unwriting the good fight and to traditional ideals of war. His manly jokes and fumbling, but ultimately
unsatisfactory,embracesareasmuchpartofhomosocialasofhomoerotictraditions.
They are particularly inappropriate for the Spanish Civil War, in which many
women fought on the side of the Republicans. This is one of several moments in the
poem when one feels that Auden hardly came close to the realities of fighting—or
Spain—during his short stay. Another is his naive assumption earlier on in stanza
9 that the poor, though they have no fire in their homes, still read the evening
paper. Yet the poem never forgets its serious message, even when it drifts into
inappropriate fantasies. All its macho behaviour is merely a prequel to ‘hurting’.
Out of community does not necessarily evolve harmony. This would be another
utopian delusion. In fact, comradeship, even friendship, can also be the prelude
to hurting one another, and the hurt can be emotional as well as physical. In the
case of war, and particularly a civil war, it is generally both, a fact attested by the
observation that many people in Spain to this day are still at pains to make sense
of the Spanish Civil War, even (or exactly) when it affects them only indirectly
through their parents and grandparents.
The sombre word ‘hurting’ thus forms the appropriate finale of the poem’s tragic
catastrophe. Yet it is not its final word. There is a short epilogue, much as in
traditional Shakespearean tragedies. It is indeedHamletthat most readily comes to
mind as a point of comparison here, not only in the sense that Shakespeare’s drama
can also be read as a play about decisions, the problematic ethics of choice, and its
catastrophic consequences, which leave only an external power as the new master.
Much of the melancholy of Prince Hamlet’s monologues (and of his dying words,
‘the rest is silence’^23 ) is also found in the last four lines of Auden’s poem. Universal
statements such as that declaring the stars to be dead or the indifference of animals
to human suffering have an apocalyptic ring. But, as with the penultimate stanza,
resignation is not what ‘Spain 1937’ can permit itself, if it wants to stay true to its
demanding ethical message.
The stars are indeed dead—and have always been. Animals have never cared
for human joy or pain (despite the well-intentioned projections of animal lovers).
Any attempt to find consolation—and thus relief—in higher powers or in lower
ones, religion or astronomy, biology or anthropology, is futile. ‘We are left alone
with our day,’ the poem declares, and insists on returning us to ‘the life’ that is
all we are, but also continues to demand decisions and actions from us. Time, our
individual time as well as historical time during a volatile military and political
conflict, is of the essence, and limited. And when ‘History’ appears one last time
and speaks to the defeated, it has little to say but ‘Alas’. Help or pardon, the poem’s
final terms, are within the grasp of humans, not at the disposal of abstract higher
forces. Despite Auden’s rejection of especially this final stanza as ‘wicked doctrine’,
it by no means ‘equates goodness with success’, as he himself wrongly came to
(^23) William Shakespeare,Hamlet,v.ii. 337.