Chapter Poems of Poems - Study Guide by W. H. Auden

Auden uses alliteration and a typical Beowulf device to emphasize the extent of the magnification. The stanza is vague and alarmist, employing the tools and language of newspaper headlines. Freud’s intelligent work has been reduced to attention grabbing, pithy metaphors.

In the fourth stanza Auden groups together those who he presumes are doomed, they become objects of the poet’s scorn. Not only has the ‘financier’ come to the end of his productive life, it is also finished for those:

"Who, thinking, pace in slippers on the lawns

Of College Quad or Cathedral Close,

Who are born nurses, who live in shorts,

Sleeping with people and playing fives".

The tone has changed, his threats are weakened and more colloquial, less apocalyptic as he tells them "it is later than you think". He ends the stanza with an enigma - the fate for the middle-classes worrying and will end in psychosis, however, it will end - either with "mania" or a slow, burn out "fatigue".

"Lay your sleeping head, my love,…." (January 1937)

This poem is an untraditional love lyric which is not politically charged. It is about unequal relationships made immediately obvious by the fact that he is addressing his lover whilst they sleep. Thus, although this is liberating for Auden, his lover is unable to answer or question what he is being told. Furthermore the poet’s liberation is merely transient as all that the tells his lover will not be remembered or consciously registered. Initially we are presented with the dramatic and intimate cameo of the lovers lying together in bed then we are pulled away from the particular and presented with the general - a philosophical statement about love and the progression of life:

"Time and fevers burn away

Individual beauty from

Thoughtful children, and the grave

Proves the child ephemeral".

The irregular rhythm in this stanza and basically throughout the poem mimics speech modulation with the muted rhyme and meters. This is evident in the irregular trochaic rhythms of the lines that run into each other and the half rhymes that exist amongst them and contrast greatly to what we would expect of a traditional love lyric. Similarly the emotion displayed in the poem differs from the high octain rhetoric employed in the more traditional works. The first stanza ends with a paradox:

"Mortal, guilty, but to me

The entirely beautiful".

These lines could be seen as an acceptance of the mutual infidelity that Auden has mentioned at the beginning of the poem. The entirely must refer paradoxically to moral beauty as well a physical because of the presence of the "but" and in light of the "mortal, guilty".

In the second stanza Auden asserts that "Soul and body have no bounds" which is an idealistic view and one that suggests that there is no division between the soul and body - it refers to man’s duality. The whole stanza is engulfed in an almost orgasmic stupor as Auden uses words such as "enchanted", "swoon" and "vision Venus" the reader lies, post-coital with the lovers. Not only does Venus allow the