Perhaps my most exquisite pleasure is waking with a fresh mind to an unfamiliar but admired lyric poem. No noise, no noxious news awhile. The silence squeaks like clean crystal. It’s just me and the poem, eye to eye, breath to breath. 

                  A lyric poem, unlike prose, is a puzzle. Prose tells you what it wants you to know best it can. A lyric poem poses questions which multiply. Why does it exist? Why did the poet choose to tell me this in this way? What does the poet seek from me? What about the poem succeeds with me? What gets in the way? Prose exists to inform, verse to affect: does this poem move me?

                  The subject of a lyric poem is not its subject but its occasion. It’s like, from a loved one, the gift of a flower. Flower and poem are meant to say something that can’t otherwise be said.

                  Looking into a lyric poem makes me a detective on an exciting case. My senses tingle. Readers rescue poets from nonentity. As long as a poet’s read, they have not died. What more awesome power. 

                  The pleasure is sensual. I am not reading to brag or pass an exam. I am not reading to write, though I love that too. Reading I feel more meant, alert, alive.

                  The other day I happened on Auden’s “Mundus et Infans,” which, if I knew, I’d forgotten. Brilliant, no? Yet it troubled me.  Why?

                  Its competence is, of course, prodigious: that’s part of the trouble. To a poet so conspicuously brilliant, capable of complex rhyming and rhythmic patterns and an easy gait, we must pay attention, for whatever he has to tell us is much. His showy patterning, like Pope’s, dares us to tackle him on his own turf.

                  His poem is about much, but what? What’s its tone? The poet’s observing a newborn and the grownups hovering over him, with the ironic precision of an existential entomologist. We’re insectile, ludicrous, in his sight. Is he writing this poem to show off – at our expense?

                  Any work of art is, to a degree, a brag, strutting our stuff as once we shone to please a parent. Here I feel chilled, less than sought: sneered at; impressed but not embraced.

                  The baby here, our focus, is a comic monster of self-concern. He begins the poem kicking his mother and demoting her to caterer, holding her responsible for adequate provisioning, but never thanking.  The “cocky little ogre” is already plotting to “seize supreme power,” shrinking all other humans into satellites, not noticing them except as extensions of himself. He can tell the truth because he doesn’t concern himself with any feelings but his own. He says whatever comes into his mind, “thinks as his mouth does” – brilliant line! We love him because we were once like him. He gives us hope he may turn out better than we did.

                  Who is this tyrannical monster in the cradle? He is any baby, of course, for babies take a while to recognize the existence of others. But he’s also an adult type we recognize, the supreme egotist who knows only his own desires and can’t distinguish between “hunger and love.”

                  One critic confidently identified this big baby as Hitler, because the poem was written during Hitler’s war. That’s reading backwards, in my view. I take the big baby to be the poet, who “thinks as his mouth does,” whose “loud iniquity” never lies, who “bawls the house down,” and who lives loveless, because he is all appetite, me, me, me.

                  Maybe that’s what troubled me.

*

Mundus et Infans

W.H. Auden (1907-1973)

Kicking his mother until she let go of his soul
Has given him a healthy appetite: clearly, her role
               In the New Order must be
To supply and deliver his raw materials free;
               Should there be any shortage
She will be held responsible; she also promises
To show him all such attentions as befit his age.
               Having dictated peace,

With one fist clenched behind his head, heel drawn up to thigh,
The cocky little ogre dozes off, ready,
               Though, to take on the rest
Of the world at the drop of a hat or the mildest
               Nudge of the impossible,
Resolved, cost what it may, to seize supreme power, and
Sworn to resist tyranny to the death with all
               Forces at his command.

A pantheist not a solipsist, he cooperates
With a universe of large and noisy feeling states,
               Without troubling to place
Them anywhere special; for, to his eyes, Funny face
               Or Elephant as yet
Mean nothing. His distinction between Me and Us
Is a matter of taste; his seasons are Dry and Wet;
               He thinks as his mouth does.

Still, his loud iniquity is still what only the
Greatest of saints become—someone who does not lie:
               He because he cannot
Stop the vivid present to think; they by having got
               Past reflection into
A passionate obedience in time. We have our Boy-
Meets-Girl era of mirrors and muddle to work through,
               Without rest, without joy.

Therefore we love him because his judgments are so
Frankly subjective that his abuse carries no
               Personal sting. We should
Never dare offer our helplessness as a good
               Bargain, without at least
Promising to overcome a misfortune we blame
History or Banks or the Weather for; but this beast
               Dares to exist without shame.

Let him praise his Creator with the top of his voice,
Then, and the motions of his bowels; let us rejoice
               That he lets us hope, for
He may never become a fashionable or
               Important personage.
However bad he may be, he has not yet gone mad;
Whoever we are now, we were no worse at his age:
               So of course we ought to be glad

When he bawls the house down. Has he not a perfect right
To remind us at any moment how we quite
               Rightly expect each other
To go upstairs or for a walk if we must cry over
               Spilt milk, such as our wish
That since, apparently, we shall never be above
Either or both, we had never learned to distinguish
               Between hunger and love?