PRACTISING CLOSE READING IN CLASS

"Dear, though the Night is Gone" by WH Auden could be given to a senior class with the question, "Why might some readers find this love poem disturbing?"

I would suggest deliberately asking pupils to form same-sex pairs as they work on the poem and I would also suggest that the teacher does not reveal Auden's homosexuality until later. Auden's work was first read without most of his audience being aware of his homosexuality, and one could debate later whether such contextual knowledge is important and how it might or might not affect the ways we read and appreciate this poem.

It would be interesting in discussion to bring out and discuss the different responses of male pairs and female pairs in the class, and the assumptions about love which such pairings made.

Below is an essay I wrote, having set the class at a later stage, after discussion, to write a critical appreciation of it.

Dear, though the Night is Gone  Critical Essay

Dear, though… is a love poem, addressed by the poet to his or her lover. Rather surrealistically, it describes an occasion when at night they came to an enormous room ("Cavernous, lofty…") where they lay together, kissing, surrounded by other "pairs", who watched them with "hostile eyes". The poet then reproaches the lover, who the following morning confessed another love, making the poet feel "Unwanted" and causing him or her to leave. I say "him or her" because one of the oddities of this poem is that there is a certain ambiguity about the gender of all those concerned.

The most striking contrast in the poem is that between the rapturous language and the sordidness of the surroundings. The first two lines suggest a conventional love poem with words like "Dear", "night" and "dream". Even the word "cavernous" has romantic associations. It is the simile, however, which brings us up sharply; "lofty as A railway terminus" suggests not only urban impersonality but also something rather final: a terminus is the end of a journey and it foreshadows, perhaps, the end of their romance. "Crowded", "gloom" linked with "beds" hints at something very institutional, like a prison, or a hospital or a hostel, even, for down-and-outs.

The exact details of the surroundings are left vague. Who are these couples on other beds? Why are they "Inert and vaguely sad"? Why are they hostile to the two lovers? We are not even sure of the sex either of the lovers or of the surrounding couples in this strange and almost nightmarish setting.

Yet there is a rapture to their love, or to the poet's experience of their loving, which is accentuated in simple but effective language:

"Our whisper woke no clocks".

This is an odd phrase, as if there was a certain timelessness to their love-making (hinted at in "glad At everything you did"). The fact that they are carrying on under the eyes of others is very odd and disturbing. It is as though they are determined to create their own world of love in defiance of the loveless world about them. The other couples seem envious of their union, which seems at first to be so complete (they are "Indifferent to everybody else").

It is in the third stanza that pathos enters with the confession by the lover, which drives them apart. The lover, shamelessly, "unabashed", appears almost deliberately cruel, or at least insensitive, and the poet, "submissive", feels rejected and alone. It is almost as if they are now on the same level as the other pairs, who seem similarly depressed and lonely. One problem in the poem is why the persona feels a "victim" of the "worm of guilt" or the "malignant doubt" and what this refers to. Does the poet feel guilty, and if so, why, for it is the lover, surely, who is guilty of loving someone else?

The poem is quite tightly organised, like a conventional love lyric. The trimeter rhythm has the simplicity of a ballad; the rhyme scheme is complex and regular, though the rhymes themselves are more often near-rhymes, which introduces a rather inharmonious note, though "doubt " and "out", as rhymes, conclude the poem effectively and with a sense of finality.

In conclusion, then, the theme and style of rapturous love turning to hopeless disappointment, which is common enough, is here given a modern and disturbing setting. The world seems to be nomadic and institutionalised – full of loneliness, even though "crowded". The circumstances of this love affair are not given exactly, but it seems momentary and set in a bleak world where everybody is paired off, but nobody is happy. It seems to be, literally, a one-night stand, which the poet celebrates for both its rapture and its desolation. The modern, urban setting contrasts oddly and disturbingly with the conventional lyricism of the language and its organisation.