438
PARTISAN REVIEW
that of his comforters, the morality of an endangered and confused
participant speaking
to himself.
(Auden's later morality is that of a
group adviser, abstract, sentimental, and
safe~for
the adviser, at
least.)
These early poems effect a strange assimilation of machinery
and the industrial
wor~d
into a traditional, rural, almost feudal world;
the new world-view of expanding optimism rots away (as its ma–
chines rust to a halt, as its industry grinds down to perpetually lower
and poorer levels) into the cyclic pessimism of an older view. The
weight and concentration of the poems fall upon
things
(and those
great things, animals and people), in their tough, laconic, un-get-past–
able plainness: they have kept the stolid and dangerous inertia of the
objects of the sagas-the sword that snaps, the man looking at his
lopped-off leg and saying, "That was a good stroke." They gain an
uncommon plausibility from the terse understated matter-of-factness
of their treatment, the insistence (such as that found in the speech
of children1 in Mother Goose, in folk or savage verse, in dreamS)
upon the
thingness
of the words themselves. Things are vaguely
tabooish, totemistic, animistic-everything is full of
!!J;!l_na,
especially
the machines, rusting tutelary deities of the countryside in which
everything occurs: if
J
ung had read the early Auden he would have
decided that rusting machines in the country are Archetypal Images
of the Racial Unconscious. Auden's early style is rooted in the English
country; his later style, compared to it, is an air-plant in a window–
box of the cloud-city of the exiled
Wandervogel.
The early poems
are in harmony with the more primitive levels _of our experience,
levels which---.since they precede others in the life of the individual
conscious-underlie the moralistic and rationalizing levels at
which the later Auden is usually working. When we say that some
patch of an early poem seems "magical," we sometimes mean that it
works directly at levels which we are not accustomed to verbalize or
scrutinize, often because they are taken for granted. But in our
culture how much (like the flaying of Marsyas) goes on under–
far under-the level grey gaze of Reason and Taste; just as Apollo,
when he was not occupied with Knowledge, Art and Light, slithered
under the pillars of his temples in the person of a hunting snake, and
was called by his worshippers the Mouse-Slayer.
In
Look, Stranger,
and
The Dog Beneath the Skin
Auden changes
over into a second, essentially transitional stage which continues until
New Year Letter-itself
a transition from the Moral Auden to the
New Auden. It is easy to find titles or mottoes for this second stage:
