Who Wrote Auden’s “The Lesson”?

Sometimes authors root for the death of the author.

Image: W. H. Auden (or someone) by Carl Van Vechten

The death of the author, or its less highbrow form, separating the art and the artist, has become a critical shibboleth. When poet Smith says “I” in a poem, you are supposed to understand that “I” is the narrator, not “poet Smith.” Writers are symptoms of texts, rather than vice versa. So say Foucault, Barthes, and people who want to keep seeing movies by their problematic favs.

I speak in shibboleths too, and I do think it’s useful to remember that writers and artists aren’t necessarily the final arbiters of what their own work means. John Carpenter may say he didn’t intend to use antisemitic tropes in They Live, but the antisemitic tropes crept in, whether he intended them to or not.

At the same time, it’s worth remembering that artists and writers are aware of these discussions about whether they exist or not, and that they often create works that struggle with, or think through, their own control, or lack thereof, over their own texts.  More these themes and explorations have been going on for longer than you might think, because the death of the self goes back longer than you might think—past Foucault certainly, and to Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, and all those other iconic thinkers who thought about how the self was an epiphenomena of psychological, material and spiritual factors, rather than the other way around.

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“The Lesson” and the Auden who wasn’t

Which brings me to a poem I’ve been trying to parse: W.H. Auden’s 1942 “The Lesson”. At first, “The Lesson” seems to hark back to a 19^th century tradition in which the poet as moralist imparts life lessons; it offers a technology of identity improvement that assumes a living author, a living reader, and an untrammeled intentionality.

But when you get to the end, and on rereading, Auden nervously slips out of intention—or, if you’re prefer, intention slips out of Auden.

Here's the poem in its entirety.

The Lesson

The first time that I dreamed, we were in flight,
And fagged with running; there was civil war,
A valley full of thieves and wounded bears.

Farms blazed behind us; turning to the right,
We came at once to a tall house, its door
Wide open, waiting for its long-lost heirs.

An elderly clerk sat on the bedroom stairs
Writing; but we had tiptoed past him when
He raised his head and stuttered--"Go away".
We wept and begged to stay;
He wiped his pince-nez, hesitated, then
Said no, he had no power to give us leave;
Our lives were not in order; we must leave.

*        *        *

The second dream began in a May wood;
We had been laughing; your blue eyes were kind,
Your excellent nakedness without disdain.

Our lips met, wishing universal good;
But, on their impact, sudden flame and wind
Fetched you away and turned me loose again

To make a focus for a wide wild plain,
Dead level and dead silent and bone dry,
Where nothing could have suffered, sinned, or grown.
On a high chair alone
I sat, a little master, asking why
The cold and solid object in my hands
Should be a human hand, one of your hands.

*        *        *

And the last dream was this: we were to go
To a great banquet and a Victory Ball
After some tournament or dangerous test.

Our cushions were of crimson velvet, so
We must have won; though there were crowns for all,
Ours were of gold, of paper all the rest.

Fair, wise or funny was each famous guest,
Love smiled at Courage over priceless glass,
And rockets died in hundreds to express
Our learned carelessness.
A band struck up; all over the green grass
A sea of paper crowns rose up to dance:
Ours were too heavy; we did not dance.

*        *        *

I woke. You were not there. But as I dressed
Anxiety turned to shame, feeling all three
Intended one rebuke. For had not each
In its own way tried to teach
My will to love you that it cannot be,
As I think, of such consequence to want
What anyone is given, if they want?

The poem is framed as three dreams and an interpretation. Each dream is a vision of romantic and sexual happiness spoiled and abandoned. Lovers try to find a refuge from war and fail; a kiss leads not to sex and marriage, but to isolation and a macabre image of holding the lover’s disembodied hand; two lovers are crowned in celebration, but the crowns are so heavy they can’t join in the dance. Auden then wakes and muses on the vanity and illusion of love.

Or does he? The conclusion of the rhetorically straightforward poem takes a sudden turn into tangled and opaque syntax, which doubles back on itself as if expressly to lose its readers. The dreams, Auden says, teach his “will to love” that it isn’t “As I think, of such consequence to want/What anyone is given, if they want?” Auden is at once thinking and refuting his own thought; he’s telling himself that to want “what anyone is given” doesn’t matter since everyone wants it? Maybe?

Again, the language is opaque. Auden doesn’t so much compare himself to others as he disappears into others; his particular self is erased by a supposedly common experience (of love? Of commonality?) that seems to slide out of focus precisely because it is common. The lesson is that Auden’s love and wanting is not particular or unique or worthwhile, and in saying so his particular love and wanting and self all fray and blur. He doesn’t rhetorically dismiss the importance of love; he and his love are swallowed in his rhetoric. That “As I think” is a kind of deception, evoking for one last time the poem’s stable thinking subject before said stable thinking subject is dismantled, in the last two lines, by an equivocal and hectoring fog.

Once you realize you’re heading for that fog, the poem’s earlier clarity also seems less clear. Auden was very aware of Freud (he wrote a famous elegy for him) and therefore knew, per Freud, that dreams are a semi-opaque mirror on a divided self that does not want to recognize itself.

In that context, the dreams (whether or not Auden actually dreamed them) might be read not as a series of intentional moral texts, but as a symbolic excess which reveals what Auden does not intend. The fact that each section is a 13-line almost-sonnet could suggest the failure or incompleteness of romance. But it could also point to an insufficiency or failure of mastery and control. A line has been left out or erased; there is something not said because the poet could not say it—or was not there to say it.

Consider for example, “he had no power to give us leave;/Our lives were not in order; we must leave.” The satisfying click of the self-rhyming couplet deftly closing distracts the reader from the fact that we don’t know what this elderly dream clerk is talking about. What is out of order in the lovers’ lives?

The dream and the closet

If you are familiar with Auden’s biography, and are willing to banish the death of the author for a moment, it’s not that difficult to figure out what’s out of order. Auden was gay, and the poem is almost certainly addressed to a lover who is a man. The clerk rejects these lovers, sending them out into the deadly civil war again, because they are both men, and the hotel, and society, has no place for queer people.

There are other hints in the poem too. The second dream opens with the lover naked in a “May wood”—Freud would certainly see that as a double entendre, the “wood” a reference to the lover’s erection. The bizarre image of the infantilized “master” sitting in a high-chair and holding a severed hand becomes in that context a symbolic castration, both of Auden and of the lover. Their joyful union “wishing universal good” becomes an arid, sterile plain, in which they are turned into severed selves, exiled from society and love—a metaphor for social ostracism, or for an internalized homophobia cosigning myths of unmanliness, narcissism, and lovelessness.

Similarly in the third dream the crowns of love turn into crowns of stigma; love literally weighs the lovers down. “A sea of paper crowns rose up to dance:/Ours were too heavy; we did not dance.”

Self-rhymes conclude each section, and underline the inaction and stasis. They also suggest a failure of difference at the root of a failure of love; this and this are too alike to prosper—again, echoing common homophobic tropes which link homosexuality to narcissism, selfishness, or solipsism, as if the only meaningful differences between people are gender differences, and so for a man to love another man is a catastrophic spiral into sameness.

From this perspective, the poem is not (just) about the failure of romantic love; it’s about the social and psychological barriers to queer love, and the painful effects of external and internal homophobia. “The Lesson” should, by rights, end two lines early, with the insight, as anxiety turns to shame, that the dreams teach “my will to love you that it cannot be.” Men, in 1942, aren’t supposed to love men; Auden is supposed to feel shame for being who he is.

And so, in those final lines, after the poem should end, he deliberately (?) stops being who he is, and becomes, or pretends to become, someone else, or everyone else. He wants only what “everyone is given”, and the want is the same as every other “want”.  Auden both insists that his (homosexual) love and other (heterosexual) loves are equivalent, and disavows love and self altogether. He expresses his wants by repeating them in such a way that they are no longer his, and he is no longer there.

What does Auden want?

Did Auden mean for “The Lesson” to be a lesson about homosexuality? How much did he mean to say, and how much did he mean to hide? Where is Auden in this poem?

These questions aren’t really meant to be answered. Rather, they are meant to show that the poem is itself about intentionality and its relationship, or lack of relationship, to the self. Auden in “The Lesson” is hiding himself and specifically hiding what he wants; the poem presents itself as an interpretation of the self, but the interpretation leads to opacity rather than clarity.

You could say Auden is intentionally withholding himself, or you could say the poem refuses to disclose intention. The lesson of the poem is that Auden is not himself; he may be no one, he may be everyone, he may be his lover, he may be a gay man. Speech, rhetoric, and dream may reveal, but they also conceal. Auden, intentionally or otherwise, frames his intentions and desires in the poem as disconnected from his self.

Foucault, one of the proponents of the death of the author, was also gay. For him, as for Auden (perhaps), to force art to confess an essential self is to trap that self; to know the speaker is to control the speaker. If you can say for sure what Auden wants, you can bar him from your hotel and apportion him a crown like a chain. And so instead Auden, or someone, chooses to make a lesson of an absence. “I woke. You were not there.”