Poem of the week: Poem XVII by WH Auden

Poem XVII

This lunar beauty
Has no history
Is complete and early;
If beauty later
Bear any feature
It had a lover
And is another.

This like a dream
Keeps other time
And daytime is
The loss of this;
For time is inches
And the heart’s changes
Where ghost has haunted
Lost and wanted.

But this was never
A ghost’s endeavour
Nor finished this,
Was ghost at ease;
And till it pass
Love shall not near
The sweetness here
Nor sorrow take
His endless look.

Commenting on Auden’s poetic development in the early 1930s, Edward Mendelson, editor of the magisterial Princeton University Press edition of the Complete Works quotes a review of a poetry collection by Louise Bogan, where Auden provides an undercover description of his own younger practice. “Poems at this stage,” Auden wrote, “are usually short, made up of magical lyric phrases which seem to rise involuntarily to the consciousness.” If there could be a better short summary of Poem XVII than “magical lyric phrases” I don’t know what it could be. The first few lines immediately conjure a vision of bright moonlight on the words and the page; the whole poem works its lyrical magic before the words are properly understood. Part of me always wants to leave it there, radiant and beyond interpretation. But, of course, Auden as usual has something complex and interesting to say, and a superb technique with which to say it.

At first glance, the poem looks formal. It might be a 20th-century Elizabethan song, with verses cut to a regular length. Only they’re not: the first verse has seven lines, the second eight, the third nine – two odd numbers bookending an even one. It’s as if even at the most basic level of form, there’d been a decision both to reflect stasis – the immutable “lunar beauty”– and the movement of time. In the crucial line in verse two, “time is inches”, and one might add that time is also the pulse of the poem, the dimeter rhythm carrying the thought from line to line, the sonic pattern of assertions and echoes.

The rhymes are arranged mostly in triplets and couplets. Verse one begins with a triplet, “beauty”, “history” and “early” connected melodically by their -y endings. The second verse, unusually, has a quatrain at its core: “is”, “this”, “inches”, “changes”. It resembles a string quartet with the deeper notes sounding out from the twinned two-syllable words. In the last verse, the end-words tend to rhyme more closely, even in the triplet’s consonantal cluster, “this”, “ease”, “pass”. In the last couplet “take” and “look” have the click of a lock that might either close or open the poem. As important to the melody is the variation of feminine and masculine line endings. All the endings in verse one are feminine. In the last verse only the first two are. Whether or not this fluidity has the effect of gendering and re-gendering the poem, it sets up a tension between a “dying fall” in the cadence and an assertive stress.

Although the adjective “lunar” is ambiguous, it’s difficult for the reader not to imagine the presence of either the moon or a moonlit object. If an object, what could it be, since it “has no history / is complete and early”? Some extremely ancient artefact? A stone? A very youthful face? A poem from two decades later, Nocturne 1, is an interesting subject for comparison. This is definitely a poem with a moon in it, and an argument about whether the moon is best seen as “goddess” or “faceless dynamo”. Auden in his maturity seeks balance: he reduces the lyricism, and some of the magic, but powerfully finds a counter-image, with the power to banish “my world, the private motor-car / And all the engines of the state”. The moon in “this lunar beauty”’ – if we insist on one “– is certainly not the woman she is in Nocturne 1. Imagine it embodied, and we might see the unusual figure of a moon-god.

Appearing at the end of verse two, the ghost has a particular significance. Auden’s phrase “family ghosts” (also referenced in Mendelson’s introduction) represented for the poet the psychological limitations inherited from parents and upbringing. Might the ghost in the context be a symbol of rejected, but to some degree internalised, disapproval of same-sex love? The syntax is difficult to read here. Is it “the heart’s changes” or the ghost that is “lost and wanted”? Has the haunting caused the heart’s changes? The shadows of loss and wanting are strongly cast, and perhaps continue, against the ghost’s will, in verse three, but this is a phase that seemingly will pass.

Meanwhile, a protective circle is drawn round the beauty of the lover, sealing it from censure, shame, regret. In the transcendent moment of adoration, Eros may be a transgression, and the last four lines, part incantation, part blessing, command love not to “near / the sweetness here”. As at the beginning of the poem, the “lunar beauty” exemplifies only itself.

The poem was probably written in April 1930. Among the subsequent small changes he records, Mendelson notes that in Auden’s lover Chester Kallman’s copy of Poems (1934), Auden revised the first line to “Your lunar beauty”, but that this change isn’t made in any further printings. The initials JC appear in Kallman’s copy: the identity of JC is unknown.