Auden’s poem, “The Shield of Achilles,” which we discuss:
She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.
A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.
Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.
She looked over his shoulder
For ritual pieties,
White flower-garlanded heifers,
Libation and sacrifice,
But there on the shining metal
Where the altar should have been,
She saw by his flickering forge-light
Quite another scene.
Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
A crowd of ordinary decent folk
Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.
The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes liked to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.
She looked over his shoulder
For athletes at their games,
Men and women in a dance
Moving their sweet limbs
Quick, quick, to music,
But there on the shining shield
His hands had set no dancing-floor
But a weed-choked field.
A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.
The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestos, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.
PC to AJ, 2/18/24:
Sorry for the delay in asking my next couple questions! Teaching three classes of freshman composition this semester is taking it out of me. … Also, you gave me a fair amount to think about. I hope you and your family are having a productively mournful Lent. …
I'm tempted to try to make you talk about every poem in this book in detail, but you've already gone and produced an entire critical edition. To summarize: the rest of the opening section consists of "moralized landscapes," a notion you and Auden borrow from Erwin Panofsky. So in the second poem, when we walk through "Woods," we don't just appreciate them; we remember that "A culture is no better than its woods" (sobering thought). Lakes become places that enable diplomacy, "yok[ing our] shoulders to one liquid centre"; on an island we're at risk of going monomaniacal from our own theories (like Robert Graves). The speaker of "Plains" is irrationally frightened of them (I wonder what Auden thought of the Midwest? He spent some time in Michigan IIRC, though that's not a Great Plains state). Then we get to the middle section, which is sort of governed by the "staggeringly ambitious" title poem, "The Shield of Achilles," and by "Ode to Gaea," with the other poems in the section sort of thematically orbiting those two. To put it crudely, they're both poems about how we live in both nature and history.
"Shield of Achilles" revisits the scene in Book XVIII of the Iliad when Thetis, Achilles's mother, asks Hephaestus to forge a new shield for the hero. On the shield, Hephaestus depicts a kind of frieze — a landscape where scenes of civilian life and of war are contrasted. But Auden writes in the twentieth century. We have missiles now. There is no secure separation between civilian life and "the front." It's also a world of "big numbers" (you refer to Auden's 1950 poem "Numbers and Faces" here): not soldiers, but armies; not people, but masses of people. So Hephaestus depicts the objectified landscape that he'd have seen if he'd looked at the twentieth century: "A plain without a feature," where "An unintelligible multitude" stand around waiting to be manipulated into killing each other and dying. It's a dystopia (and, again, a plain), with only one out-of-place detail: a reenactment of the Crucifixion which neither Hephaestus nor Thetis seems to recognize as such.
I can't ask only one question about this poem; here are three.
I've never quite known how to read this Homeric moment. Is it a way of giving Achilles symbolically what he won't have in reality? Is he supposed to feel somehow comforted by it, fulfilled? Or is it supposed to increase his pain by reminding him of what he's giving up, thus increasing the amount of arete he's racking up? How do you read it, and how do you think Auden is reading it? What's the background cultural understanding of this moment that he's playing with or against?
As I read through these poems again, with your commentary in mind, I keep thinking of a writer who I wouldn't normally think to put in conversation with Auden: Thomas Pynchon. It's partly that they're both concerned with World War II, and it's partly that they're both impossibly dense with references and allusions. In thinking about "Shield of Achilles," I realize a third connection: The landscape that Auden's Hephaestus depicts is basically the one that Gravity's Rainbow is about. It's just a flat plane of coordinates where we're all pushed around by bombing/science/Cartesianism/Calvin's God [in Pynchon's extremely Weberian and frankly careless reading of what Calvinism is]. Pynchon's greatness is the thoroughness with which he's understood what that world looks like, though sometimes, especially in the early books, he writes about people with a distance and contempt that resembles too much what he's critiquing, IMO — which is why I like the more sentimental old Dad Pynchon of Against the Day and Mason and Dixon more than I like GR and V. As I think about it, another similarity appears: Pynchon was an engineer and young Auden wanted to be one (he was obsessed with water pumps and the like). I know you've thought about Pynchon a lot too, and fairly recently (you call him "America's theologian"). Am I crazy to see a similarity here? Have these writers been put in conversation? What might happen if we put them in conversation?
Lastly: Auden fears plains. To judge by "Achilles" and "Ode to Gaea," he also fears or distrusts the overhead perspective. It's a new one for human beings (shades of Henderson the Rain King/Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now"). It's not natural to us. But I also think of that later poem from the '60s where the speaker, a wealthy and celebrated poet (Auden!), is on an airplane, thinking about all the lovely, friendly, "rich" campuses below, which are paying for his ticket. For Auden, is there a healthy way of seeing from above?
AJ to PC, 2/19/24:
About Homer’s account of the Shield of Achilles, I can only tell you how I teach it. First, I’d say, Achilles doesn’t give a shit what’s on his shield — he just wants a functional set of armor that he can wear when he sets out to take his revenge on Hector. Of all the warriors in this “shame culture,” Achilles is the only one consumed by guilt — no one blames him for the death of Patroclus, but he blames himself, and is desperate to achieve some kind of expiation. (It doesn’t really work, though, which is why later he keeps pointlessly dragging Hector’s dead body around the city walls.)
The decoration on the shield is, I think, simply what Hephaestus sees, the view from Olympus: that the Trojan War is a mere aberration, a deviation from the human norm of culture and agriculture, social order and law. Within the scope of that norm, bad things happen — a lion attacks one’s herd of cows, a man murders another man — but there are mechanisms to deal with them, and the work of art and culture, dancing and acrobatics, herding and planting, manages to go on. But war ends all that.
All this Hephaestus sees, and that’s the benefit of the view from above: perspective, context. But of course the price you pay for that perspective is the disappearance of particularity. You get numbers but not faces. You see that war is an aberration, but you don’t see that for the people suffering the war it is everything. Only for this moment in the Iliad does Homer remind us of the Olympian view; the rest of the time we see things up close: the sheer terror and misery, not the calculation of aberrance.
(But there’s one more thing here: in the Greek conception of the agon the opponents confront not so much their enemies as themselves, and who sees the decorations on the shield? Not Achilles — it faces away from him. No, it’s Hector who sees it, and Hector is the one character in the whole poem who best understands what is lost in war, who most loves all the things that the Shield depicts. Conversely, what does Achilles see when he fights Hector? His own armor — the armor Hector stripped from Patroclus when he killed him. In their confrontation each man, then, sees himself, his own understanding of the world.)
In Auden’s poem the shield also is, simply, what Hephaestus sees: the view of the middle of the 20th century from Olympus. And therefore he too sees only numbers, not faces: “an unintelligible multitude.” Eyes, boots. No wholeness of personhood. The interesting thing here is that this “panoptic” view is precisely what the modern industrial society also has, or at least wants: it’s surveillance capitalism in its (compared to today) infancy. Hephaestus “sees like a state” and only like a state. And what the poem wants, very gently, to call our attention to is what remains invisible to the Olympian/panoptic/statist view: the difference between one condemned criminal and another, the value of promises kept, the rare but beautiful capacity to weep with those who weep. Just little pinpricks of possibility, associated (if we have ears to hear) with a God who does not remain on the Heights but rather descends into the Depths.
The flip side of this terrifying panoptic vision is life on the plains, because on the plains there’s nowhere to hide — everything is visible to the presiding Powers. And if we fear that, that may be because we don’t trust those Powers, but also (Auden suggests) because we can’t trust ourselves. We are not like “the blessed” whom in “In Praise of Limestone” Auden describes as “having nothing to hide.”
All of these reflections on panopticism and the Powers — they sound pretty Pynchonian, don’t they? Maybe that’s one connection. Another is that Pynchon and Auden are writers who tend to treat matters of the heart through a double indirection: intellect and humor. Both of them, I think, are most serious when they’e most comical.
I probably need to think about this more, though, because it may be noteworthy that I’m not the only Auden’s scholar to be fascinated by Pynchon: Edward Mendelson wrote about Pynchon early in his career, edited a collection of critical essays on Pynchon, and wrote an introduction for a never-to-be-published edition of Gravity’s Rainbow:
https://mendelson.org/grintro.html
All that probably means something, but I am not sure what.