rainer emig
only potentially likely future, one finds again the reform movements that were so
influentialin the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, all of them aiming for
the good life, a small-scale ethics of goodness compared to the decision necessary
for the poem’s struggle. Even romantic love is rediscovered, but placed only on
the same scale as the symbolically slightly disconcerting ‘photographing of ravens’,
traditionally portents of ill omen.
Politically, too, a rather ambivalent scenario opens up when what is predicted for
this possible future is ‘fun’ under the authoritarian shadow of a capitalized ‘Liberty’.
The term ‘master’ that appears twice in stanza 19 (once in ‘masterful’) is always a
critical one in Auden’s early poems, since authority generally stands for the dubious
one of tradition or ‘the old gang’. Here, its attachment to freedom could signal an
ironic nod in the direction of the world power that has most ostensibly written
liberty on its flag, the United States of America, soon to be Auden’s home. Yet
‘Liberty’ could also be merely an ironic oxymoron in connection with ‘masterful’,
one that acknowledges that, whatever outcome the struggle may have, freedom
will only ever be imaginable inside authoritarian power structures. This would go
back to the poem’s discussion of life as choice, and choice as responsibility and
challenge, and to the insistence that life, choice, and ethics are only imaginable as
part of a civic identity (and not a romantic individual or equally romantic collective
one—such as communism or fascism). It would also, perhaps grudgingly, declare
that even the ideal of a democratic citizenship that combines individual desires,
anxieties, weaknesses, and injustices is not free from, but indeed rests on, power,
and power demands institutions, authority, and ultimately repression.
Pageant master and musician as theatrical organizers of the embellishments of
such political structures are, nonetheless, ironically juxtaposed to the terrorist-like
poets in the subsequent stanza. Yet these ‘poets exploding like bombs’ (an image
that reiterates ‘bombs of conspiracy|In arm-pit secrecy’ from an early poem
called ‘Will you turn a deaf ear’^19 ) are said to be there ‘for the young’. Such
thinking in terms of individual resistance against inevitable institutions and power
is qualified as immature and naive. Anarchy, a strong movement with military
forces of its own in the Spanish Civil War, is thus dealt with very critically. Auden’s
poem positions itself against communism and against anarchism and in favour
of a pragmatic acceptance of some form of liberal democracy—at a time when
Auden was ostensibly fighting, or at least writing for the global Left in its struggle
against, Spanish fascism!^20 It is hard to believe that it was not this implicit political
(^19) Auden, ‘Will you turn a deaf ear’, inEnglish Auden,35–6.
(^20) Peter C. Grosvenor is one of the few critics to see this clearly when he writes: ‘In fact, it is an error
to conclude from his use of the fashionable language of the decade that he was ever in any meaningful
sense a Marxist at all. Auden seems to have been a moderate in both political and religious terms,
temperamentally suited to social liberalism and Anglicanism at a time when liberalism appeared spent
and the Church of England was part of the larger English establishment that had been discredited
by the trauma of the Great War’ (Grosvenor,‘Auden, ‘‘Spain’’, and the Crisis of Literary Popular