Observations placeholder
Auden, W H - September 1st, 1939
Identifier
000394
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
The youtube video has the full text and the poem being read, the text below provides some simple extracts.
The significance of the date is that on this day Hitler invaded Poland and WWII broke out. Thucydides was an honest historian, the originator of Political Realism which observes that the relationship between countries is based on strength and not which is in the right. His work is still studied in military academies.
A description of the experience
"1st September 1939" by W.H. Auden (read by Tom O'Bedlam)
selections From September 1st 1939
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 Nijinsky 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
…..
All I have is a voice
To undo 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.
The source of the experience
Auden, W HConcepts, symbols and science items
Science Items
Activities and commonsteps
Activities
Overloads
Unrequited loveSuppressions
Communing with natureLOVE
Love with visualisation
Reducing threats
Squash the big I am