its homeliness and relative inertia, yet looks strangely
helpless when put side by side with the predators of the preceding image. What is
important in this list is that it shows nationhood in its varieties as the equivalent of
ecological niches, not as historical inevitabilities, but as adaptations and reactions
to circumstances. This also colours the exchange of positions between nations (as
ordering instruments by and for individuals) and abstract universal History and
Time. It is an uneven—indeed, a paradoxical—exchange, since all the positions
from which the requests to History and Time are made are generated by individual
decisions, or at least by individual responses, not by a higher superhuman force.^14
It is therefore not illogical that what answers the requests and demands of poet,
investigator, poor, and the nations is not animpersonal History. It is ‘the life’,
specific and lower-case, and its answer is a possibility, not a certainty. This is the
crucial move of ‘Spain 1937’. This life represents the only explicit lyrical ‘I’ of the
(^13) See Michael O’Neill and Gareth Reeves,Auden, MacNeice, Spender: The Thirties Poetry(Basings-
toke: Macmillan, 1992), 209–10.
(^14) Justin Replogle summarizes the poem’s concern in the neat formula ‘freedom-necessity-choice’
(Auden’s Poetry(London: Methuen, 1969), 44).