Love Forming a Dominant Theme:
In Auden poetry, there is theme of love. Throughout the development of his poetic genius, theme of love is seen closely associated with the ideas. But the distinguishing feature of this love poetry is that his is not traditional love poetry. His treatment of love reflects an intellectual approach. He employs it as an idea, a concept, which is part of his poetic thought. However, there has been a bit of confusion about the love poetry of Auden. In its early stage, the word ‘love’ was used by the poet vaguely. Secondly, Auden has always been suspicious of romantic love.
The Use of Love in His Poetry:
According to Auden, romantic love is self – love in disguise, which is falsehood. Such love takes us away from reality. But love has been used by Auden as a healing principle rather than an emotional realisation. Poetry has been employed by Auden as a means of giving imaginative colouring to his thoughts about love. As a result, we notice a lack of the agony, poignancy, rapture and yearning.
The Lack of Immediacy and Intensity:
Auden is a poet who is interested in the quest of a satisfying meaning of love rather than the delight and agony of its sensuous and emotional experience. Nor do we find in his poetry an appreciation of the physical charms of women.
Auden’s Concept of Love under Freudianism:
During the years 1928-33, Auden composed poems under the influence of great psychologists. His poetry of the period reflects his message that society and individuals are sick. For the people and their culture has repressed vital sexual impulses and their life – force, within their bodies. The vital force in man is the sexual impulse called Libido. It inspires sexual love. In effect it becomes the life – force called Id. When a man represses the Libido and the Id, he becomes a victim of great mental tension and serious diseases. The repressed Id becomes a destructive force and gives rise to many mental and physical diseases like cancer, tumours, gall – stones, etc.
Love as Eros and Libido:
The early poems Auden give an impression that he thinks of love as ‘ Eros’, the Freudian sex – instinct, or ‘Libido’. According to Freud, instincts are divided into two groups: (a) the erotic instincts which try to draw human beings together, and (b) the death instincts which act against this instinct and try to reduce living matter to its original inorganic condition. In the Prologue to Look Stranger, love is invoked as the ‘interest itself in thoughtless Heaven’ to ‘make simpler the heating of man’s heart’. Thus, here love is presented as a ‘personification of some abstract integrating force that may cure and pacify the disorders of a troubled heart’. Likewise, in Poem XXVII of ‘Poems’, love is presented as a source of integration of human personality through a harmonious blend of prophetic ideas and concrete symbolic images.
Auden’s poems give the suggestion that ‘Eros’ or life – wish and ‘Thanatos’ or death – wish are in perpetual conflict in human personality. The erotic instinct something healthy and good becomes self – destructive and produces neurotic maladies, if it is suppressed. In the poem Miss Gee, the idea suggested is that if sexual gratification is denied, the result is such diseases as cancer. The erotic instinct, the libido, must be given free play. In this lies the secret of a balanced personality.
His Concept of Love under Christian Religion:
Sometime in 1938, Auden came under the umbrella of Christian religion. According to Richard Hoggart, he stuck to the concept of fraternal love of philosophical Marxism. In 1st September 1939, he refers to self-love as hunger and fraternal love as love:
“Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.”
Love as Agape:
Auden’s concept of love undergoes a gradual change. Auden’s original obsession with perversion and guilt caused by repressed sexuality or by a diseased environment is now linked with the idea of original sin, and the personal or social love of the earlier phase transforms into universal love (Agape) which demands from man a selfless love of all his neighbours. Since ‘love’ can flourish only in the field of relationships, the greatest obstacle to its free growth is self-regard. If that rules, the hard self – conscious particles collide; to the self – absorbed, all men are enemies, only with extreme difficulty can there be any moving out to a relationship, any submission of the ego in friendship. But not until the ego is forgotten in love can there be an escape from the prison cell. No personal experience, no scientific knowledge, gives any other verdict than that which you can self forgetfully love, you can cure. “Thus, love, according to the more matured concept of Auden, is a universal, creative force, but this force needs to be disciplined.
False Forms of Love – Real or True Love:
In the American or Christian phase, Auden considers more deeply the nature of love. According to Auden true love is difficult. In fact, to live properly is extremely difficult:
“O let none say I love until aware
What huge resources it will take to nurse
One ruining speck, one ting hair
That casts a shadow through the universe. ”
True love, according to Auden is selfless and disciplined. There is no place for hatred and other base passions in it. It rises above the interests of an individual to include love for the neighbours, the society and the country at large. Individual interests must be sacrificed for the longer interests of the country. Auden now becomes more interested in the public cause. He now condemns selfish love not because he believes in the freedom of the unconscious as he did earlier, but because he wants to change the environment for which love has to take the help of reason and discipline.
Surrender to the Divine Will:
Love can be realised only by surrendering one’s will before the Divine will. The idea is expressed in For the Time Being, In Sickness and in Health, etc. Auden celebrates the same theme of human weakness of self-love and the possibility of redemption through Agape. This surrender to the Divine will gives us pleasure, for it is this Divine love that manifests itself through all our actions. The operation of love cleanses the will and personality. It should be freed from undue pre occupation with itself and be rendered less likely to breed strange obsession.
Auden’s Humanistic Concern:
Auden’s basic concern is humanistic. Since man wants to free himself from the sense of guilt and sin, he has to accept love with all its imperfections and weaknesses. Love, therefore, becomes a mean to an end. Hence, man must make a complete surrender to ‘Love’ to attain his ultimate objective – redemption from sin anxiety. Poem IX of Another Time makes it clear that only by surrendering oneself to ‘ Love ‘ one can go to Eden which is otherwise beyond man’s reach.
Conclusion:
Thus, it is this love, Agape, love in the wider Christian sense, that can solve the overwhelming problems of modern life. It is only in this way that the kingdom of God can be established on earth. Agape is a – love which longs for suffering and sacrifice, and not for self – fulfilment. It is the highest good of human life , Auden has travelled a long way from his earliest concept of love as Eros .