September 1

It is a curious fact that W.H. Auden is most famous for a poem he came to loathe. The last time he gave permission for September 1, 1939 to be printed, in 1964, he noted, “Mr. W.H. Auden considers [this poem] to be trash which he is ashamed to have written.” Auden wrote it just after Nazi Germany invaded Poland and the war Europe desperately hoped to avoid became unavoidable. Explaining his disavowal of it later, he said, “The whole poem, I realized, was infected with an incurable dishonesty—and must be scrapped.”

September 1, 1939 enjoyed a renaissance in the United States after September 11, 2001. Every line seemed to reverberate with tragic prescience; it was eminently quotable. “Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return” was, for some, an explanation too neat to be resisted, a pithy line that cut through the swirl of fear and sorrow and jingoism. That the rest of the poem undercuts the certainty of those two lines with an overwhelming sense of ambivalence—evil may be “bred in the bone,” a later stanza suggests—was beside the point. That Auden disowned his poem shortly after its publication was also beside the point. It was solace to a frightened and confused people who saw themselves “lost in a haunted wood/children afraid of the dark/who have never been happy or good.”

In a way, September 1, 1939 is the right poem for September 11th precisely because of its post-publication history. Auden wrote it in the wake of a traumatic event and later, when time and reflection had worked on the immediate visceral reaction, he tried to backpedal. We said and did things in the wake of September 11th, our own traumatic event, that with the benefit of hindsight and perspective we might wish to undo. Mistakes were made, as the saying went. A wounded country reacted sharply, out of fear, and buried doubt with certainty.

In related milestone news, August 2011 was the first month since the war began without an American casualty in Iraq.

September 1, 1939
by W. H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

…

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

…

(Excerpt from here.)