Six years later, and the piece of writing that best asserts itself in the still-roiling wake of the Trade Center tragedies was composed almost sixty years earlier, not long after Hitler’s tanks started rolling freely over Eastern Europe.
The poem that I continue to find most apt is Auden’s “September 1, 1939.” I’m not alone–many turned to it immediately after the disaster. Even composed over an entirely different set of generating events, the poem is a remarkably prescient take on the force of collective and individual griefs, and on the emotional spectrum possible in a world capable of harboring intolerable acts.
Eric McHenry wrote an excellent piece for Slate about the poem. About suffering, he notes:
“Tragedy sends people to poetry. “Suffering is exact,” Philip Larkin wrote, but the vocabulary of consolation is loaded with abstraction and clich??, as anyone who has tried to write a sympathy note in the past week knows. Naturally, there’s a certain comfort in pillowy, familiar phrases–”This too shall pass,” “Our hearts are with you”–but living through a day like Sept. 11, and listening to all the subsequent cant from public figures and TV personalities, can leave people craving language that’s as precise as their pain.”
Enter Auden, and his precision. In seeking comfort, the poem-as-salve yields. But it is astonishing to consider how Auden’s nervy tone–which must have fit the circumstances of the poem’s creation and his times–also hews to the heart of our 21st century experience.
The famous line (and in Auden’s own opinion, the poem’s crutch) “we must love one another or die” has invited criticism for it’s ostentatious sentimentality; it is also a provocative declarative in a time of grief. Auden revised the line later to say “we must love one another and die”–an entirely different meaning–before giving up on the poem for many years. Eventually the poem, with the original line, found favor with Auden again.
The power of that confident, declarative voice in the poem (the one that even Auden himself was skeptical of) continues to persuade me on this day, continues to act like a buoy by which we might strike a course. I think part of that effect also comes from a sense of responsibility taken in the final stanza:
Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
of Eros and of dust
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
I take the “affirming flame” as more than putting a plastic American flag in the window of my car–I take it as an effort to repair. I take it as a step past the guilt of existing in the same moment as a travesty of a terrible scale. It is an act even as “defenseless under the night / our world in stupor lies.” Even as we continually shuffle along “beleaguered by the same / negation.” It is a suggestion that we continue to be capable of more than grief.