In bad times like these, poetry sometimes helps
- Last night, I turned off my computer, ignored the news all evening, reread W.H. Auden, and wept
“Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return”
— September 1, 1939, W.H. Auden
It’s ironic and also very sad how all news outlets are focusing on the same story. But what they end up telling you is not what actually is happening, but where they stand on what they think you ought to be informed about what’s happening. The media – whether new/social or legacy/mainstream – now essentially have nothing to tell you about but themselves. They … We have nothing worthwhile to say about the outside world.
The media business is a very funny thing. They/we tell you they/we keep you informed, that they/we are essential to a functioning polis or a democracy. Well, and I have some fine London gold options and cyber coins, one coin for US$100, to sell you! How ‘bout it?
I got a little sick last night, spiritually perhaps, and made myself a news-free zone.
“September 1, 1939” was and probably still is one of W.H. Auden’s most popular poems. But he grew old and outgrew it. He thought its political sentiments were too overt and egotistic. When he edited the final anthology of his own poetry, he deliberately left it out. Many fans were upset and wrote him angry, pleading letters. Imagine a Beatles collection without Yesterday.
I don’t really read poetry, I can never hear the music in it. But now approaching 60, I can understand why the elderly Auden became embarrassed with his youthful work, during his most intensely political phase. Consider the following, it’s just cringey: “All I have is a voice/To undo the folded lie”. Oh, shut the hell up!
The older and more humble Auden realises that “For poetry makes nothing happen.” It doesn’t matter, literally.
Are Hongkongers less interested in politics? Survey finds apathy abounds
The next few lines of the poem after “the folded lie” are just as bad: “The romantic lie in the brain/Of the sensual man-in-the-street/And the lie of Authority/Whose buildings grope the sky:/There is no such thing as the State/And no one exists alone;/Hunger allows no choice/To the citizen or the police;/We must love one another or die.”
The last line was worthy of a Lennon and McCartney song.
Even so, the political poem is still truthful in many places. There are, for example, the two lines that preceded the two I quoted at the beginning of this column: “I and the public know/What all schoolchildren learn,/Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return.”
Actually, we, “I and the public”, don’t necessarily know. The more educated – the public intellectual, the professor, the pundit, the politician – ought to know better but don’t. But children know. We adults think evil is only done by the OTHER side; and when our side does evil, it’s at least the lesser of two evils. Or worse, we think we do no such thing at all.
I now know why Auden’s poem was so popular. Imagine if you are a reasonably educated or well-informed person, or fancy yourself one, and you find yourself, slightly depressed, drinking alone in a dive bar, say in Wan Chai, one late afternoon. This is exactly how you would feel:
“I sit in one of the dives/On Fifty-second Street/Uncertain and afraid/As the clever hopes expire/Of a low dishonest decade:/Waves of anger and fear/Circulate over the bright/And darkened lands of the earth,/Obsessing our private lives;/The unmentionable odour of death/Offends the September night.”
