September 1, 1939

Today is the 70th anniversary of the invasion of Poland by Germany, marking the beginning of World War II in Europe. 

Excerpts from the poem “September 1, 1939” by W. H. Auden:

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.

               ****

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.

Defenseless 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.

Born in England, poet Wystan Hugh Auden came to the United States in 1939 and seven years later became an American citizen. In 1947 he won the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Anxiety, a long poem that fellow poet Marianne Moore described as a modern morality play.

Richard Lahey's watercolor was exhibited under the title W. H. Auden Reading Poetry, circa 1955. Principal of the Corcoran School of Art, Lahey was a respected portraitist, watercolorist, and printmaker in a generally traditionalist mode, but here he experimented with a cubist abstraction of form. This painting can be seen at the National Portrait Gallery in the “New Arrivals” gallery on the first floor. 

Despite the distortions, Auden, with his tweedy look and boyish haircut, is still recognizable as the energetic teacher, lecturer, and editor from the American phase of his career. In his later years, he was generally acknowledged to be one of the finest poets in the English language.