“Sonnets from China” (Publication, 1967)
Year
1967
Text
Auden, W.H. Sonnets from China. In : Auden, W.H. Collected shorter poems, 1927-1957. (New York, N.Y. : Random House, 1966). (Aud12)
Type
Publication
Subjects
Literature : Occident : Great Britain : Poetry
Chronology Entries (2)
| # | Year | Text | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1939 |
Auden, W.H. Hong-Kong. In : Auden, W.H. ; Isherwood, Christopher. Journey to a war [ID D3432]. The leading characters are wise and witty; Substantial men of birth and education, With wide experience of administration, They know the manners of a modern city. Only the servants enter unexpected; Their silence has a fresh dramatic use: Here in the East the bankers have erected A worthy temple to the Comic Muse. Ten thousand miles from home and What's-Her-Name The bugle on the Late Victorian hill Puts out the soldier's light; off-stage, a war [Text in Journey to a war] Thuds like the slamming of a distant door: Each has his comic role in life to fill, Though Life be neither comic nor a game. = [Text in Sonnets from China] Thuds like the slamming of a distant door: We cannot postulate a General Will; For what we are, we have ourselves to blame. |
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| 2 | 1966 |
Auden, W.H. Sonnets from China [ID D30728]. I So from the years their gifts were showered: each Grabbed at the one it needed to survive; Bee took the politics that suit a hive, Trout finned as trout, peach moulded into peach, And were successful at their first endeavour. The hour of birth their only time in college, They were content with their precocious knowledge, To know their station and be right for ever. Till, finally, there came a childish creature On whom the years could model any feature, Fake, as chance fell, a leopard or a dove, Who by the gentlest wind was rudely shaken, Who looked for truth but always was mistaken, And envied his few friends, and chose his love. II They wondered why the fruit had been forbidden: It taught them nothing new. They hid their pride, But did not listen much when they were chidden: They knew exactly what to do outside. They left. Immediately the memory faded Of all they'd known: they could not understand The dogs now who before had always aided; The stream was dumb with whom they'd always planned. They wept and quarrelled: freedom was so wild. In front maturity as he ascended Retired like a horizon from the child, The dangers and the punishments grew greater, And the way back by angels was defended Against the poet and the legislator. III Only a smell had feelings to make known, Only an eye could point in a direction, The fountain's utterance was itself alone: He, though, by naming thought to make connection Between himself as hunter and his food; He felt the interest in his throat and found That he could send a servant to chop wood Or kiss a girl to rapture with a sound. They bred like locusts till they hid the green And edges of the world: confused and abject, A creature to his own creation subject, He shook with hate for things he'd never seen, Pined for a love abstracted from its object, And was oppressed as he had never been. IV He stayed, and was imprisoned in possession: By turns the seasons guarded his one way, The mountains chose the mother of his children. In lieu of conscience the sun ruled his day. Beyond him, his young cousins in the city Pursued their rapid and unnatural courses, Believed in nothing but were easy-going, Far less afraid of strangers than of horses. He, though, changed little, But took his colour from the earth, And grew in likeness to his fowls and cattle. The townsman thought him miserly and simple, Unhappy poets took him for the truth, And tyrants held him up as an example. V His care-free swagger was a fine invention: Life was too slow, too regular, too grave. With horse and sword he drew the girls' attention, A conquering hero, bountiful and brave, To whom teen-agers looked for liberation: At his command they left behind their mothers, Their wits were sharpened by the long migration, His camp-fires taught them all the horde were brothers. Till what he came to do was done: unwanted, Grown seedy, paunchy, pouchy, disappointed, He took to drink to screw his nerves to murder, Or sat in offices and stole, Boomed at his children about Law and Order, And hated life with heart and soul. VI He watched the stars and noted birds in flight; A river flooded or a fortress fell: He made predictions that were sometimes right; His lucky guesses were rewarded well. Falling in love with Truth before he knew Her, He rode into imaginary lands, By solitude and fasting hoped to woo Her, And mocked at those who served Her with their hands. Drawn as he was to magic and obliqueness, In Her he honestly believed, and when At last She beckoned to him he obeyed, Looked in Her eyes: awe-struck but unafraid, Saw there reflected every human weakness, And knew himself as one of many men. VII He was their servant (some say he was blind), Who moved among their faces and their things: Their feeling gathered in him like a wind And sang. They cried 'It is a God that sings', And honoured him, a person set apart, Till he grew vain, mistook for personal song The petty tremors of his mind or heart At each domestic wrong. Lines came to him no more; he had to make them (With what precision was each strophe planned): Hugging his gloom as peasants hug their land, He stalked like an assassin through the town, And glared at men because he did not like them, But trembled if one passed him with a frown. VIII He turned his field into a meeting-place, Evolved a tolerant ironic eye, Put on a mobile money-changer's face, Took up the doctrine of Equality. Strangers were hailed as brothers by his clocks, With roof and spire he built a human sky, Stored random facts in a museum box, To watch his treasure set a paper spy. All grew so fast his life was overgrown, Till he forgot what all had once been made for: He gathered into crowds but was alone, And lived expensively but did without, No more could touch the earth which he had paid for, Nor feel the love which he knew all about. IX He looked in all His wisdom from His throne Down on the humble boy who herded sheep, And sent a dove. The dove returned alone: Song put a charmed rusticity to sleep. But He had planned such future for this youth: Surely, His duty now was to compel, To count on time to bring true love of truth And, with it, gratitude. His eagle fell. It did not work: His conversation bored The boy, who yawned and whistled and made faces, And wriggled free from fatherly embraces, But with His messenger was always willing To go where it suggested, and adored, And learned from it so many ways of killing. X So an age ended, and its last deliverer died In bed, grown idle and unhappy; they were safe: The sudden shadow of a giant's enormous calf Would fall no more at dusk across their lawns outside. They slept in peace: in marshes here and there no doubt A sterile dragon lingered to a natural death, But in a year the slot had vanished from the heath; A kobold's knocking in the mountain petered out. Only the sculptors and the poets were half-sad, And the pert retinue from the magician's house Grumbled and went elsewhere. The vanquished powers were glad To be invisible and free; without remorse Struck down the silly sons who strayed into their course, And ravished the daughters, and drove the fathers mad. XI Certainly praise: let song mount again and again For life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face, For vegetal patience, for animal courage and grace: Some have been happy; some, even, were great men. But hear the morning's injured weeping and know why: Ramparts and souls have fallen; the will of the unjust Has never lacked an engine; still all princes must Employ the fairly-noble unifying lie. History opposes its grief to our buoyant song, To our hope its warning. One star has warmed to birth One puzzled species that has yet to prove its worth: The quick new West is false, and prodigious but wrong The flower-like Hundred Families who for so long In the Eighteen Provinces have modified the earth. XII Here war is harmless like a monument: A telephone is talking to a man; Flags on a map declare that troops were sent; A boy brings milk in bowls. There is a plan For living men in terror of their lives, Who thirst at nine who were to thirst at noon, Who can be lost and are, who miss their wives And, unlike an idea, can die too soon. Yet ideas can be true, although men die: For we have seen a myriad faces Ecstatic from one lie, And maps can really point to places Where life is evil now. Nanking. Dachau. XIII Far from a cultural centre he was used: Abandoned by his general and his lice, Under a padded quilt he turned to ice And vanished. He will never be perused When this campaign is tidied into books: No vital knowledge perished in that skull; His jokes were stale; like wartime, he was dull; His name is lost for ever like his looks. Though runeless, to instructions from headquarters He added meaning like a comma when He joined the dust of China, that our daughters Might keep their upright carriage, not again Be shamed before die dogs, that, where are waters, Mountains and houses, may be also men. XIV They are and suffer; that is all they do; A bandage hides the place where each is living, His knowledge of the world restricted to A treatment metal instruments are giving. They lie apart like epochs from each other (Truth in their sense is how much they can bear; It is not talk like ours but groans they smother), From us remote as plants: we stand elsewhere. For who when healthy can become a foot? Even a scratch we can't recall when cured, But are boisterous in a moment and believe Reality is never injured, cannot Imagine isolation: joy can be shared. And anger, and the idea of love. XV As evening fell the day's oppression lifted; Tall peaks came into focus; it had rained: Across wide lawns and cultured flowers drifted The conversation of the highly trained. Thin gardeners watched them pass and priced their shoes; A chauffeur waited, reading in the drive, For them to finish their exchange of views: It looked a picture of the way to live. Far off, no matter what good they intended, Two armies waited for a verbal error With well-made implements for causing pain, And on the issue of their charm depended A land laid waste with all its young men slain, Its women weeping, and its towns in terror. XVI Our global story is not yet completed. Crime, daring, commerce, chatter will go on, But, as narrators find their memory gone, Homeless, disterred, these know themselves defeated. Some could not like nor change the young and mourn for Some wounded myth that once made children good, Some lost a world they never understood, Some saw too clearly all that man was born for. Loss is their shadow-wife, Anxiety Receives them like a grand hotel, but where They may regret they must: their doom to bear Love for some far forbidden country, see A native disapprove them with a stare And Freedom s back in every door and tree. XVII Simple like all dream-wishes, they employ The elementary rhythms of the heart. Speak to our muscles of a need for joy: The dying and the lovers bound to part Hear them and have to whistle. Ever new, They mirror every change in our position, They are our evidence of how we do, The very echoes of our lost condition. Think in this year what pleased the dancers best, When Austria died, when China was forsaken, Shanghai in flames and Teruel re-taken. France put her case before the world: Partout Il y a de la joie. America addressed Mankind: Do you love me as I love you ? XVIII Chilled by the Present, its gloom and its noise, On waking we sigh for an ancient South, A warm nude age of instinctive poise, A taste of joy in an innocent mouth. At night in our huts we dream of a part In the balls of the Future: each ritual maze Has a musical plan, and a musical heart Can faultlessly follow its faultless ways. We envy streams and houses that are sure, But, doubtful, articled to error, we Were never nude and calm as a great door, And never will be faultless like our fountains: We live in freedom by necessity, A mountain people dwelling among mountains. XIX When all our apparatus of report Confirms the triumph of our enemies, Our frontier crossed, our forces in retreat, Violence pandemic like a new disease, And Wrong a charmer everywhere invited, When Generosity gets nothing done, Let us remember those who looked deserted: To-night in China let me think of one Who for ten years of drought and silence waited, Until in Muzot all his being spoke, And everything was given once for all. Awed, grateful, tired, content to die, completed, He went out in the winter night to stroke That tower as one pets an animal. XX Who needs their names? Another genus built Those dictatorial avenues and squares, Gigantic terraces, imposing stairs, Men of a sorry kennel, racked by guilt, Who wanted to persist in stone for ever: Unloved, they had to leave material traces, But these desired no statues but our faces, To dwell there incognito, glad we never Can dwell on what they suffered, loved or were. Earth grew them as a bay grows fishermen Or hills a shepherd. While they breathed, the air All breathe took on a virtue; in our blood, If we allow them, they can breathe again: Happy their wish and mild to flower and flood. XXI (To E.M. Forster) Though Italy and King's are far away, And Truth a subject only bombs discuss, Our ears unfriendly, still you speak to us, Insisting that the inner life can pay. As we dash down the slope of hate with gladness, You trip us up like an unnoticed stone, And, just when we are closeted with madness, You interrupt us like the telephone. Yes, we are Lucy, Turton, Philip: we Wish international evil, are delighted To join the jolly ranks of the benighted Where reason is denied and love ignored, But, as we swear our lie, Miss Avery Comes out into the garden with a sword. Sekundärliteratur 1985 Jean-Paul Forster : Auden's Sonnets from China is a good illustration of the nature of Auden's experimentation and of its relation to tradition. When the cycle first appeared under the title In time of war in Journey to a war, it formed the natural emotional climax of an experienc4e of disillusion and a poetical summing-up of the travel book. The sonnets deny and blur the distinction between history and discourse, past and present, rather than underline it. As is customary with sonnet sequences, Sonnets from China is not organized according to a consistent pattern. It presents a juxtaposition of pictures. This juxtaposition of what are for the most part portraits and scenes does, offer a fairly systematic survey of social and political life. If there is any order in the way the sonnets are arranged, it is social and not chronologically historical. The division into two groups of equal length would rather correspond to a distinction between sonnets dealing with ruling ideologies, masters and profiteers (sonnets I-IX) and those dealing with the victims and manipulated (sonnets X, XII-XVII). The sonnets consider in turn farmers, tyrants, soothsayers, poets, politicians, religious leaders, soldiers, wounded men in a hospital, gardeners, chauffeurs and exiles, as well as different aspects of life and social institutions. Each sonnet tells the story of a failure and there remains no doubt that the cycle is but an impressionistic survey of social and political life. Auden uses the conciseness and compactness of the sonnet form to present caricatures : striking, distorted pictures in which the distortion becomes denunciation. The poet combines past and present, ancient and modern features to create composite pictures of different sorts of life and types of men. The result is ahistorical. The first sonnet is a caricature of the Darwinian evolutionary myth, but it also shows that man escapes Darwin's determinism, though he is incapable of making use of his freedom. The fifth and eighth sonnets are caricatures of the tyrannical and liberal leaders of all times, and the twelfth of war as lived by the private soldier, who never fully understands what is really happening. Sonnets from China is one of Auden's ambitious projects and typical creations in the second half of the thirties. He has found a new way of using the sonnet form. With their style and tone akin to those of reporting, the individual poems are like hasty magazine snapshots or political cartoons : this is what the historical and political vignette has become in the cycle. The very looseness of the form becomes expressive comment when it shows that man has lost his true nature as the sonnet has lost its true character. 1991 Edward Callan : Many of these sonnets are not directly about the war in China. The poems are wartime reflections on the human condition and on the role of the artist in time of war. The first three sonnets constitute a prologue on the evolution of human consciousness. They imply that only plants and animals are innocent or good by nature, and that man may use his freedom for either good or evil as he chooses. The next seven, a retrospect of human history markedly anti-Romantic and far from Marxist in outlook, combine the evocation of a series of historical epochs with portraits of personified types who supplied successive ages with models of heroic personality : the agriculturalist, the soldier, the prophet, the poet, and so on. The Sonnet X is an sonnet on the Enlightenment. Its theme is that the Enlightenment, by banishing the mythical, the mysterious, and the illogical, prepared the way for their reappearance in the unconscious. Auden made the culmination of the retrospective survey of his own Western, intellectual heritage – a placement that gives weight to its questioning of wholly rational values (expressed elsewhere in his view that Hitler's rise in a center of humane learning cast doubt on the proposition that liberalism was self-supporting). Since this sonnet was composed in 1936, prior to Auden's visit to Spain and China, it confirms that the stages of his return to Anglicanism enumerated in Modern Canterbury Pilgrims are stated in exact sequence. The second half of Sonnets from China moves on to the immediate situation in China by way of a transitional sonnet affirming the value of song. There follows a group of sonnets dealing directly with scenes from the war, with individual sonnets devoted to the dead, the wounded, air-raids, diplomats exchanging views, and so on. |
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Cited by (1)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Zentralbibliothek Zürich | Organisation / ZB |
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