Stripping the Dead: Auden’s Appropriation of Anglo-Saxon Poetry
Stripping the Dead: Auden’s Appropriation of Anglo-Saxon Poetry
This essay will analyze a passage in Auden’s Age of Anxiety in the hope of gaining insight into the way he appropriated and modernized Anglo-Saxon poetry. I have always loved Malin’s account, early in the poem, of an RAF bombing run over Germany. Whereas most of the rest of the “Baroque Eclogue” consists of meditations and free-association put in the mouths of insufficiently differentiated characters, this passage distinguishes itself by virtue of being narrative:
Untalkative and tense, we took off
anxious into air; instruments glowed,
Dials in darkness, for dawn was not yet;
Pulses pounded; we approached our target,
Conscious in common of our closed Here
And of them out there thinking of us
In a different dream, for we die in theirs
Who kill ours and become fathers
Not tricky targets their trigger hands
Are given goals by; we began our run;
Death and damage darted at our will,
Bullets were about, blazing anger
Lunged from below, but we laid our eggs
Neatly in their nest, a nice deposit
Which instantly hatched; houses flamed in
Shuddering sheets as we shed our big
Tears on their town: we turned to come back,
But at high altitudes, hostile brains
Waited in the west, a wily flock
Vowed to vengeance in the vast morning,
- A mild morning where no marriage was,
And gravity a god greater then love-
Fierce interferers. We thought them off
But paid a price; there was pain for some.
"Why have They killed me?" Wondered Bert, our
Greenhouse gunner, forgot our answer,
Then was not with us. We watched others
Drop into death; dully we mourned each
Flare as it fell with a friend's lifetime,
While we hurried on to our home bases
To the safe smells and a sacrament
Of tea and toast. At twenty to eight I
Stepped on to grass, still with the living,
While far and near a fioritura
Of brooks and blackbirds bravely struck the
International note with no sense
Of historic truth, of time meaning
Once and for all, and my watch stuttered: -
Many have perished; more will.
Let’s start by considering how Auden’s choice of material in this passage relates to Anglo-Saxon poetry. The alliteration, driving rhythms and clashing rhythms characteristic of Anglo-Saxon poetry are very effective at conveying strain, struggle and brutality. Though the passage under consideration does not allude to any particular passage in Anglo-Saxon literature, it does describe violence, and the Anglo-Saxon poets excel at such descriptions, whether it be the hand-to-hand combat of Grendel and Beowulf or the epic pitched battle between the Old English and combined Irish and Norwegian forces in The Battle of Brunanburh. In his analysis of the Auden passage, Chris Jones explains: “Although fought with modern war-machines, the narrative of ambush and counter-ambush and the sense of tragic inevitability find direct analogues in such material as the Icelandic Sagas and the Beowulf-poet’s account of the raid at Finnesburgh” (Jones 2006, 117). Apart from brutality, the only other thematic link is the “morning chill” (morgenceald, Beowulf 3022), which tends to occur in Beowulf when nighttime atrocities are discovered in the morning. After the nighttime bombing run, Malin refers to “the vast morning,/—A mild morning where no marriage was,/And gravity a god greater then love.” Rather than dwelling on the deaths he has caused (at an alienating distance), Malin sits down to “a sacrament/Of tea and toast.” Auden may well be using the lack of morgenceald on Malin’s part to draw a contrast between up-close and personal ancient warfare and mechanized and dehumanizing contemporary warfare.
Translations of Beowulf into contemporary idiom serve as good comparative material for assessing how Auden handles the nuts and bolts of alliterative verse in contemporary English. I will compare the diction, rhetoric and syntax in the passage under consideration with those of Beowulf and several translations. The most effective translators of Anglo-Saxon poetry, Tennyson, Heaney and Murphy-Sullivan, stick almost exclusively to words of Germanic origin, however much such a restriction limits word-choice. Auden certainly favors the Germanic third of the language in Age of Anxiety, but he allows himself regular use of Latinate words: “anxious,” “instruments,” “altitudes,” “fioritura,” and “international” are some of the more egregious examples in the passage under consideration. By fitting in these non-Germanic polysyllabics, Auden updates alliterative verse to accommodate a wider range of contemporary diction. Later in Age of Anxiety, he uses such diction to travesty the impersonal officialese of bureaucrats (one of his favorite modes; see Epitaph on a Tyrant and The Unknown Citizen, for example). I understand and respect Auden’s decision to allow non-Germanic words into this all-too Germanic form—he could hardly have felt that he had revived alliterative verse in contemporary English if he did not allow himself to use two thirds of the words in the dictionary.
The Beowulf poet frequently employs ironic litotes, and Auden follows suit with the phrase “there was pain for some” (just before the account of Bert the Gunner’s death). He also uses paired adjectives to fill out a half-line (“untalkative and tense”), a common structure in Beowulf: isig ond utfus (“icy and outbound,” 33a), for example, and heah ond horngeap (“high and horn-gabled,” 82a). Auden, however, uses no kennings in this passage and very few in the poem as a whole, most likely because they are inescapably archaic. Though he had, in fact, updated the Beowulf kenning ecghete (“sword-hate,” 70b and 1738a) as “gun-anger” in Paid on Both Sides, here we find only “blazing anger.” An inflected language, Anglo-Saxon allows a poet to separate a noun from its qualifiers (adjectives or nouns in apposition) without grammatical confusion. Apposition does appear frequently in contemporary English, though we enjoy far less flexibility with it and tend to put the qualifiers immediately after the nouns they restate. In Age of Anxiety Auden prefers this contiguous or “concatenated” type of apposition and only places a qualifying noun at some distance from its antecedent noun when there is no risk of ambiguity. He uses apposition twice in the following sentence, with the climactic phrase (“fierce interferers”) occurring at the end and some distance from what it qualifies: “. . . hostile brains /Waited in the west, a wily flock/Vowed to vengeance in the vast morning,/—A mild morning where no marriage was,/And gravity a god greater then love—/Fierce interferers.” Though these “interferers” are three full lines from what they qualify (“flock”), there is no risk here that the reader will take them as an apposition for some other noun. We also find synecdoche in this passage, a device common in ancient epic in general and Beowulf in particular, where we find Grendel biting a man’s “bone-locks,” and Beowulf and Grendel reduced to their hands in the phrase “grip to grip.” In the Auden passage the reduction of the German airmen to “hostile brains” through synecdoche materializes (and thus temporarily dehumanizes) them. At this point the enemy are still simply “them out There.” The impersonal nature of contemporary warfare is, in fact, one of the major themes of the passage.
Though eager to adopt the Anglo-Saxon style of apposition in cases where there is no risk of ambiguity, Auden does not use the syntactic inversions common to Anglo-Saxon poetry, most likely because 1.) they would have sounded archaic and poetical and thus alienated his audience, and 2.) they would have introduced grammatical ambiguity and thus confused his audience. He does, however, compress contemporary idiom to fit the demands of the form: “dawn was not yet”, for example, compresses the inefficient impersonal construction: “it was not yet dawn.” In sum, though the passage under consideration preserves rhetorical and syntactic hallmarks of Anglo-Saxon poetry, the diction is entirely contemporary. As Jones puts it, “The appropriation here is total. . . Lexically, there is nothing in the above passage which would indicate that something ancient underlies this poetry” (Jones 2006, 118).
This passage, I believe, gives us an example of Auden’s standard method for appropriating and rejuvenating old poetic forms. This theory finds corroboration in the following passage in which Auden (most likely but maybe Pearson) sums up the legacy of Milton’s poetry:
“Milton’s influence on later poets was principally through his diction, which is precisely the element in his style which, when the subject does not demand it, is most likely to fall into pomposity. Few, if any, of them made use of his poetic syntax, his extraordinary way of arranging his clauses. . . This is a pity, because syntax, the structural element in style, is adaptable to different subjects and different sensibilities in a way that diction is not” (Auden and Pearson 1950, Vol. 3, xvi).
Thus I can conclude, with some confidence, that Auden’s approach to appropriating and rejuvenating forms of ancient poetry was as follows—1.) replicate the rhythms (and rhyme schemes if applicable), 2.) steal as much of the syntax as current idiom will allow, 3.) use only contemporary diction. I like this method and what it implies: first, that vocabulary is a river flowing through our language: some words evaporate or obsolesce in fetid lagoons; others ride tributaries into the main current. Vital poetry will always draw water from the river of its own time. Second, that the poetic forms our language begat or adopted (often in an altered state) are shapes into which this river water can be poured, and they are eternal. They may pass out of use but they are always there waiting to be revitalized with living idiom.
Works Cited
Auden, W. H. and Pearson, N.H. 1950. Poets of the English Language. Vol 3: Milton to
Goldsmith. The Viking Press: New York.
Jones, Chris. 2006. Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry.
Oxford University Press: Oxford.
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Aaron Poochigian
Last edited by Aaron Poochigian; 04-09-2016 at 06:12 AM.
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