W. H. Auden – “Spain”

W. H. Auden went to Spain in 1937 to help the Republicans, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t find the medical service job he had talked of taking. He spent a few weeks there, made a few propaganda broadcasts which, being in English, fell on deaf ears, and went back to England. The long poem “Spain” is the lasting memento of this excursion, with the proceeds of its publication going to Spanish Medical Aid Committee.

The poem is written in sprawling stanzas of verse which is not quite syllabic, because the verses may differ here and there, but it generally follows the pattern of lines 1, 2, and 4 being long and 3 much shorter. The first six stanzas are a kind of poetic history of civilization, from pre-history through the middle ages, connected with the word “Yesterday” at the beginning of each stanza. Stanza 4 ends unexpectedly with “but to-day the struggle” and this is going to recur as a refrain for several stanzas later, as Auden progresses through the early modern era and the beginnings of science and modern technology. The following stanzas present a poet asking for inspiration, a scientist asking for a discovery and poor people reading newspaper asking to be shown “History the operator, the/Organiser. Time the refreshing river.” But the Life Force which they invoke refuses to answer their pleas, saying that it is not the mover people imagine it to be: it acts only through people, and if they choose to have mundane lives, then it is going to give them mundane lives, “I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain”.