In Memory: "The Unmentionable Odor of Death"

(This haunting and grave poem, wrtitten by Auden about the invasion of Poland by the Nazis and considered by some to be the greatest poem of the 20th century, made the rounds--on the streets of New York and later by email--in the days immediately following the attacks eleven years ago.)


September 1, 1939
by W.H. Auden

 

I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-second street

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 odor of death

Offends the September night.

 Accurate scholarship can

Unearth the whole offence

From Luther until now

That has driven a culture mad,

Find what occurred at Linz,

What huge imago

Made a psychopathic god:

I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.  

Exiled Thucydides knew

All that a speech can say

About democracy,

And what dictators do,

The elderly rubbish they talk

To an apathetic grave;

Analyzed all in his book,

The enlightenment driven away,

The habit-forming pain

Mismanagement and grief:

We must suffer them all again.

 Into this neutral air

Where blind skyscrapers use,

Their full height to proclaim

The strength of Collective Man

Each language pours its vain

Competitive excuse:

But who can live for long

In an euphoric dream;

Out of the mirror they stare,

Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar

Cling to their average day
The lights must never go out
The music must always play.
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash

Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinski wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.  
 
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come
Repeating their morning vow:
“I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work.”
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now?
Who can reach the dead?
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To unfold the folded lie,
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.
 
Defenceless under the night

Our world in stupor lies;

Yet dotted everywhere

Ironic points of light

Flash out wherever the Just

Exchange their messages:

May I, composed like them

Of Eros and of dust,

Beleaguered by the same

Negation and despair

Show an affirming flame.