waking into the world

Auden’s single greatest poetic achievement, I think, is his sequence “Horae Canonicae,” which begins with the first hour of the prayerful day, Prime. Here is a stanza from Auden’s poem in which he describes something that always interested him, the experience of waking up:

Holy this moment, wholly in the right,

As, in complete obedience

To the light’s laconic outcry, next

As a sheet, near as a wall,

Out there as a mountain’s poise of stone,

The world is present, about,

And I know that I am, here, not alone

But with a world and rejoice

Unvexed, for the will has still to claim

This adjacent arm as my own,

The memory to name me, resume

Its routine of praise and blame

And smiling to me is this instant while

Still the day is intact, and I

The Adam sinless in our beginning,

Adam still previous to any act.

Most of Auden’s critics know that he read Heidegger, and it’s easy to hear here an echo of Heidegger’s idea of “being thrown” (Geworfen) into the world. John Fuller also finds here echoes of Husserl and Paul Valéry. And all that may be true, but I wonder if there might be another source: Beowulf.

In the genealogical section with which Beowulf begins, we’re told that Halfdane had four children, though that’s not quite how the poet puts it. The poet says that four bearn — as some Scots still say, bairns — “woke into the world”:

ðaém féower bearn | forðgerímed

in worold wócun

And isn’t that what Auden is talking about? The daily birth, the daily waking into the world.

Maybe, maybe not. But it would be very characteristic of Auden to write a poem which blends an idea of Heidegger’s with a phrase made by the Beowulf poet.

Also, if when we are born we wake into the world, in death, we part from it: worulde gedál. That word gedál means “parting” or “separation,” but the Germanic root also means “valley.” When we die we are parted from the world: we take a last look at it, perhaps, across the great valley that separates us. Late in Auden’s sequence, at the hour of Compline, as he moves towards sleep at the end of a day that has seen the incomprehensible sacrifice of “our victim,” he writes:

Nothing is with me now but a sound,

A heart’s rhythm, a sense of stars

Leisurely walking around, and both

Talk a language of motion

I can measure but not read: maybe

My heart is confessing her part

In what happened to us from noon till three,

That constellations indeed

Sing of some hilarity beyond

All liking and happening,

But, knowing I neither know what they know

Nor what I ought to know, scorning

All vain fornications of fancy,

Now let me, blessing them both

For the sweetness of their cassations,

Accept our separations.