W H Auden, ‘The Shield of Achilles’ (1955): ‘Winds’

This morning I have been re-reading Auden’s The Shield of Achilles (1955) in this gorgeous new edition, published by Princeton University Press, edited by Alan Jacobs. Amazon, if you shop there, have it for £16.99, or twelve quid for the ebook: but I’d recommend getting a physical copy. It is a beautiful piece of book-making, a delight to read, and Alan’s editorial work is top notch: a judicious, informative and insightful introduction, detailed but not intrusive materia critica, attentive annotation at the back of the volume. In one respect I am in two minds: the poems are printed without line-numbers — I presume because there’s no linear numeration in the original edition, and perhaps also because those columns of [10]s, [20]s, [30]s etc in scholarly editions are ugly. So they are, although they are also useful, and I felt the absence here a little. But I’m a dryasdust academical pedant, and I’m aware most readers don’t need or want line numbers.

Like most people, I have Auden in the big Edward-Mendelson-edited Faber one-volume Collected Poems, but it’s good to go back to the separate volumes in which Auden originally issued his work. To quote the introduction here:

The Shield of Achilles is an integral work of art, basically chiasmic in structure, in three balanced sections, with multiple echoes and resonances (linguistic and thematic) linking poems to one another both within the sections and across them. … Part I is a sequence of seven poems called “Bucolics”; Part II is a series of 14 lyrics called, collectively, “In Sunshine and in Shade”; Part III us another sequence of seven poems called “Horae Canonicae”.

Reading the volume solus does bring out the ways these continuities and echoes work.

The volume’s most famous work is its title-poem, ‘The Shield of Achilles’ (I blog a little about this poem here, actually), a poem Jacobs hardly annotates, presumably because he thinks the work doesn’t need the kinds of explanation or elucidation endnotes can provide. By contrast he annotates the volume’s opening poem, ‘Winds’, in impressive detail, and here I get the pleasure of disagreeing with his glosses. ‘Winds’ is a poem in three verse paragraphs. Here’s the first:

Deep below our violences,
Quite still, like our First Dad, his watch
And many little maids,
But the boneless winds that blow
Round law-court and temple
Recall to Metropolis
That Pliocene Friday when,
At His holy insufflation
(Had He picked a teleost
Or an arthropod to inspire,
Would our death also have come?),
Our bubble-brained creature said —
“I am loved, therefore I am” — :
And well by now might the lion
Be lying down with the kid,
Had he stuck to that logic.

What is behind, our below, or propensity to violence, says Auden, is original sin. Of ‘First Dad’ Alan says: ‘a melding of God as first cause and God as Father, whose “watch” links him to the “watchmaker god” of Deism’. But surely the First Dad is Adam, from whom we have inherited our sinfulness (lower-case his/he, contrasting the upper-case His/He a few lines down). His watch might be a timepiece (connecting him to the old-fashioned gentlemen in the second verse-paragraph, with their barometers and rain-gauges) but I think rather Auden means something like guard: that the fall of man happened, as it were, on Adam’s watch — on account of the temptations of the various little maids with whom Adam and the sons of Adam have to do. The speaker of the poem, in the modern metropolis, observes the winds blowing around the structures of the city, and is reminded of the primal scene, God blowing the wind of life into Adam. And there he is, lying lifeless, at the beginning of things (Pliocene in geologic shorthand; and Friday because, as we all know, God creates and then rests on Sunday; here the Friday animation of Adam, like the crucifixion of Christ, looks forward to a Sunday rising). His limp body (boneless is transferred to the winds themselves, a lovely description) is waiting for God to blow life into his lungs: ‘His holy insufflation’. Had, Auden says, God chosen not our First Dad, but some other form of life: the piscine teleosts, or the lobsters and woodlice and centipedes of the arthropod genus, then world history might have gone very differently: we might have avoided death altogether. But He didn’t, and the breath of life he inspires in humanity becomes, in the poem, connected with the meteorological winds that constitute our weather. I think Auden’s “I am loved, therefore I am” is presented as a kind of glory: a first instinct (as with newborn babies) of profound insight and wisdom. Had we stuck to that logic, he suggests, the lion would lie down with the lamb and utoppia obtain. But implicit in those words is the sense that — we didn’t. We replaced it with the “I think, therefore I am” that the line recalls, and that’s much less satisfactory. We must, as Auden wrote elsewhere, love one another or die. ‘Bubble-brained’ looks dismissive, but I think it only follows-through on the logic of God inspiring life into us, blowing us up like a bubble. The second verse paragraph jumps from this Pliocene Eden to the modern era, where old-fashioned men are still on watch in various suburban gardens:

Winds make weather; weather
Is what nasty people are
Nasty about and the nice
Show a common joy in observing:
When I seek an image
For our Authentic City
(Across what brigs of dread,
Down what gloomy galleries,
Must we stagger or crawl
Before we may cry — O look!?),
I see old men in hallways
Tapping their barometers,
Or a lawn over which,
The first thing after breakfast,
A paterfamilias
Hurries to inspect his rain-gauge.

The weather does matter (as Rishi Sunak discovered the day before yesterday when he made his electoral announcement). It is also the idiom through which we move, the world we breathe. The poem styles it as stirred by the breath of God, the same force that brought us to loving life. The enjambments of weather/Is what nasty people are/Nasty about hangs us, momentarily, in the sense that weather is what nasty people are — turbulent, perhaps; stormy, raining on other folk’s parade — but that’s not what Auden means: his quasi-Edwardian vision of gentlemen, descendents of Adam though they be, observing the weather, fussing over barometers, checking rain-gauges, prioritises attentiveness to the breath of life, the divine wind and the weather it generates. I’ll be honest, I don’t like that wrongfooting enjambment (what nasty people are/…) Then the address of the poem shifts:

Goddess of winds and wisdom,
When, on some windless day
Of dejection, unable
To name or to structure,
Your poet with bodily tics,
Scratching, tapping his teeth,
Tugging the lobe of an ear,
Unconsciously invokes You,
Show Your good nature, allow
Rooster or whistling maid
To fetch him Arthur O’Bower;
Then, if moon-faced Nonsense,
That erudite forger, stalk
Through the seven kingdoms,
Set Your poplars a-shiver
To warn Your clerk lest he
Die like an Old Believer
For some spurious reading:
And in all winds, no matter
Which of Your twelve he may hear,
Equinox gales at midnight
Howling through marram grass,
Or a faint susurration
Of pines on a cloudless
Afternoon in midsummer,
Let him feel You present,
That every verbal rite
May be fittingly done,
And done in anamnesis
Of what is excellent
Yet a visible creature,
Earth, Sky, a few dear names.

This is about Auden’s muse: the ‘goddess of winds and wisdom’ who inspires (breathes poetry) through him, even on depressed and windless days. She can fetch Auden ‘Arthur O’Bower’: that is, winds, from the old nursery rhyme (which Jacobs quotes in his note)

To be sung in a High Wind

Arthur o’Bower has broken his band,
He comes roaring up the land!
The King of Scots with all his power
Cannot turn Arthur of the Bower.

Here, once again, I disagree with Alan’s footnotery: of the ‘Goddess of winds and wisdom’ he says:

Since the Anemoi or wind-gods in Greek mythology are all male, and Athena is not associated with winds, it is possible that Auden has in mind here Divine Wisdom, who in Proverbs 8 says “The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was.”

He’s right about the Anemoi, but wrong about Athena. I think Auden was thinking of this passage in Pausanias [Book 4, chapter 35]:

Mothone, which before the expedition against Troy and even subsequently to that war was called Pedasus, afterwards changed its name to Mothone from the daughter of Eneus as the inhabitants say: for Eneus the son of Porthaon after the capture of Ilium retired they say with Diomede to the Peloponnese, and had by a concubine a daughter Mothone.

At Mothone is a temple of Athene the Goddess of Winds. Diomede they say dedicated the statue of the goddess and gave her that title, for violent winds and unseasonable used to blow over the place and do much harm, but after Diomede prayed to Athene, no trouble from winds ever came to them thenceforward. [This is Arthur Richard Shilletoe’s 1886 translation]

Some relevant data pertaining to Methone: ‘this port was the Homeric Pedasus, one of the seven cities which Agamemnon offered to Achilles. Homer gives to Pedasus the epithet ἀμπελόεσσα (vine-covered), and Methone seems to have been celebrated in antiquity for the cultivation of the vine. The eponymous heroine Methone, is called the daughter of Oeneus, the “wineman”.’ Auden liked his wine; and here, in a collection named for Achilles, is an Achillean town — one of ‘seven kingdoms’ — containing a temple to Athene the Goddess of winds.

That’s what this opening poem is, I think: an invocation of the muse, the Goddess, who will inspire Auden to create the volume, as God inspired Adam to life (is there an Auden/Adam semi-homophonic pun here?) — and, of course, a paean to the weather, which Auden observes, and which he knows must be propitiated by divine prayer, as Diomede prayed to Athene.