“it was good to be alive/but sometimes that can slip away as fast/as any fingers through your hands”

For Poetry Monday, another Auden:

In Time of War XIV, W.H. Auden

Yes, we are going to suffer, now; the sky
Throbs like a feverish forehead; pain is real;
The groping searchlights suddenly reveal
The little natures that will make us cry,

Who never quite believed they could exist,
Not where we were. They take us by surprise
Like ugly long-forgotten memories,
And like a conscience all the guns resist.

Behind each sociable home-loving eye
The private massacres are taking place;
All Women, Jews, the Rich, the Human Race.

The mountains cannot judge us when we lie:
We dwell upon the earth; the earth obeys
The intelligent and evil till they die.


Part of a sonnet cycle written for a travel book, Journey to a War (1939) by Auden and Christopher Isherwood, in which they documented the conditions at the front of the Sino-Japanese War. This was not his first poem about a war he observed first-hand (see “Spain 1936”) nor his first collaborative travel book (see Letters from Iceland), but the cycle as a whole is possibly his best work from the 1930s. He extensively revised the cycle when he started including it in his collections (and dropped the verse commentary appended in Journey), but this is from the original version.

---L.

Subject quote from Not Alone, Patty Griffin.