Auden’s Law Like Love

The alliteration in this essay’s title refers to Auden’s 1939 untitled poem, anthologized as so many of his poems are only by its first line, “Law, say the gardeners is the sun.” ¹ And while some recent editions have employed the title “Law like Love,” as I do here, it seems important to note right away how such a condensation is contrary to the explicit structure of the poem itself, which seems to take some pains to avoid any spatial closeness or contiguity between the two words. For seven stanzas the poem attempts to complete the infinitive “law is.” The poem recites a series of conventional answers, from the laws of nature (the gardener’s sun) to religion (“the priestly book”) and tradition (“Law is the wisdom of the old/ the impotent grandfathers feebly scold”). Auden even offers us the tautologies of positive law: the judge’s meandering answer in the fourth stanza ends with the dictum “law is the law.”

After all this speculation, the poet in the eighth and longest stanza of the poem finds himself unable “To identify Law with some other word, / unlike so many men/ I cannot say Law is again.” This exhaustion prompts the “timid similarity” of the comparison to love, which in turn allows the poem to conclude with a striking anaphora:

Like love we don’t know where or why,

Like love we cant compel or fly,

Like love we often weep,

Like love we seldom keep.

The poem instructs us to consider law as we would love, and this is already a departure from a conventional wisdom that would place law as public, cold and impersonal and love as its putative antidote. Indeed, law and love were two recurrent even abiding preoccupations of Auden’s intellectual life. Certainly, given a poet and critic as prolific in his output and protean in his interests as Auden, trying to isolate any two themes seems foolhardy at best. And yet there is considerable evidence for such a claim, particularly if we remain open to the variety of references embedded in the two terms. Especially with the theme of love, there is considerable consensus that for Auden, as Stephen Spender once remarked, “throughout the whole development of his poetry (if one makes exception of the undergraduate work) his theme had been love: not Romantic love but love as interpreter of the world, love as individual need, and love as redeeming power in the life of society and of the individual.” ² Spender’s particular utility here is that he reminds us not to associate exclusively the term love with romantic relations. Indeed, the notion of comparing law to love immediately becomes less opaque if we recall our linguistic disability, our need to gather many affective relations under the single heading of love, and remind ourselves instead of the ancients and their access to what James Martel has called “the many names of love.” As Martel reminds us, the Greeks distinguished between eros, storge, philia and agape (roughly translating to erotics, care, friendship and divine love). ³ And, indeed, as Arendt reminds us, “the Latin translations of the Greek New Testament could accommodate three Greek terms for love –eros, storge, agape –with the corresponding Latin: amor, dilectio and caritas.” ⁴

Auden’s interest in law is less a part of conventional wisdom, but there is some if not too much in Auden’s canon to offer as evidence of his general interest in the law, in its forms and formalities, its rigors but also its possibilities of redemption. Soon after composing his elegy to William Butler Yeats, Auden considered the charges against the politics of the poet and a defense, and cast the arguments in the adversarial form of a court in The Prosecutor v. William Butler Yeats. ⁵ But it was less the forms of legal procedure than the redemptive power of God’s law in the disenchanted condition of modernity that truly held Auden’s interest. This meant not only his interest in religion but also recognition of the centrality of law to the modern condition. Such recognition would prompt Auden to dub Kafka as “the novelist of our age.” ⁶

Before I move on to Auden’s “law like love,” which is more as I said a condensation than a quotation, I will here merely note that such a phrase placed with the personal possessive in my title has the distinct felicity of opening up the subject. Perhaps our concern is Auden’s notion of law, which is apparently akin to love, or perhaps our focus is Auden’s personal loves and their oddly law-like guise – or perhaps both. So today, some thoughts on Auden, on law, on love.

“Law say the gardeners” is dated September 1939, and appears in the collection entitled Another Time, first published in 1940. The collection itself is a haphazard amalgam divided into three parts: “People and Places” (into which inexplicably the poem “Law say the gardeners,” which is neither about a person nor a place, is inserted); “Lighter Poems”; and finally a concluding part entitled “Occasional Poems.” Even so, the collection contains some of the more famous and admired poems in Auden’s oeuvre, such as the love sonnet “Lay your sleeping head, my love,” the recently resurgent “September 1, 1939” (although it should be noted that Auden, for reasons not irrelevant to our topic today, wanted the poem omitted forever from his collected works), and Auden’s justly famous elegies to Yeats, Freud and Ernst Toller. “Law say the gardeners,” “September 1, 1939,” and the elegy for Freud were all composed in 1939. The year is not without significance, obviously, on a world-historical level – on September 1, 1939, the Wehrmacht marched into Poland leading Auden to pen his eponymously dated poem – but also for more specific reasons having to do with Auden’s biography. For on January 26, 1939, Auden along with his friend Christopher Isherwood arrived in New York – an emigration for which many of his countrymen were never to forgive him – but more importantly in April of that year he met Chester Kallman, a handsome, sexually precocious, eighteen-year-old, who was to become Auden’s partner, his husband, his literary collaborator till the end of his years. ⁷

Auden’s love of Kallman was to be his doing and undoing, teaching him in flesh what he had only written of before, but also keeping him in both rapture and rage. “You have made me,” Auden would write to Kallman in a letter from this period, “into a murderer in thought and almost in deed.” Perhaps to escape from such thoughts, Auden increasingly turned to the church of his childhood and to another love – that of god. But even as he explored the idea of agape he was always, as Edward Mendelson correctly notes, too self aware to not notice that agape could be very close to the feelings of the mob: “most of the experiences which are closest to it in mode … are clear cases of diabolical possession, as when thousands cheer hysterically for the Man-God, or cry bloodthirstly for the crucifixion of the God-Man.” ⁸

The problem, baldly stated here for reasons of economy, is that for Auden love tends to obliterate reciprocity, veering constantly between becoming a too encompassing force and becoming solipsism. The latter appears as a threat and a warning repeatedly throughout Auden’s work. Thus is the glibly titled “Heavy Date,” which is anything but glib, the poet learns an odd lesson from the conventional gaze into the lover’s eyes:

Nowhere else could I have known

Than, beloved, in your eyes

What we have to learn,

That we love ourselves alone. ⁹

And the phrase “love ourselves alone” is resonant of the error famously warned of in the poem “September 1, 1939:”

For the error bred in the bone

Of each woman and each man

Craves what it cannot have,

Not Universal love

But to be loved alone. ¹⁰

If the varieties of love, of beloved, of nation, of leader, tend to be too encompassing or solipsistic, such a disproportion finds a correspondence in at least one version of law offered in “Law like Love”:

And always the loud angry crowd,

Very angry and very loud,

Law is We,

And always the soft idiot softly Me.

What is lacking then in Auden’s efforts to use eros, caritas or agape to constitute a social and political order is that each tends to break down the connection between people, or rather the space between people, through which alone they could both remain individuals and remain connected. What is lacking then is mutuality. The word is not mine but rather was recommended to Auden, precisely on this topic, by his dear friend Hannah Arendt.

Arendt and Auden got to be friends late in their lives, when both were established figures living in New York City. In 1959 Auden had published a deeply admiring review of The Human Condition in the journal Encounter, and five months later, apparently still thinking of the many themes in Arendt’s work, published a piece on Measure for Measure, in which he insisted that a distinction be drawn between forgiveness and judicial pardon. He must have informed Arendt of this piece, as she obtained a copy, read it and proceeded to write an elaborate response letter to Auden. In this conceptually dense letter, which responds to a series of claims and arguments about forgiveness and judicial pardon, Arendt reiterates her claim for forgiveness as a faculty. To that extent, love would have to be set against because “love will forgive everything because of its utter commitment to the beloved person.” ¹¹ Here Arendt reiterates her concern in The Human Condition that love is not just an apolitical but also an anti-political force.

But if erotic love holds dangers for this vision of a political order, Auden’s alternative of universal love, that is for him the idea of Christian charity, does not work for Arendt either. Indeed, her letter is a response to precisely that claim. “Of course I am prejudiced, namely against Christian Charity,” she writes, “but let me at least make a stand for my prejudices.” ¹² Charity, Arendt notes in her letter, may derive from the command to love, but goes too far precisely in its stance of humility and non-judgment – it forgives “überhaupt.” To that extent charity may do much good, but Arendt still wonders if forgiving belongs in such a category. “This side of the matter, that is, the mutuality of the whole business remains outside all considerations of “doing good,” but it is essential for the act of forgiving.” Indeed, even love, Arendt notes, does not or should not go so far as charity: “even love violates the integrity of the wrongdoer if it forgives without having been asked to. Is not forgiving without having been asked to really impertinent, or at least conceited – as though one said: Much as you tried, you could not wrong me: charity has made me invulnerable?” ¹³ The problem here is that the universal love of charity ends up producing the same solipsistic condition that erotic love produced.

It is not evident if Auden took this particular counsel to heart, but his later poetry is more conscious of the condition of mutuality. Auden thematizes this condition through a poetics that emphasizes the human need for a sense of place; and does so, to my mind, nowhere more beautifully than in the 1968 poem “Ode to Terminus.” What is interesting, however, is that for this thematization of place and interpersonal exchange, Auden turns not to love but to law: the laws of natural life, of immanent existence by which all creatures “have been allotted the niche and diet that become them,” and even the laws of language and poetry itself, grammar and meter.

My consideration of the rules of language as “law” may stretch any conventional sense of the term, but there is a more orthodox connection between terminus and a concept of law; and it is one that is made by Arendt in The Human Condition. In the section on “The Public and the Private Realm,” Arendt notes with approval that the ancient and original purpose of the laws of private property was not the protection of wealth (property) or the creation of some inviolable interior space (private) but the structuring of space whereby each could have his own location and a “common world” in which to interact with others. In a footnote, she notes the derivation in Greek of the word law from the word “hedge” – nomos from nemein. And although, she notes, the Roman word for law, lex, meant a relation rather than a wall, “the boundary and its god Terminus” were highly revered. ¹⁴

Auden’s “Ode to Terminus” opens by observing how science with its abilities to see both the very small and the very far away, The High Priests of Telescopes and Cyclotrons, contribute to our loss of place and proportion. Terminus must be praised then for providing rules whereby our surroundings make sense, and, perhaps more importantly, whereby our interactions with each other are made possible. Thanks to Terminus in “the world we really live in and that saves our sanity,” lovers “recognize each other by their surface” and in gatherings “each in each finds his right translator.”

The types of interactions in the poem range from romantic love to Christian fellowship (certainly the two felt most urgently by Auden), but even more striking is the nature of these interactions. The poem abandons an imagery of depth or possession, completion or obliteration in favor of one of surfaces and sense. ¹⁵

It is tempting to end here, where law like love strike a note of proportion, but by the 1960s neither politics nor love were a source of calm or joy for Auden. The possibilities of nuclear decimation seemed daily more pressing (it seems that the Priests of Cyclotrons are not so easily dismissed); and Kallman had moved out of their St. Marks Place apartment in New York, preferring to spend his summers in Athens with his new lover. Love had produced a result, it turns out, that was indeed unforgivable. “When the vision fades,” Auden writes in a letter from this period, “the contrast between the glory of the vision and the sober world (I do not say reality) is too great to forgive.” ¹⁶

In response to these circumstances, toward the end of his life Auden emphasizes a theme that had really been present throughout his work: not law or love, but gratitude. Gratitude not for any particular kind of existence, but for sheer immanent life itself. Here the last stanza of a poem from his later writings, entitled “Precious Five,” is illustrative. The poem is addressed to the poet’s own five senses and celebrates the body and its vicissitudes. But such celebration is made possible only by obeying nature’s command to be grateful for existence itself. We may note that this is still framed in the verse as a command, indeed, “an absolute command,” but directed not by god but by an ultimately indifferent sky. It is also the very stanza that Arendt chooses to quote in full in her memorial to Auden: praise she notes is the dominant motif here – “praise not of ‘the best of all possible worlds’ – as though it were up to the poet (or the philosopher) to justify God’s creation – but praise that pitches itself against all that is unsatisfactory in man’s condition on this earth and sucks its strength out of the wound.” ¹⁷ Here then is the end to Precious Five, which will also serve as my ending here today:

I could (which you cannot)

Find reasons fast enough

To face the sky and roar

In anger and despair

At what is going on,

Demanding that it name

Whoever is to blame:

The sky would only wait

Till all my breath was gone

And then reiterate

As if I wasn’t there

That singular command

I do not understand,

Bless what there is for being,

Which has to be obeyed, for

What else am I made for,

Agreeing or disagreeing? ¹⁸