THE SUBURB OF DISSENT

In 1939 Auden's decision to settle in the United States had seemed to fix on some final frame of reference from which to consider the contemporary world. In renouncing England, however, he was seeking not a place to put down but, on the contrary, one in which to ‘live deliberately without roots’. The imagery of passing-through pervades his post-war volumes, whether the Irish transit lounge of ‘Air Port’ in Nones (1951) – later retitled with even greater insistence ‘In Transit’ – or the through-train of ‘A Permanent Way’ in The Shield of Achilles (1955), which permits the luxury of daydreaming about settling in places where one knows the train doesn't stop. As the title suggests, the train symbolizes the kind of provisional permanence which is all Auden thought possible for mortal creatures (and all he desired). The ‘mixed feelings’ of all these volumes are signalled by ‘In Praise of Limestone’, the second poem in Nones, which turns the limestone landscapes of his childhood into a paysage moralisé of the modern condition:

There is a kind of metaphysical punning in that dissoluteness and inconstancy, recalling the ‘water | Running away in the dark’ which had woken the ‘Secret Agent’ in 1928 to his own mortal insecurity. Landscapes of granite or gravel may summon potential Saints and Caesars to their destinies and the ocean call the reckless to the solitude and death that frees them. But this limestone landscape is not itself ‘the sweet home that it looks, |Nor its peace the historical calm of a site |Where something was settled once and for all’. Nothing is settled in a landscape whose primary dimension is not space (as it would be in America) but time, embodying a storied antiquity which, though here clearly Italian, recalls such English locations of his youth as the moors near Hadrian's Wall of New Year Letter. These became, by association with the felicitously named river Eden, a symbol of the ‘original address’ from which ‘Man faulted into consciousness’, thereby founding civil life.