An Analysis of Ode

This would not only be useful with respect to AO2, but also for those of you who want to do Auden in Section A Part (b) of the exam, where you deal with AO3 and AO4. Hope this helps!

An Analysis of Ode by W.H. Auden

An expose of military service and the dulcet decorum syndrome, "Ode" ("Though aware of our rank and alert to obey orders") typifies Auden's ability to fuse his high and low-styles of light verse, to maintain two modes of address to two audiences in the one poem. Despite the relaxed versification, carrying a suggestion of second-intensity poetry, the ode is in my opinion the finest achievement of Auden's first period. The loose stanzaic form, filled to bursting with Audenesque data, and the syntactical inventiveness, breaking with grammatical strictures to release an uninterrupted conversational flow, anticipate the methods of much in the later verse, from "Dover" to "In Praise of Limestone". The ode has suffered primarily by being read in terms of its epigraph, “To my boys”, and secondarily by being read exclusively in the context of The Orators. This has led to the standard interpretation that it is a poem in which a schoolmaster lectures his pupils on the evils of the school cadet corps, whereas, if the poem is read as a self-contained entity, there is rather more reason for supposing its setting to be prehistoric Scotland than a public school. Has it escaped so many critics that Auden might be, not haranguing his boys, but dedicating a poem to them, in the belief that they might find the problems entertained in "Ode" pertinent to their own situation?

It is noteworthy that Auden subsequently withdrew the dedication, evidently feeling that it furnished no aid to interpretation of the poem. Not that Auden's dedication was misplaced. Though it is wrong to insist that Auden addresses his boys in the ode (he addresses them through it), it is still true that a young student is its ideal reader, a reader who is capable of a fresh, generalist response, yet whose curiosity might be roused by certain of the more refractory details to further, specialist reading of his own. It is unfortunate that much of the following analysis has had to be devoted to a merely specialist interpretation. A school is not the wrong political context in which to set the ode's action, but it is only one of many. It would be a pity not to connect the ode with Auden's remark that he opposed fascism because, having taught in a school, he knew what it was like; and yet it does point to more than one setting for the poem. It would be a shame not to recognize that the schoolteacher with a foot in each camp, sympathetic to "the youngest drummer" while he works for the veterans and bishops, is the exact modern embodiment of the ode's persona. Yet a greater omission would be to fail to see how the ode creates a sense of political process by disrupting the reader's sense of definite social roles.

A greater loss would be not to notice that the persona's uncomfortably sliding scale of "us", and the other syntactical confusions by which he avoids admitting his own confusions of sympathy and role, dramatize Auden's poetic dilemma, his conviction that a poet must speak for "I and the public" and his scepticism any modern poet can. In "Ode" Auden succeeds in creating a poetry of the pronoun. "Ode" starts out on manoeuvres, but plunges quickly into the mental landscape of "the youngest drummer". His mind is invaded with all the mental paraphernalia of the military, rank, orders, frontiers and code-words: he is as nervously cocked as his pistol. In support of his present state of alert, he also "Knows the peace-time stories like the oldest soldier". He knows his nation's ancestral myth of how "tall white gods" once instituted the Audenesque garden of Eden, where men followed their specializations (“Skilled in the working of copper"), wild animals roamed plentifully, there was "an open wishing-well in every garden [And] love came easy". "The peace-time stories" are as vital to the young soldier's mental stability as tales of heroic action. They tell him that, though the Garden has been lost by negligence, military vigilance might regain it. His psychology pivots on the Garden of childhood where, as stanza six reveals, he had a bad fall: it is this garden, as well as the garden of his cultural inheritance, which he must protect from the encircling wilderness of moving grass. His private myth, of an innocence threatened by anxieties, overlaps conveniently with the social myth in which he has been reared, of a homeland threatened by secret aggressors.

 The ode is an action shot of a system replicating itself by means of its younger members; it is a study of social conditioning. Conditioned from the cradle by pious mother and warrior father, by peer-group expectations and the alternate barbs and overtures of his elders, by church and state, it is not surprising that his inner needs find fairly complete satisfaction in the outlets for action provided within the by now renewed system, that the questions he asks of himself receive fairly thorough answers from the established verities of his society. Only the overseeing persona, as he speaks of the verities "we" all acknowledge, by his over-protestation of the pronoun elicits an outsider's doubts and qualms as to where these blind acceptances might be leading.

Private and public myths coincide fairly well for "the youngest drummer" (who must also be the "recruit" spoken of in stanza three and after), but not fully, as an ambiguity of the persona's indicates. The recruit "Knows all the peace-time stories ... About the tall white gods", while remaining "frontier-conscious"; but is he not also "frontier-conscious, / About the tall white gods", to the point of confusing them with the much-publicized aggressors? In the third stanza, where both archaeological records, which would give information about "tall white gods", and espionage, which would give information about aggressors, are muddled together by the veterans, the recruit's confusion is shared by "all of us", as we pretend to be "perfectly certain". He asks his first empirical question, "Who told you all this?" and is promptly silenced by the veteran's remedy for all empirical doubt, "Go to sleep, Sonny."

Sleep heightens his confusion, however, for in his dreams he returns to the foundation of his psyche, the restored Eden: "in a moment / Sees the sun at midnight bright over cornfield and pasture, / Our hope ..." This is the ode's first crisis. If the recruit at this point identified aggressors and "tall white gods" as being one, and as being the party able to restore the Garden and the new millennium, he would turn against his elders to become a revolutionary. The system is saved only by his being in military training: there's no time to think or dream, he must get out on guard duty. He is jostled awake by "Someone", presumably the veteran, hears a brusque explanation-cum-apology, and stumbles out. Already his fate is sealed: he has taken over from the Old Guard.

Stanzas seven to nine present a diptych of "us" in the cathedral (the reader may imagine a spire) and the chthonic mirror-image, "them", "in a great rift in the limestone". The persona allows himself the perception that the veterans appear, not as conquerors of wine-dark seas, but as themselves wine-dark with bibulousness, but his remark has little more pungency than a later aside about inverted commas in newspapers. The principal force of the stanzas lies in the contrast between the bishop with his choirboys and the "scarecrow prophet" screaming his jeremiad, between "our" rather primitive shouting about past victories and "their" howl for vengeance, followed by a vow to the future. The more nearly one approaches the structure of Auden's early poems the more clearly is discovered that dualistic habit of thought, which was to take on epidemic proportions in some of his critical prose. In his poetry, by contrast, the dualism is usually held in an artistic suspension or developed dialectically or even criticized, as in this ode, when carried to Manichaean extremes.

Here the balancing of one side against the other makes prominent "our" party's lack of the figure of the Leader, "that laconic war-bitten captain". The allusion is not only to the ideals of heroism and fidelity to a leader, but also to the virtue of implicit obedience to the elder or veteran. Evidently the aggressors are impeccably trained in this virtue. In addition, by his capitalization of "Lord", Auden attracts his reader's notice to a tentative identification in The Battle of Maldon of Byrhtnoth, the man who gives his life for his nation, with Christ.

The medievalism continues, and continues to elucidate the realization, for an outsider, that the enemy is an objectification of the group's subconscious fears. In the motley ranks of the enemy are enrolled all whom the society has branded as evil, from drop-outs to bank-absconders and to those favourite whipping-dogs of the medieval preacher, the Seven Deadly Sins.

Noticeably, when they are externalized as aggressors, the Sins take on qualities diametrically opposed to those they display as inner weaknesses: Wrath is cunning; Envy is true to his profession,

Sloth "famed ... for her stamina", Greed "simple" instead of various, Gluttony "austerer than us" in pursuing his ends and Lust "skilful". Less immediately noticeable is the fact that

Auden has listed only six of the seven. The sin omitted is that which the medieval Parson considered the "general roote" of all the others, his is how Chaucer's Parson lists these "chieftaynes of sins":

Of the roote of thise sevene synnes, thanne, is Pride, the general

roote of aIle harmes. For of this roote spryngen certein braunches,

as Ire, Envye, Accidie or Slewthe, Avarice or Coveitise (to commune

understondynge), Glotonye, and Lecherye.

The reason for its omission, why "we" have ignored it, may be "we" have not recognized Pride as the true captain of the enemy, because to do so would require, firstly an unmilitaristic, religious humility, and secondly and more importantly, a degree of self- knowledge. The stanzas on the enemy are an elucidation of the logic of paranoia: so cunning is my enemy he pretends not to exist.

In the last two stanzas winter and cold have invaded the land, "We entrain ... for the North". The penultimate stanza, brief sketch of an industrial wasteland, is the inversion of stanza two; it is the sacking of the dream of the Garden. Fighting or Eden has destroyed it. With the last stanza comes the return to manoeuvres. In a real sense what the young soldiers are "doomed to attack" are "headlands". In the coming battle the distinctions and frontiers, in which they have been trained, ill melt and vanish, "snow down to the tide-line": they may discover the true battle, if they do not die first. With the ultimate breakdown of communications and the dissipation of all energy, the persona will be able to cease enunciating his insights. "We shall lie out there": death is his desperate solution. The last line is, of course, a multiple pun, referring to the lying position for firing, to the final self-deception in which the soldiers will be engaged, and to their deaths. The recruit has finally laid down his life beside the only Lord he has been permitted to love, the Lord of Fear.