Tones of Voice

DAMIAN GRANT

‘The characteristic style of “Modern” poetry is an intimate tone of voice’ wrote Auden in The Dyer’s Hand. He created this intimateness very deliberately in his last volume, About the House (1966), with its domestic and occasional themes; and if this is less pronounced in the new volume City Without WaZW (though several of the poems are in quite the same key: particularly the ‘Five Occasional Pieces’, one of them an elegy to a housekeeper ‘harder to replace than a lover’) still the subtle adjustment of tone of voice is one of the most obvious features. The title poem is almost an exercise in contrasting tones, as one voice launches into confident criticism of ‘the functional/ Hobbesian Man’ rising to a rhetorical climax

if all has gone phut in the future we paint, where, vast and vacant, venomous areas surround the small sporadic patches of fen or forest that give food and shelter

to be interrupted by another ‘sharp voice’ which reproaches him for playing ‘Jeremiah-cum-Juvenal’ ; and the argument between these two is cut short by a bored third voice : ‘ “Go to sleep now for God’s sake!/You both will feel better by breakfast time” ’.

It was her tone of voice that attracted Auden to Marianne Moore’s poetry, despite his initial incomprehension, and there is a warm poem here in honour of her 80th birthday that celebrates her created ‘garden’ (‘where it is human/to sit’) with conscious famili- arity

For poems, dolphin-graceful as carts from Sweden, OUT thank-you should be a right good salvo of barks: it’s much too muffled to say ‘how well and with what unfreckled integrity it has all been done.’

It is certainly true that the relaxed tone involves some loss. The lyrical and rhetorical strains in Auden are for the most part ‘muffled’, as if the urbane intelligence is holding the imagination on too tight a rein, the detachment barely affording the poem sufficient energy to realize itself. Auden wrote in About rhe House of a bird singing ‘formless fragments/of his real tune’, and there is a similar principle of disintegration at work in poems like ‘Profile’ (a series of abrupt views of himself:

Vain? Not very, except about his knowledge of metre and his friends.)

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Tones of Voice 197

and the hundred or so ‘Marginalia’: His thoughts pottered from verses to sex to God without punctuation.

-without much purpose, either. This is the kind of self-indulgent rambling Auden has always castigated, and outlawed from the ‘closed system’ of the poem.

But most often the cultivated self-consciousness brings its pecuIiar rewards. For one thing, Auden is a ‘keep-fit poet’ and follows the fortunes of language with professional interest :

Ever since observation taught me temptation Is a matter of timing, I’ve tried To clothe my fiction in up-to-date diction, The contemporary jargon of Pride.

The poet as an old dog must learn new tricks. And the result is some poems that must be included among his best. ‘Amor Loci’ is a miniature ‘Limestone Landscape’, providing the ‘real focus’ Auden works best with:

Here and there a tough chimney still towers over dejected masonry, moss, decomposed machines.

Auden’s richest poems are typically compounded of what he had Caliban describe to the Audience as ‘the terrible mess that this. particularized life, which we have so futilely attempted to tidy, sullenly insists on leaving behind it’; ‘River Profile’ takes up this. clutter of nouns in a strong current of meaning. ‘Ode to Terminus’ reduces the cosmos to an imaginable scale (‘galaxies/bolt like panicking mobs’) and ‘Insignificant Elephants’, somewhat remini- scent of ‘Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’, deals obscurely with the natural phenomenon of faith. ‘Prologue at Sixty’ is a generous, human poem (again alive with the spirit of place; the Austrian place; in his ‘numinous map’ where

. . . at harvest time chugging tractors, child-driven, shamble away down sheltered lanes)

in which Auden meditates his place in ‘the anxious species to which I belong’ and faces without evasion-or sentiment-the fact of death: death that deepens ‘Forty Years On’ too, as the old rogue Autolycus confesses his disturbing dream.

. . . For three nights running

of a suave afternoon in Fall. I am standing on high ground

a plain, run smoothly by Jaguar farmers. In the enloignment,

now I have had the same dream

looking out westward over

a-glitter in the whelking sun,

198 Critical QuarterZy a sheer black cwf concludes the vista. At its base I see,

the mouth of a cave by which (I know in my dream) I am to

its roof so low it will need an awkward duck to make it.

1 ask when I awake. Why should it be? When has Autolycus

black, shaped like a bell-tent,

make my final exit,

‘Well, will that be so shaming?

ever solemned himself? Death’s pale flag is tentatively advanced elsewhere in the volume, but with no gesture of surrender. The tone of voice is as alert as ever; Auden will have some call for his real tune yet.

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