16
THE MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW
When baby is hungry
'Tis best not to wake.
Thy mother is crying,
Thy dad's on the dole:
Two shillings a week is
The price of a soul.1'
From these caustic but relatively indirect
methods of expressing discontent with the
establishment, we turn to the poetry of sheer
invective. First, in W. H. Auden, the major
poetic voice of the decade, who, though occasionally adopting disengaged leftist poses
in his poems in the thirties, wrote very little
that can be designated unequivocally communistic.'7 "A Communist to Others," in
spite of its title, is not unequivocally what it
purports to be. It contains some good invective, however, which Monroe Spears compared with Robert Burns's and which was
praised in its own day by John Cornford,
who singled out two of its most ugly stanzas
for special recommendation. In one of these,
the poet speaks of the wealthy pillars of the
establishment:
Let fever sweat them till they tremble
Cramp rack their limbs till they resemble
Cartoons by Goya:
Their daughters sterile be in rut,
May cancer rot their herring gut,
The circular madness on them shut,
Or paranoia.8s
Spender called the poem "an exercise in entering into a point of view not his own";19
Auden, later, called it rubbish.20
The poetry of Auden, its techniques and
attitudes, is echoed by his contemporaries
throughout the decade and beyond it. Although he is not himself significant as a canvasser or protester, the occasional places
where he attacks the establishment serve as
models for others in the decade. In "Get
There If You Can," in the rhythms of
" Collected Poems, p. 140.
1 See Monroe Spears, The Poetry of W. H.
Auden: The Disenchanted Island (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 87.
8 Look, Stranger! (London: Faber and Faber,
1936), p. 37.
1 Quoted in Spears, p. 86.
" Spears, p. 154. Robin Skelton reports that this
poem and four others, Auden now considers to be
"trash which he is ashamed to have written"
(Poetry of the Thirties, p. 40.)
"Locksley Hall" and Kipling, Auden draws
up the lines, naming the enemies and the allies, "they" and "we," and feeds on the vengeance yet to come:
S.. in friendly fireside circle, sit and listen
for the crash
Meaning that the mob has realized something's up, and start to smash...21
-the lines that give William Empson his
cue, in "Just a Smack at Auden," for the refrain "Waiting for the end, boys, waiting for
the end."22 Some youthful verses of Gavin
Ewart, who has picked up the cavalier tone
and part of the spy-game motif of his model,
are also a bit of a smack at Auden:
Every minute scouts give signals, come
reporting what they've seen
"Captain Ferguson is putting." "Undermine
the 18th green."23
The title, "Audenesque for an Imitation," is
an unnecessary indication of the indebtedness. Ewart's "Political Poem" incurs a similar debt in the image of the nurse, though
not in the opening catachresis:
O Communists with gradual inevitable
chemical action
Turning this blue litmus people red,
As potent as acid, the good, we believe you
have got it.
We believe that you are our enormous nurse
Helping us not to cry in the dark, not to
steal sweets,
Kindly to many, a saviour of rearrangement.24
The rhythm of the last line quoted echoes
that of the end of Auden's "Petition."
A poem of Auden's which attacked Lord
Beaverbrook leads the way for a number of
other poets to attack the press lords. Auden
writes:
"2Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1930),
p. 75.
SCollected Poems (New York: Harvest Book,
1956), p. 62. There is actually more anticipation
of "the end" in the early poems of Louis MacNeice.
" Poems and Songs, p. 12. (Captain Ferguson is
a mysterious figure, named in Auden's "Taller today we remember similar evenings," Poems, p. 82.)
Rex Warner goes one up with a Colonel Humphries, equally mysterious, in "Chorus," Poems
(London: Boriswood, 1937), p. 57.
4 Poems and Songs, p. 31.
