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.)

• 10 minutes of free parking
• A glance around your living room for the cigarettes I know you still smoke
• 2 sets plastic cutlery; patch of roped-off grass
• A concord grape that may not have been for sampling
• Blacked-out windows of a black Suburban for lipstick application
• A look long enough to provoke a “Can I help you?” from a Matthew McConaghey lookalike on Lexington Avenue, who upon boarding a crosstown bus was revealed not to be Matthew McConaghey

Every time I walk through Astoria Park I’m struck by the diversity of activities and people pursuing them. There are dads in t-shirts with the sleeves cut off huffing and puffing and doing that dad-getting-back-in-shape type of jogging where the motion is largely up and down rather than forward. Dad is usually being outstripped by his three-year-old on a tricycle.

A young blond mom in yoga pants powerwalks with aggressive swinging of the hips, accompanied by her small daughter on a scooter in a Barbie helmet who is in the middle of saying “See when you scream at me I just get angry” and the mom is responding “See I scream at you because” and I really want to hear the end of that exchange but they are powerwalking and scootering too fast.

A group of kids are monopolizing the water fountain, filling balloon after balloon with water as a line of sweaty adults hold back their desire for a slurp of water and/or inability to see someone cut a line without barking “hey! you see this line?” because the kids are cute in their excitement about the water balloon project. The project turns out not to be a water balloon fight; they are using the balloons as vessels, filling them, carefully carrying them to a nearby bench, and emptying them into a plastic container, its purpose endlessly absorbing to these girls and completely inaccessible to the waiting adults. Eventually a smiling South Asian man rides by on a bike, assesses the situation, doubles back and asks the girls to let others have a turn.

Hot young things who walk in pairs, their leggings and skintight tops showing off hourglass shapes that would make Kim Kardashian jealous, their ponytails sleek, and their conversations along the lines of “but then Tyler came to her party, and he showed up totally drunk, and” but again we’ve walked past and we’ll never know if Tyler is a boyfriend, cousin, or what, and if his behavior is a serious continuing issue, or not that big of a deal.

50s-ish women with visors and fanny packs walk-and-talk, discussing the rise and fall of neighborhoods. 70s-ish men sit on the benches at the brow of the park, faces to the setting sun.

Inside the track, people do calisthenics and crunches. Some of them work in pairs. You can always borrow someone else’s partner’s encouragement if you need help getting to that 10th sit-up. “Ya feeling this, right? Ya always feel the sit-ups. How ya know they’re good for you.”

Inside the track, on the field, the “No Ball Games” sign is being disregarded with joyous abandon. There are at least five soccer games going on. To my delight I recognize a group of older men playing SPUD and I’m immediately transported to the field behind my grandmother’s house, my cousins and I spelling out giant steps, S-P-U-D SPUD, stretching one leg out until our shorts threatened to rip, pegging each other as hard as we could.

Mainly it’s soccer though, and there’s always some guys in striped cook’s pants, and some guys in undershirts, gym shorts and dark dress socks, their belt, suit jacket and pants folded neatly on the edge of the field. The ball games add a hazard to jogging around the track, because at any moment you could take a ball to the face, or to the stomach, or worse, to the behind, and then all the kids shriek with laughter and you hear “She got hit in the butt!” in four different languages.

But the hazard is worth it because the players kick the balls high high high, since they don’t have much lateral space to work with, and they arc beautifully, moving more slowly than would seem possible, and the evening light is so soft and clear that you can see the pattern of stitches turning over and over as the ball traces an elegant curve against the angles of the Triborough Bridge, gathers speed on the way down, and thwomps a helpless jogger. “Sorry, sorry!” all the players call out, and you can tell they are, but they can’t stop playing because they are having so much fun, this is so wonderful, the fresh air blowing off the river, the aforementioned evening light, the day ending with some light competition and vigorous moving about and camaraderie.

People of all shapes, sizes, races, income levels, are out of doors and breaking a sweat together. I have profound thoughts about America and melting pots, about neighborhoods, about community, about diversity, about fitness and fresh air, to the point that I think I should start taking a tape recorder with me to the park to preserve these observations, because they never sound as profound by the time I get home and write them down.

I feel a surge of affection for Astoria and for New York as I trot around the track, watching. This leads me to another profound thought, this one about New York’s boundless capacity for new life, new stories, its endless ability to absorb and embrace and make you its own.