HOME TO LUNCH

In the 1958 poem which concludes the main text of Homage to Clio, Auden bade ‘Good-bye to the Mezzogiorno’ and ‘those |Who call it home’ with the wistful observation that ‘though one cannot always | Remember exactly why one has been happy, | There is no forgetting that one was’ – which makes the poem appear as much a valediction to happiness as to middle Italy. His new location was to be that ancestral ‘gothic North’ with which the poem opened.

One would think from the title of his next volume About the House (1965), and from its major opening sequence, ‘Thanksgiving for a Habitat’, which is about every room in his converted Lower Austrian farmhouse, that Auden had finally found a settled happiness pottering ‘about the house’. Home, and feeling at home, are certainly key themes of the later volumes; but the hesitation of ‘those who call it home’ indicates the provisionality Auden felt in any dwelling place. The new book's concluding poem, ‘Whitsunday in Kirchstetten’, speaks of his pleasure at having ‘come home | to lunch on my own land’, in the only property he ever owned. But even here he sees himself as a ‘metic’ (a resident alien), whose Anglo-American idiom and Anglican worship set him apart from his neighbours.

Krushchev's threat ‘We shall bury you’ may be ‘unlikely’, but the idea of supersession is persistent. The customary prayer for the dead in the local (Roman Catholic) church only serves to remind of that approaching ‘catastrophe’, personal death, he hopes to greet gracefully. As ‘Ascension Day, 1964’ has already indicated, though Pentecost celebrates the departing Christ 's promise to send the gift of tongues and the Holy Ghost as Comforter, its actuality lies in those ‘Formulae of farewell’, where ‘Absence remains | The factual loss it is’.

The first poems in ‘Thanksgiving for a Habitat’ begin, not with home comforts, but with images of that long home which has preoccupied thought from the origins of human culture. ‘The Birth of Architecture’ sees that birth built on the celebration of death, from the first line's gallery-grave (prefiguring references to Hetty Pegler 's Tump and Weland's Stithy, both prehistoric burial mounds), to the closing recognition that only self-conscious creatures, aware of death and ‘the meaning of If’, would bother to ‘construct | a second nature of tomb and temple’.