rainer emig
In keeping with the ethics of doing and the relegation of responsibility to the
individual,the short three central stanzas are concerned with the ‘Many’ and with
‘They’. These nameless and faceless collectives are by no means a strange depiction
of the Spanish population (which would be more than condescending), yet they
include it, too. On ‘remote peninsulas’, ‘sleepy plains, in the aberrant fishermen’s
islands’, and even in the corrupt city, the demanding voice of ‘Spain’ is heard in
stanza 15. Spain is, of course, itself a peninsula, but remote only for the traditional
British onlooker or foreign volunteers in the Civil War. The poem carefully floats
its imagery between symbolic possibility and metaphoric imprecision, precisely to
avoid an all-too-easy ascription of identities and, ultimately, sides. Sleepy plains
and corrupt cities are certainly something one can find in Spain in the 1930s. But
they never become exclusive images. Instead, they retain their universality. This is
true even for the puzzling ‘aberrant fishermen’s islands’, which might be an oblique
reference to Tenerife, where Franco started his military coup in 1936.
After all the careful balancing acts between individuality, collectivity, and uni-
versality, however, one has to admit that, after the introduction of the local and
international collective affected by the demand to decide and act, the poem con-
tains its first serious logical flaw. In a regression to the Romantic imagery that
was ridiculed in stanza 7, it now describes the acts of the ‘Many’ in images of
migrating gulls and flower seeds. These are beautiful similes; yet they contradict
the ethical prerequisite of choice, since gulls migrate instinctively and flower seeds
spread randomly. The subsequent two verses are more in line with the imagery of
Auden’s early poetry—and more appropriate to the ethical argument developed in
the third section of ‘Spain 1937’. They describe clinging to express trains moving
through the night and through a tunnel, fitting images both for the actual mode of
reaching Spain for many volunteers and for the symbolic uncertainty and obscurity
of their future and that of the country for which they had come to fight. Walking
over passes is a further appropriate image, while floating over the oceans (both in
stanza 16) is not.^16 Yet even the problematic stanzas 15 and 16 finally return to the
question of decisions and actions in their final verse. It once again reads so simply
as to smack of propaganda, and yet represents the logical consequence of the most
radical decision-making process one could envisage. Challenged by their lives to
decide and act, the unnamed many who have decided to become involved in the
struggle in Spain present nothing less than these lives, which enabled them to make
this decision in the first place.
It is perhaps the uncertainty and confusion that emerge from this decision
to invest one’s entire existence for a cause, which lead to the feverish imagery
and temporary loss of logic in the anti-climactic fourth part of ‘Spain 1937’.
First the poem makes a brief return to the ironical detachment of its universalist
(^16) John R. Boly also criticizes these sections in hisReading Auden: The Return of Caliban(Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 171.