We Must Love One Another
This is a placard we made for the Stop the War march that took place immediately before the start of the Iraq war. It has now become, like many other manifestations of political discontent, a pretty decoration for a wall.
The London peace demonstration of the 15th of Feburary 2003 was the biggest political protest ever to take place in Britain’s history. The quotation comes from the poem “September 1, 1939″ by W H Auden. A committed Communist as a young man, Auden was later to despair of organised politics and drift further and further towards the mysticism espoused by his lover, the novelist Christopher Isherwood.
As he became more politically apathetic, Auden later revised this line to read “We must love one another AND die.”
Perhaps this is not apathy, after all.
I remember you making that placard! I have to comment because I read that very poem over and over and over just the other day. It is amazing. This part nearly makes me cry:
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.
(I am sorry if that’s some kind of persecutable interface plagiarism!)
And it nearly makes me cry because it’s so true. Nijinsky was a protege of the Russian Ballet, who was in love with another dancer Diaghilev, and after the love ruined he descended into schizophrenia. The story of them makes me nearly cry, the truth of the selfishness of their love makes me nearly cry, and the fact I can’t help behaving the same despite all good intentions.
It’s like that bit in some crap films where the hero is just getting the chalice/item/code to save all civilisation - BUT his girlfriend is falling off the cliff! Leave me leave me, she says, but he always goes back for her, risking civilisation and winning both (proving auden WRONG, though Auden lived in our real world and not in crap film). If Auden made the film though he’d have the hero go back to get the girl and then civilisation destroy — not in an ‘oh well lets have post-apocalyptic sex’ kind of way, in a seriously ruined ‘bad choice dude’ way. I’d watch it.
What would you do? Girlfriend or civilisation? Or post-apocalyptic sex with W H Auden.
Sex with Auden, sex with Auden, with his giant wrinkled vinegar-soaked walnut head!
September 1, 1939
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.
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.
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,”
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?
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.
You see now I am crying afresh
That was the idea.
You are a clever man, Wystan Hugh.
It’s a brilliant poem. I’m not sure I agree that the revision of ‘love on another or die’ to ‘love on another and die’ was neccessarily a result of growing apathy.
Auden revised the line because he found it dishonest. It is a little out of kilter with the rest of the poem, e.g. in the last stanza where he refers to himself as composed “Of Eros and of dust” ( i.e. love and death).
It feels like a kind of desperate grasping for some simple truth, a generalisable principle of how to live within the chaos of mad Nijinksys and bored commuters.
“Love one another or die” is an exhilarating line, but I can see why Auden changed it.
PLUS! A guy I didn’t know from Leeds came up to me in Sheffield a few months later and said - “I know you! You were the one with the WH Auden quote on your banner.” No shit.
Here’s another line:
‘We are all in the same boat in a stormy sea, and we owe each other a terrible loyalty.’
- G. K. Chesterton
that *is* a line! thankyou. and just the sort of thing a pirate would say, when push comes to shove. hello, tom.