Friday, December 2, 2016

But Then We Were Children





My poetry-only Advent has never been about poems specifically relating to the season, or even particularly religious poetry. I like religious poetry and seek it out, but other poetry works just as well for me. If it takes the top of my head off, to paraphrase Emily Dickinson, it's good enough for me.

Today, however, I am on an Advent message and will share some lines from W.H. Auden's marvelous work, For the Time Being, a "Christmas Oratorio" which was never actually set to music. This long poem covers the story from before the Annunciation through the Flight into Egypt. Even though it was never fully performed, either spoken or sung, the reader can still hear voices raised in song, can still see movement of characters across a stage. Or maybe it's just my imagination.

The piece I am sharing today is from the first section in which Caesar's world is portrayed, and there is no better passage in all literature that so well describes the utter and endless tedium of a world without Christ. Auden plays with time so that modern references are intertwined with ancient ones. He plays with mood as well, transposing his 20th Century angst with the overwrought Empire of the 1st Century. This "dark night of the soul" is as easily viewed in any godless world or person.

But it was not entirely godless. God's people were there with "the fern's devotion to spatial necessity," going through some sort of motion. It was more that any reaching toward God had been so worn thin by reaching elsewhere. Sound familiar?

The Narrator of the oratorio:

If on account of the political situation,
There are quite a number of homes without roofs, and men
Lying about in the countryside neither drunk nor asleep,
If all sailings have been cancelled until further notice,
If it's unwise now to say much in letters, and if,
Under the subnormal temperatures prevailing,
The two sexes are at present the weak and the strong,
That is not at all unusual for this time of year.
If that were all, we should know how to manage. Flood, fire,
The desiccation of grasslands, restraint of princes,
Piracy on the high seas, physical pain and fiscal grief,
These after all are our familiar tribulations,
And we have been through them all before, many, many times.
As events which belong to the natural world where
The occupation of space is the real final fact
And time turns itself in an obedient circle,
They occur again and again but only to pass
Again and again into formal opposites,
From sword to ploughshare, coffin to cradle, war to work,
So that, taking the bad with the good, the pattern composed
By the ten thousand odd things that can possibly happen
Is permanent in a general average way.

Till lately we knew of no other, and between us we seemed
To have what it took -- the adrenal courage of the tiger,
The chameleon's discretion, the modesty of the doe,
Or the fern's devotion to spatial necessity:
To practice one's specific civil virtue was not
So impossible after all; to cut our losses
And bury our dead was really quite easy: That was why
We were always able to say:"We are children of God
And our Father has never forsaken His People."

But then we were children: That was a moment ago,
Before an outrageous novelty had been introduced
Into our lives. Why were we never warned? Perhaps we were.

More about Auden here  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/w-h-auden



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