In Praise of Limestone
"In Praise of Limestone" is a poem written by
First published in Horizon in July 1948, the poem then appeared in his important 1951 collection Nones. A revised version was published beginning in 1958,[5] and is prominently placed in the last chronological section of Auden's Collected Shorter Poems, 1922–1957 (1966).
Themes
Auden visited
According to critic Alan W. France, the Mediterranean's religious tradition and culture are contrasted in "Limestone" with the
If it form the one landscape that we, the inconstant ones,
Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly
Because it dissolves in water. […][8]— Lines 1-3
Other outsiders, however—the constant and more single-minded (the "best and worst")—do not share his appreciation for the landscape. Rather, they "never stayed here long but sought/ Immoderate soils where the beauty was not so external". The "granite wastes" attracted the
'I am the solitude that asks and promises nothing;
That is how I shall set you free. There is no love;
There are only the various envies, all of them sad.'[8]— Lines 57-59
The immoderate soils together represent the danger of humans "trying to be little gods on earth", while the limestone landscape promises that life's pleasures need not be incompatible with public responsibility and salvation.[9] After seeming to dismiss the landscape as historically insignificant in these middle sections of the poem, Auden justifies it in theological terms at the end. In a world where "sins can be forgiven" and "bodies rise from the dead", the limestone landscape makes "a further point:/ The blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from/ Having nothing to hide." The poem concludes by envisioning a realm like that of the Kingdom of God in physical, not idealistic terms:
[…] Dear, I know nothing of
Either, but when I try to imagine a faultless love
Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur
Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.[8]— Lines 90-93
Auden's literary executor and biographer
The
What could be more like Mother or a fitter background
For her son, the flirtatious male who lounges
Against a rock in the sunlight, never doubting[12]
That for all his faults he is loved; whose works are but
Extensions of his power to charm? […][8]— Lines 11–15
—is a point of entry into the
Structure and narration
The narrator's tone is informal and conversational, attempting to conjure the picture of a dialogue between the reader and the speaker (who is evidently Auden himself, speaking directly in the first person as he does in a large proportion of his work). The informality is established syntactically by
The poet's audience seems to change between halves of the poem. He first addresses, in the
They were right, my dear, all those voices were right
And still are; this land is not the sweet home that it looks,
Nor its peace the historical calm of a site
Where something was settled once and for all: A backward
And dilapidated province, connected
To the big busy world by a tunnel, with a certain
Seedy appeal, is that all it is now? Not quite:[8]— Lines 60-66
Legacy
Mendelson, Auden's biographer, summarises the response to "In Praise of Limestone" in the years following its publication: "Readers found the poem memorable … but even the critics who praised it did not pretend to understand it. Those who, without quite knowing why, felt grateful to it were perhaps responding to its secret, unexplicit defense of a part of themselves that almost everything else written in their century was teaching them to discredit or deny."[15]
The English poet Stephen Spender (1909–1995) called "In Praise of Limestone" one of the century's greatest poems,[16] describing it as "the perfect fusion between Auden's personality and the power of acute moral observation of a more generalized psychological situation, which is his great gift".[17] Literary critic David Daiches found it loose and unfulfilling. The poem became "In Praise of Sandstone" at the hand of Australian poet John Tranter (1943– ), who created a poetic form called the "terminal" in which only the line-ending words of the source poem are kept in the writing of a new work.[18]
See also
Notes
- ^ Hecht, Anthony (1979). "On W.H. Auden's 'In Praise of Limestone'". New England Review. 2 (1): 65–84.
- ^ a b Price Parkin, Rebecca (Autumn 1965). "The Facsimile of Immediacy in W. H. Auden's 'In Praise of Limestone'". Texas Studies in Literature and Language. 7 (3): 295–304.
- ^ .
- ^ a b Mendelson (1999), p. 290.
- ISBN 0-19-818294-5.
- required.)
- ^ .
- ^ ISBN 0394408950.
- ISBN 0-521-41033-9.
- ^ Smith (2004), pp. 56–57.
- ^ Mendelson (1999).
- ^ In the versions published in 1948 and 1951, lines 12–13 read "For her son, for the nude young male who lounges/ Against a rock displaying his dildo, never doubting/ …" (Stonebridge, p. 121).
- ISBN 0-415-92160-0.
- ^ Smith (2004), 57.
- ^ Mendelson (1999), p. 292.
- ^ Gowrie, Grey (24 February 2007). "Bells to St Wystan. (W.H. Auden) (Brief biography)". Spectator: 46.
- ISBN 0-415-15940-7.
- ^ Henry, Brian (June 2004). "John Tranter's new form(alism): the terminal". Antipodes. 18 (1): 36–43.
References
- ISBN 0-374-52699-0.
- Smith, Stan (2004). The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-82962-3.