September 1, 1939
I was just kidding about it being the last poem of National Poetry Month because, somehow, I forgot to write to you about one of my all-timers. (I’m sure you’ve guessed by now that I have a great many all-timers, so I can happily do this every week like clockwork.) I want to close April and open May with a poem that has meant so much to me for so many years now: W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939.”
A few weeks back, I wrote about the way I’d received “Great Expectations” as a teenager versus now, as an adult, and how my perspective on the text changed, how it evoked different emotions and surprised me, given it was once so special and absolute to me, which I found interesting. Equally, I’ve always found it interesting when an artist turns away from a piece of work and effectively disowns it, especially when it’s an objectively great work. I think that’s part of why I love this poem, actually: Auden wrote it in the heat of the moment and then turned his back on it, outright hated it and its popularity and then, in the late period of his life, made a change to its text that revised its meaning.
Auden wrote this poem at the outset of the Second World War shortly after Nazi Germany invaded Poland. It starts slowly, chartering the course of events that led to war, but by the final two stanzas, it’s galloping toward its ultimate conclusion. Its most famous passage comes from the second to last stanza, which reads: “All I have is a voice / To undo the folded lie, / The romantic lie in the brain / Of the sensual man-in-the-street / And the lie of Authority / Whose buildings grope the sky: / There is no such things as the State / And no one exists alone; / Hungers allows no choice / To the citizen or the police; / We must love one another or die.”
This one stanza is the poem’s central thesis, its beating heart and, paradoxically, it’s the bit that Auden hated the most. He thought it was too ‘flattering’ to himself and his readers. He removed it from subsequent printings and then, later, following some coaxing from his publisher, included it in a collection of his work with an amendment. No longer would the stanza read, “We must love one another or die,” but instead, “We must love one another and die.” Do you see how it changes? The love is no longer a choice we must make, but a state of constancy. It’s inescapable, forever present even if we want to deny its existence and, to return again to the Langston Hughes poem I wrote about last week, the rest is worms eating the rind, dividing us in the rot.
If you’ve been alive longer than me, then you have almost certainly seen or heard this poem. It was used by the Johnson campaign in the 1960s (“Daisy”) and read out over the National Public Radio immediately after 9/11. So there’s something in it that speaks to a moment, something about it that’s unifying. A writer I love once said that a poem works when it’s the action of the mind moving through a thought — in other words, who you are at the beginning is not who you are at the end. When it works, when it clicks, something in you changes and you begin to see the world through someone else’s eyes.
I think that’s the fundamental purpose of all art and I think that’s what frustrates me so deeply about how far we’ve fallen in encouraging arts education or hobbies and media literacy on a whole. Engaging with art and grappling with the feelings it elicits is alchemical. I don’t mean to romanticize it because it actually is true — statistics show that reading, in particular, makes you more empathetic toward other people. And so, in saying that, I suspect that’s why I love the poem. It isn’t just the story behind it, but its empathy and the final challenge that becomes an acceptance, instead, of an inviolable reality that we are part of a whole. It’s comforting and hopeful; or, to borrow Auden’s own words: “May I, composed like them / Of Eros and of dust, / Beleaguered by the same / Negation and despair, / Show an affirming flame.”