“The Cave of Making”

In my reading this week, I ran across the passage below in a long poem, “The Cave of Making” by W. H. Auden. It is subtitled “In Memoriam Louis Macneice,” and I found the text in Selected Poetry of W. H. Auden, Second Edition (Modern Library, 1970).

…Friends we became by personal
        choice, but fate had already
made us neighbors. …Though neither of our dads, like Horace’s
        wiped his nose on his forearm,
neither was porphyry-born, and our ancestors probably
        were among those plentiful subjects
it cost less money to murder. Born so, both of us
        became self-conscious at a moment
when locomotives were named after knights in Malory,
        Science to school boys was known as
Stinks, and the Manor still was politically numinous:
        both watched with mixed feelings
the sack of Silence, the churches empty, the cavalry
        go, the Cosmic Model
become German, and any faith if we had it, in immanent
        virtue died. More than ever
life-out-there is goodly, miraculous, lovable,
        but we shan’t, not since Stalin and Hitler,
trust ourselves ever again: we know that, subjectively,
        all is possible. . . .

He doesn’t not mean that last line in a positive sense, obviously. Not a good American optimist.

But what stopped me about this passage was the thought that I can never really comprehend the world these men lost; the world those High Modernists Eliot and Pound were trying so desperately to reconstruct. Those men, as Mark Jarman points out in his essay “Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Possum: the Americanness of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot” (which I found in The Secret of Poetry [Story Line Press, 2001]), perhaps the last to think the Poet had that much power, failed. Pound opted for Fascism and madness, Eliot retreated into traditional Catholicism.

In fact Macneice and Auden were a generation younger; they were young Turks who rejected Eliot and Pound as too vulgar and American. They wanted to establish their own turf. And yet, it seems to me that in these lines, Auden is associating himself with the time before “the sack of Silence,” the death of God, a time before the world fragmented.

As I have said many times, I was born of that fragmented world. I was born during the Battle of Iwo Jima and the Firebombing of Dresden. My birth was practically co-eval with the dropping of the Atomic Bomb, the ultimate fragmenter. I have never known a time when any atrocity was impossible.

On top of that, I was born female.

So I can never know what it was that these men lost, except perhaps in reading novels and 19th Century British poetry.

I have nothing more profound to say. Just life is change. The old order passes. Dylan songs go out of style and then become relevant again.

On the other hand, not everybody was all that well served by the tidy European world order. For one thing, Alicia Ostriker says the death of God came as a bit of a relief to some women poets. That old order tended to keep them pretty well repressed.

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I am off in a few minutes for a three-day retreat. Am not sure how much access I’ll have to wi-fi so things may be pretty quiet here until about Tuesday or so.