unwriting the good fight opening stanzas. Now it describes Spain rather condescendingly in geographical
andmeteorological terms, and indeed as a part of Africa that is only ‘soldered’ to
Europe, without, however, naming it. Its name tellingly appears only once in the
corpus of the text, in the declaration of ‘the life’. The fourth part of the poem then
concludes with a strange statement that, for the first time, involves an implicit ‘we’:
‘Our fever’s menacing shapes are precise and alive.’
The voice of the text has shifted again. After the impersonal start and the limited
perspectives of poet, investigator, and the poor, the nation that combined them,
and the challenging voice of ‘the life’ addressing a ‘you’, the subtle and sudden
implied ‘we’ looks temptingly like a possible solution. Yet, like the illogical drift
into Romantic natural imagery of stanzas 15 and 16, it is a problematic response.
Fever once again does not agree with ethical choice. It might stand for passion, yet
also for the loss of a clear view. And indeed the fever here produces delusions, only
that the text calls them—paradoxically—‘precise and alive’. The precision claimed
for passionate (or sick) fantasies appears very much like clutching at straws.^17 Yet
the ‘alive’ quality of the desperate perspective regains some motivation by being
connected to the lives that are presented as a potential sacrifice and the life that
enables the collective to arrive at such a choice. Nonetheless, the verse remains
warped, and it is certainly no coincidence that it is followed by the bathos of the
first line of the concluding fifth section of the poem, which declares the future to be
a mere possibility of tomorrow, a ‘perhaps’.^18
While the poem’s rather bombastic opening was certain that all the past could be
relegated to yesterday, the claim concerning the future that forms its mirror-image
is now hesitant and comes across as feeble. Indeed, stanza 18 replicates many of
the images of the poem’s beginning. It also includes movement, exploration, and
expansion. Yet this time it is not continents and trade routes that are charted, but
very individual issues, such as fatigue, consciousness, diet, breathing (only radiation
stands out as both abstract and non-individual). It is as if the grand gesture of the
poem’s universal start has crash-landed on the final realization of one’s individual
life and the consequences of its decisions and actions.
This is not to say that the images of the stanza and those that follow are completely
pessimistic. They appear small and even tired, as if the mere decision to become
involved in the struggle has already been too much of an effort. The entire section
does not contain a single verb, as if to emphasize its inertia. Yet, as the anaphoric
repetition of ‘To-morrow’ signals, the section also looks towards an aftermath
of the struggle, an aftermath that, again, seems to take place as much in Spain
as anywhere (including a very middle-class Britain). There, in this uncertain and
(^17) I am not convinced by Stan Smith’sreading, which suggests that ‘InSpain 1937the alien
landscape of the peninsula is a place where we find what has been grippingourunconscious’ (Smith,
W. H. Auden, 95). There is neither a collective unconscious in Freud nor an identification of the
implicit ‘we’ in Auden’s ‘Spain 1937’; nor can their thoughts easily be translated. 18
See Hynes,Auden Generation, 253.