Nones

Nones by WH Auden, 81 page

Written in the years immediately following the Second World War, in these poems Auden is haunted by the festival of war now concluded.

     For the present stalks abroad

     Like the past and its wronged again

     Whimper and are ignored,

     And the truth cannot be hid;

     Somebody chose their pain,

     What needn't have happened did.

If there is an overarching theme, it is the wartime triumph of technicians and social scientists.  This reaches a kind of giddy though inelegant climax in "Under Which Lyre", in which the poet cheers on the "sons of Hermes" as they quietly sabotage the works of Apollo.

     A compromise between us is

          Impossible;

     Respect perhaps but friendship never:

     Falstaff the fool confronts forever

          The prig Prince Hal.

Auden regards the arcane disenchantments of planners and bureaucrats with a skeptical eye.

     The last word on how we may live or die

          Rests today with such quiet

     Men, working too hard in rooms that are too big,

          Reducing to figure

     What is the matter, what is to be done.

And looks forward to the apocalyptic recovery of the human.

     The pantocratic riddle breaks -

          "Who are you and why?"