Maybe in a world besieged by great evils, there’s no such thing as innocence or even moral consistency, but maybe that’s the point and pleasure of living. Mutability being not only inevitable to all but the most inhuman - saints and Caesar’s - but a strength masquerading as weakness. We can, maybe we must, aspire to live life with laughter, irresponsibility, taking pleasure in pleasure, and embracing only modest culpability when such deeper mortal and immortal threats abound.
Although ‘In Praise of Limestone’ is often said to be one of Arden’s more loved poems, it’s difficult to see why. It is quite long, with its meanings curled up in sentences which are twisted, broken and hard to follow. Worse, just when you think you’re getting a grip on it, the poem shifts to new concerns, images, and viewpoints. Time and again, the poem discards or even discredits the imagery and argument it had been developing, and offers or demands of the reader something quite new. He does it again and again. It’s poetic philosophical dodge-ball.
And so on and so on, until quite abruptly he ends the poem with a moment of blessed confessional clarity:
Dear, I know nothing of
Either, but when I try to imagine a faultlesss love
Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur
Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.
Now given all of the above, one sensible reaction is just that this is a pretty bad poem, a collation of not-very-interesting mysteries strung together, adding up to nothing very much. But Auden is emphatically not a bad poet, and one who values control of meaning and mood. He is celebrated, after all, for his clarity, his acute verbal brevity, and his willingness to embrace argument within a poem. In short, all the poetic virtues which seem to have gone so missing in ‘In Praise of Limestone’. What’s going on?
Crowds of academics, publishers, journalists and critics have for decades tried to figure it out, and indeed, have wondered why they made the effort.
Now it’s my turn, and my case for the poem is that Auden has quite deliberately crafted a poem which defies easy or definitive interpretation, and it is precisely that which is its power, its performance, and its purpose. It is, in fact, a perverse masterpiece. If the reader or the academic stumbles repeatedly, the poem is doing its work. To puzzle, to doubt, is important, it tells us.
In happier times the purpose isn’t obvious. But when the stakes are high enough, the point of the poem, the point of writing and publishing it, emerges again. Maybe, alas, now is such a time.
The background to the poem is important to understanding its purpose. It was published in May 1948. That’s three years after the conclusion of the Second World War which had - in Western eyes - been above all a monumental death-match between Nazi fascism and liberal democracy. (Though, whisper it, most of ‘democracy’s dying had been done by Stalin’s monstrous communist tyranny.) Now, there’s a new death-match coming - the West vs Communism Cold War. We’re on the brink: the poem was published in May, and by June Stalin had started blockading/besieging Berlin. In response, the Western European Treaty, NATO’s forerunner, was strapped together.
But that’s not all. In the Middle East, the British left Palestine on 14th May, and on 15th May, a coalition of Egypt, Transjordan, Syria and Iraq and others invaded the nascent state of Israel. The war would last until next March, with Israel winning the ground which laid the foundation for . . .well, for what we’ve got now. Elsewhere, in India Hindu extremists have assassinated Gandhi, in South Africa the National Party is introducing apartheid, and in Asia North Korea has established a communist dictatorship which will soon enough start a war with South Korea.
And scientists in Britain and the Soviet Union are racing to replicate The Bomb.
So is 1948 a time for clarity, for certainties? Maybe clarity is needed. Maybe clarity is incredibly dangerous. What would you do in 1948?
Then there’s Auden himself in 1948. Auden had had an inglorious war, scuttling out of England in 1939 to ensconce himself with his boyfriend safely in New York. Evelyn Waugh said he left ‘at the first squeak of an air-raid warning’; questions were raised in Parliament. What did W H Auden know of war?
Actually, quite a bit: in 1939, Auden had also travelled to China, and taken a hard look at the war there - the Japanese invasion of China now increasingly being seen as the real start of World War II. And here’s what he wrote:
‘War is bombing an already disused arsenal, missing it and killing a few old women. War is lying in a stable with a gangrenous leg. War is drinking hot water in a barn, and worrying about one’s wife. War is a handful of lost and terrified men in the mountains, shooting at something moving in the undergrowth. War is waiting for days with nothing do to, shouting down a dead telephone, going without sleep, or sex, or a wash. War is untidy, inefficient, obscure, and largely a matter of chance.’
He’s seen it, hasn’t he?
So much introduction: longer than the longish poem we’re dealing with. But even at his most deceptively discursive, Auden was stingy with words. And after rather effortful attempts, I discovered it took me far more words to dissect the poem and its meanings than the poem uses. I blue-pencilled almost all of it, you should be relieved to hear. (Ie: Don’t read me, read Auden.)
So I’m not going to attempt to go line by line, but rather set out what I think are the main struts. Both the start and the finish are important, and cunning. The opening lines openly broadcast the trickery to come:
“If it form the one landscape, that we, the inconstant ones, / Are consistently homesick for . . . . “
To start anything with ‘if’ is to invite doubt - is this a conditional, or a hypothetical? And then the doubt gets deepened because he announces himself (or ourselves?) as ‘the inconstant ones’. And immediately he contradicts himself, so far from being ‘inconstant’, he/we are ‘consistently’ of this taste, or nostalgia. So in a one and a half lines, he’s raised a query, announced his inconsistency, and then demonstrated it by being inconsistent in his inconsistency. You can’t say you haven’t been warned.
The rest of the poem is a series of demonstrations about what that means, and how it works, a series of jujitsu throws of meaning, approach, imagery and philosophical positioning. But the first stanza, daunting as it is, sets the scene. It is 13 lines of intricate and hard-to-follow imagery which winds, appears, and disappears, like an underground stream in limestone country. Like the water, the words and images show ‘from appearing water to conspicuous fountains’, but seem to me to ally limestone country to the human body. At this remove, I take this to be the ‘gay’ part of the poem: ‘Mark these rounded slopes / With their surface fragrance of thyme and beneath / A secret system of caves and conduits; hear the springs / That spurt out everywhere with a chuckle.’
But also mark that this landscape also ‘entertain / The butterfly and the lizard’ - two life-forms which might seem the extreme opposite of each other.
This passage plays with a bit of Freud, centring on the games boys play in order to ‘receive more attention than his brothers’, whether by pleasing or teasing.
The next long passage considers what sort of person a landscape which can ‘entertain’ both butterfly and lizard, and where ‘everything can be touched or reached by walking’ might breed. The answer is, of course, the ‘inconstant ones’ ‘unable / To conceive a god whose temper-tantrums are moral / And not to be pacified by a clever line / Or a good lay.’ People who have never looked into the volcano, never confronted the immensities of the desert or the sucking traps of the jungle. Or, ‘the monstrous forms and lives / With which we have nothing, we like to hope, in common’.
The poem was written in Ischia, but surely at this point, he’s thinking of Upper Wharfedale. What, after all, could go wrong in Upper Wharfedale?
But of course things can go wrong, since the mind is ultimately incomprehensible, and without the constraints of mortal grandeur or an angry god’s threatening frown, we can end up as pimps, fences, or might just ‘ruin a fine tenor voice / For effects that bring down the house.’ Small but serious crimes and betrayals.
It takes the ‘best and worst of us’ to commit really abominable crimes, it takes granite or volcanic landscapes, or alternatively clays and gravels, where ‘soft as the earth is mankind and both / Need to be altered.’ How safe, how pleasant, by comparison is Wharfedale.
At this point, Auden does more philosophical jujitsu, denying that these mutable and hospitable limestone landscapes are simply places to hide. ‘This land is not the sweet home it looks / Nor its peace the historical calm of a site where something was settled once and for all.’ Rather, its truth is very much more challenging: ‘It has a worldly duty which in spite of itself / It does not neglect, but calls into question / All the Great Powers assume; it disturbs our rights.’
And there’s the paradox: even modesty, playfulness, mutability, limited culpability can, in certain circumstances - like in 1948, like now perhaps - be fundamentally and dangerously threatening. Even for those of us neither the best nor worst. . .
In the end, Auden concludes, the ability to endure through shameless change, even if made solely for pleasure, is the virtue which matters. ‘The blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from, / Having nothing to hide.’
Finally, after all this toil, he grants us a benediction of clarity and beauty: ‘Dear, I know nothing of / Either, but when I try to imagine a faultless love / Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur / Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.’
Why the sudden simplicity of line and meaning. Dear reader, it’s a come-on. It’s why you’ll read the poem again, why you’ll make the effort. Make the effort!