Review: W. H. Auden: Poems Selected By John Fuller

This collection of 60-odd of W. H. Auden’s poems selects roughly two poems for each year of his writing life, beginning with The Watershed written in 1927 when Auden was 20. A watershed is a threshold, but it is also a curiously scientific term. Auden describes a watery, industrialised landscape, “snatches of tram line running to the wood”, although perhaps its greatest days are over, the old machinery lying in “flooded workings” like a ruin in a neoclassical painting, a reminder of civilisation come and gone.

That interest in the empirical — engineering, biology, physics, geology and particularly geomorphology — continues throughout this selection, belying the fact that Auden studied biology at Oxford, “our first major poet to have a scientific education”, Oxford scholar John Fuller writes in the intro. Auden turns such concepts to investigate the subterranean forces of human nature. The first poet to catch my attention, Taller To-day, takes place somewhere where “the brook runs over the gravel, far from the glacier” but otherwise summons a yearning for an absent companion. The watersheds of the first poem are present again in Shut Your Eyes And Open Your Mouth, but now the thresholds to cross or transgress are the features of lover’s face. Auden was queer and in the poem’s “ill-fed prisoner” and “tongue’s soft advance, so longed for” you can feel perhaps the relief of intimacy enjoyed freely.

That sensuality surfaces again in A Summer Night, in which the poet enjoys a warm evening with friends and lovers, “enchanted as the flowers/the opening light draws out of hiding”, but now there is a political and ethical concern too. “What doubtful act allows/Our freedom in this English house,” the poet wonders, as violence threatens in Europe where “Churches and power stations lie/alike among earth’s fixtures” (the poem was written in 1933). Later Auden addresses the role of poetry in such a world, in In Memory Of W. B Yeats, where he decides that “poetry makes nothing happen: it survives/In the valley of its saying … it survives,/A way of happening, a mouth”.

Elsewhere the collection introduces Auden’s interest in the delights of nature, such as in On This Island, where on a chalk coastline:

the shingle scrambles after the suck-

ing surf, and the gull lodges

A moment on its sheer side.

Those geological themes reach their apotheosis in two later poems. In Praise Of Limestone is an extended love letter to the bedrock of the Pennines where Auden spent much of his early life, a gentle and moderate landscape where “the best and worst never stayed here long”, and “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”. River Profile does exactly that, following the path of a river from its headwaters, “thundering/Head-on collisions of cloud and rock”, through “crags that nauntle heaven”, until it becomes “of a size to be named”, which Auden humorously notes as “cause of/dirty in-fighting between rival agencies”. Finally it reaches the coastal flood plains, where it “disintegrates”, “wearies to its final//act of surrender, effacement, atonement” in “non-country,/image of death”.

Often these poems are difficult. The lean towards the rational and esoteric — the modernity of it all — often thrills with strangeness, and at other times obscures. But then there’s a poem like Since, an unbearably tender and warm reminiscence of a past love, that begins with the poet frying sausages in a pan:

I abruptly

felt under fingers

thirty years younger the rim

of a steering-wheel

Auden goes onto recall a glorious drive across the countryside:

we raced in clouds of white dust,

and geese fled screaming

as we missed them by inches

Later the poet and his companion bed in an inn, sleeping “to the sound of a river/swabbling through a gorge” (I linger over the gorgeous old English words). Although the lover is gone, the poet finds that “round your image/there is no fog, and “the Earth/can still astonish”. The poem ends with him humorously taking solace in his neighbours, “obesity/and a little fame”. I enjoyed Auden best when he finds that astonishment and humour in his life.

Gay rating: 3/5 for queer relationships, sex and themes.