In November of 1939, the poet W.H. Auden, by then settled in New York, went to see a German-language film, which was preceded by an official German newsreel that celebrated the Nazi invasion of Poland. He was shocked to hear from the German immigrants in the audience affirming cheers to “Kill the Poles!” Auden later said that reflecting on that experience contributed to his return to religion and his decision to go back to church.
Auden’s famous poem, “September 1, 1939” is a reflection on that invasion, which was announced with a three-line headline in the New York Times that morning. I’m told that the poem finds renewed popularity at times of national crisis.
Here we are in early September, 81 years later, and the poem still speaks with an honest voice, if you ask me. Listen to these lines from the penultimate stanza:
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Now, that’s the kind of poetry a preacher can work with. Especially when presented with a text like the one from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans that we heard earlier: “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.”
The Epistle to the Romans is an extended assertion of the power of love to rule our lives, and an insistence that God desires that so it should be. Auden’s poem seems to be in line with this theology. But over time, the poet became dissatisfied with his poem. He tried editing it, and eventually omitted it from a collection of his poems. He explained his dissatisfaction:
“Rereading a poem of mine,” Auden wrote, looking back, “1st September, 1939, after it had been published I came to the line ‘We must love one another or die’ and said to myself: ‘That’s a damned lie! We must die anyway.’ So, in the next edition, I altered it to ‘We must love one another and die.’ This didn’t seem to do either, so I cut the stanza. Still no good. The whole poem, I realized, was infected with an incurable dishonesty – and must be scrapped.”
The scholar, Ian Sansom, says that despite Auden’s withering assessment of his own work, the poem continues to find popularity. It “is the world’s greatest zombie poem. It won’t die – and never will – because people want it to be true.”*
... no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
St. Paul, I think, could work with the poem either way - with either the “and’ or the “or”. But I think he would prefer it the way Auden originally intended it; “We must love one another or die.” It’s not that St. Paul had a greater confidence in the human spirit than Auden did. Rather, St. Paul had greater confidence in what God could do and is doing in the lives of human beings. And it’s no insult to say of someone that St. Paul had greater faith in God.
“We must die anyway,” Auden wrote. Truer words, and all.... And yet, there is love.
If Auden was horrified by the jeers he heard in that movie theatre in New York in 1939, imagine how he would react if he had a Facebook account these days. Who of us is surprised by polarizing nationalist animosity loudly and unapologetically exclaimed? And can either poem or epistle really compete in this age of disinformation?
“Owe no one anything, except to love one another,” St. Paul wrote, “for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.” He was deeply concerned with how the revelation of God’s work in the person of Jesus affected the faith transmitted to him by the Jewish law. And he wanted to proclaim Jesus without annulling the law or his ancient faith.
Most people these days are less concerned with the theological implications, and more in need of a poem that will not die, a faith that will not die, since we must all die anyway. I don’t know what it was that caused Auden to judge his own work so harshly, to say that it was “infected with and incurable dishonesty.” He seems to have forgotten that it was a poem and not a legal brief, and that a poem can say things that are truer than the sum of their component parts.
I think St. Paul would want to recruit Auden to announce over and over again, “we must love one another or die.” Of course, we must all die anyway. But there is more than one kind of death. And there is more than one kind of life. In Christ, we are being called to a life of love that does no wrong to its neighbor. Why has this idea become so hard to put into action? Has it always been thus?
The online version of this morning’s New York Times includes a photo taken on Wednesday in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The image is of a workman in a yellow safety vest pressure washing graffiti from the pavement. Specifically, the graffiti painted on the concrete that is being washed away is the word “Love.” The word is written in green letters, outlined in purple, outlined again in yellow, with a black and white border around it, further ornamented by emanating rays, curlicues, and a heart in the upper right hand corner. It’s vaguely reminiscent of the way Keith Haring might have written the word if he’d had some spray paint with him and had been in Kenosha.** And the caption reads, “A worker blasts graffiti from the pavement at Civic Center Park in Kenosha, Wis.” To me, it’s a heart-breaking caption in a world that needs to know that we need more graffiti like that not less; more love, not less.
It’s easier than you think to blast love from the pavement.
“Love does no wrong to a neighbor.”
Indeed, at this moment, when love is so easily blasted away, it seems more important than ever to remind ourselves that “no one exists alone.” And to repeat over and over again “to the citizen or the police; we must love one another or die.”
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
6 September 2020
Saint Mark’s Church, Locust Street, Philadelphia
Ian Sansom, writing in The Guardian, 31 August, 2019, “The Right Poem for the Wrong Time: W.H. Auden’s September 1, 1939”
The photo is by Chang W Lee for The New York Times
Photo by Chang W. Lee for the New York Times, 6 Sept 2020