'Make Intercession'

How many poems still move us after a thousand readings? More than I suspected, and it comes as a surprise that the poet who probably wrote the most poems that still elicit a strong and immediate emotional response in me is W.H. Auden. I’ll spare you a list but give him another good reading and see if you agree. 

Eighty years ago, Auden published “At the Grave of Henry James” in the June 1941 issue of the English literary magazine Horizon, edited by Cyril Connolly. I find that the Auden poems most important to me, with notable exceptions, date from his post-1939 American years, when he had given up Marx for Christianity. “In Praise of Limestone,” anyone?

 

On a cold Sunday morning in the winter of 1992-93, I visited James’ grave in Cambridge Cemetery, beside his brother William’s and other James family members. In preparation, I bought gloves and reread Auden’s elegy of the novelist. In the third of the poem’s twenty-eight stanzas Auden asks, “What living occasion can / Be just to the absent?” Well, this poem. I like its commonsensical loquaciousness (“my loose impromptu song”). Auden is eloquent enough to keep up with the Master, without aping him. The poem is not a Jamesian pastiche, as the prose portion of The Sea and the Mirror (1944) is. In the poem’s climax, Auden addresses James directly, petitioning him as he might a saint:

 

“All will be judged. Master of nuance and scruple,

Pray for me and for all writers living or dead:

Because there are many whose works

Are in better taste than their lives, because there is no end

To the vanity of our calling, make intercession

For the treason of all clerks.”

 

It helps that I love James, the greatest of American writers. That accounts for some of my emotional susceptibility to the poem. But I also love the spirit of gratitude that quietly moves Auden’s poem along – thanks for James’ gifts and thanks for Auden’s new life in the United States.