FUMBLED EMBRACES

The traveller's hope at the start of Letters from Iceland (1937) was to be ‘far from any | Physician’, free from the need for a healer. The internationalism of ‘Journey to Iceland’ rejects all local allegiances, convinced that history has also rejected them: ‘our time has no favourite suburb’, and the ‘fabulous |Country’ of some utopian future is ‘impartially far’ from all parochial addresses. In the words of On the Frontier: ‘Truth is elsewhere.’ Reality is characterized, that is, by a determinate absence: that which is most central to it is missing, an unrealized negativity. The same year that Letters from Iceland was published, however, history nominated one favourite place and time, and Auden followed it there: Spain, 1937. In ‘Journey to Iceland’, ‘North means to all: “Reject!”’; but the command of Spain (1937) is to join.

The poem emphasizes the freedom of the individual to choose a destiny in terms which prefigure the Kierkegaardian turn of New Year Letter. The life force says to each ‘I am your choice, your decision’, challenging them to bring the potential into existence. But that freedom is soon imprisoned in necessity, demanding from each allegedly free subject the ‘conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder’ which seems the inevitable consequence of political commitment. This is the modern dilemma expressed as paradox in Journey to a War (1939): ‘We live in freedom of necessity.’

Auden here sees his trip to China with Isherwood as a stage on the road to that global conflict which finally erupted in September 1939. New Year Letter, completed by October 1940 in a still neutral USA, assumes rather more necessity and less freedom for the self, observing that ‘we are conscripts to our age’ and ‘No words men write can stop the war’, but finding also the ‘immeasurable grief’ of its outbreak a relief from the anxiety of expectation. The poem ends with a wishful vision of a republic ‘Where Freedom dwells because it must, |Necessity because it can, | And men confederate in Man’. But in retrospect what seems most nearly prophetic in this close is its vision of ‘A weary Asia out of sight’ tugging night's blanket off a restless sleeping America to wake it to a world where ‘Ashamed civilians come to grief | In brotherhoods without belief’.