Form offers poets an objective standard to which they can aspire. This it is that offers Auden a certain control in his poem In Memory of Sigmund Freud. Form in this poem offers the following:
1. Control of public grief;
2. The ability to hold society together in the midst of public grief;
3. Assure British society of 1939 that such loss and public grief is not new;
4. Link British society of 1939 to a history of grief that goes back for centuries.
Auden begins the poem with the admission that mourning for the dead is a fact of life. In his essay “Death & Politics” from the journal First Things, editor and writer Joseph Bottum points out the importance of our remembering the dead. He writes “What I am proposing is a complete revaluation of political theory: a return to an extra-political, even metaphysical, foundation for thought about politics. Death—the death not of ourselves but of others—becomes the key for understanding human association when we grasp three propositions about death and politics:
(1) The losses human beings suffer are the deepest reason for culture,
(2) The fundamental pattern for any community is a congregation at a funeral,
(3) A healthy society requires a lively sense of the reality and continuing presence of the dead.”
The fact and acknowledgement of death obviously has an impact on a society’s moving forward in all of its endeavors, even politics. Also, he states wonderfully the following, that the “significance of life derives from the presence of the future, while the richness of life derives from the presence of the past. How we live is important only if we see the consequential future flowing toward us—beginning, always, with the fact that we will die and must prepare our children to assume the burdens of culture. How we live is thick and meaningful only if we see the momentous past, the ancient ghosts, dwelling among us—beginning, always, with the fact that our parents have died and left their corpses’ care to us. Death is the anchor for every human association, from the family all the way up to the nation-state. It provides a reason for association; it keeps us from drifting by tying us to a temporal reality larger—richer and more significant—than our individual present.”
It is with this paragraph that I will move on from. As I said just previously, Auden begins his poem with the recognition and acknowledgement that grief for the loss of someone, whether private or public (he does not state which in the opening stanza), is a fact of life.
When there are so many we shall have to mourn,
When grief has been made so public, and exposed
To the critique of a whole epoch
The frailty of our conscience and anguish . . .
What happens here is thus: in the first line we are allowed to express our grief through mourning, but because the poem’s form requires only eleven syllables and the first line is a complete thought in itself, our mourning is checked from becoming irrational. Auden also has in that first line what Joseph Bottum mentions above, including all three propositions about death and politics; and that “[d]eath is the anchor for every human association, from the family all the way up to the nation-state.” All of the so many that we have mourned and will mourn in the future is contained by the rule of the syllabic count. It is in the second line that we are told it is a public grief we are observing and as readers will be participating in. Grief is public and has exposes our frailness, our conscience and anguish to being commented upon, how we mourn; but the form again acts as a check against our anguish overflowing beyond respectable boundaries, beyond respectable expression. Grief can drive people into states of irrationality, so Auden uses quantitative verse to hold us together, encouraging us comport ourselves in a manner befitting the one who is being mourned, but also because it is right to do so. Manners are what also make a society, and especially in moments when we feel so frail and vulnerable to our emotions, that we may often allow them to control us and direct our actions.
The form Auden uses links British society of 1939 with that of ancient Greece, and every society in-between. Because society is made up by humans, who are mortal, there will be loss and grief. And because loss and grief have been at the centre of human existence since the beginning of time, Britain in 1939 ought not to feel alone, but can draw comfort by looking back and seeing that it is part of and participating in a tradition that is very vital to the survival of civilization. This linking of societies puts Britain in a community of societies that mourns its dead, that does not seek to push death away from being a fact of life.
Out of this adherence to form and this specific tradition of this specific form, Auden creates his own society of words. The poem continues,
Of whom shall we speak? For every day they die
Among us, those who were doing us some good
And knew it was never enough but
Hoped to improve a little by living.
Such was this doctor: still at eighty he wished
To think of our life from whose unruliness
So many plausible young futures
With threats or flattery as obedience,
Alcaics allows Auden the control that is necessary in this poem to control the almost-impossible-to-control, i.e. grief. In the third stanza he breaks the line at two important words, ‘unruliness’ in the second line and ‘obedience’ in the fourth; and that is exactly what happens and what Auden wanted. The form does not just break the line in these specific places, but symbolically constrains unruliness and enforces obedience to it.
“A rhyme turns an idea into law,” said Joseph Brodsky in his lecture on Auden’s September 1, 1939, and so it is with Robert Lowell’s lyric poem Waking Early Sunday Morning. It is built upon this law of rhyme and strengthened with the instruction of iambic tetrameter, for the most part. Fourteen stanzas comprise the poem, each stanza containing eight lines composed in couplets, but for a variation in the last stanza; and each stanza is its own room with its own window. Lowell explained that Marvell’s eight-line four-foot couplet stanzas hummed in his mind throughout the summer and into the fall prior to writing this poem. This kind of statement is rarely heard today, that of a poet admitting and even displaying his influence/s; too many today try to hide their predecessors away in an attic in the name of ‘originality’.
With each line and stanza, we feel Lowell fighting up against the constraints of the form he has chosen to work inside of. Like Auden’s poem, the form gives Lowell the ability to deal with such a weighty topic as spiritual despair in a clear manner, without falling all over the place, and staying in form, i.e., holding himself together, even if spiritual belief, or especially because spiritual belief, or lack thereof, cannot. He will not fall to pieces all over the place, poetically, mentally and personally. This poetical adherence is a spiritual hold or brace. And it also replaces, for lack of a better way of saying it, the Christian faith; if there is no Christian morality, at least there is a poetic morality. Things are not random in this poem. Words do not fall together and rhyme without purpose. The rhyme has a purpose: it instills in the poet the belief in a higher order that is more perfect than the everyday, i.e. the order of words. But also, the form affords Lowell to fulfill Coleridge’s definition of poetry: that is it equals the best words in the best order.
In the third stanza we see an example of Lowell breaking loose, like the Chinook salmon’s ability to jump against the current in its migration upstream to spawn before dying, yet he stays within his chosen boundaries,
Vermin run for their unstopped holes;
in some dark nook a fieldmouse rolls
a marble, hours on end, then stops;
the termite in the woodwork sleeps –
listen, the creatures of the night
obsessive, casual, sure of foot,
go on grinding, while the sun’s
daily remorseful blackout dawns.
The alert Lowell, his body fully awake, catches the actions of the creatures about him. His imagination is greedy like a dragon scouring his premises. There is so much action occurring in the poem, from vermin running around to a fieldmouse rolling a marble, to a termite in the woodworks, and other creatures of the night; and then sunrise. Because his alert imagination is ranging all around, if he had strayed beyond his chosen form, if he had written this in free verse, the tension would not be what it is – the tension between order and disorder, between lack of spiritual belief and desire to believe (in something), between the rundown world and that of the beauty of the word. It takes an imagination like this to catch what it does and to focus on these several things. Here again free as I is present. The choices and the freedom to roam and snatch up the action occurring around him is the will in action that is both industrious and playful, like the poet’s present engagement. He is ranging around, catching creatures, being specific and general. He begins the stanza with the general term vermin that could be mammals or birds that are believed to be harmful to crops, farm animals or game that carry disease and which could be foxes, rodents and insect pests. He then goes specific in naming one the smallest of the vermin, a field mouse; and then goes even smaller to a termite. Their actions have a bit of a direction, for he begins by describing them as running about outside of and going for their holes/burrows; then he tells of a field mouse in a dark nook; then the termite in the woodwork. Their actions are also in degrees as he goes from telling of their running about, to the cessation of rolling a marble to sleeping. It is imaginary to say that one knows a termite is sleeping in the woodwork.
He then tells himself and us to listen to them. Don’t just read, but listen to the poem, he appears to say. Is not that what poets have been demanding from their readers, to hear the poem and not just read it? Experience the poem, listen to the sound of the words and hear the poem as a poem, along with what is in the poem. By telling himself to listen it is also as if he is forcing himself to concentrate and not become distracted. The industriousness of the creatures reflects that of the poet and this and is shown in the next line which is a perfect line of tetrameter, obsessive, casual, sure of foot, and that last word communicates the confidence of “I”. The stresses in this line fall perfectly where they are supposed to without making it a strict, lifeless line. The beat is confident, the breath natural and the diction casual. He has obsessed over the poem and its form, meter and direction/journey. In this line one is impressed by the deftness of Lowell’s hand that makes a line like this come off easy, obeying Yeats’ dictum that the poem should look easy. “Casual elegance,” he once told Derek Walcott when the latter fixed a knot on Lowell’s tie and Lowell loosened it. And it goes on grinding into the next line.
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