O dear, why couldn’t this wretched infant be born somewhere else? Why can’t people be sensible? --Herod, from The Massacre of the Innocents, For the Time Being
What was Auden thinking about when he dreamt up the Oratorio? Here are some clues:
Likely he was thinking about love.
“Love is more serious than Philosophy/ Who sees no humor in her observation/ That Truth is knowing that we know we lie.” (Christmas Oratorio, At the Manger)
Auden wrote For the Time Being between October 1941 and July 1942, during which time he was falling in love with the man who would become his life partner, eighteen-year-old poet Chester Kallman. This love, like most great ones, brought Auden joy, pain, and comfort, if not necessarily in that order. He referred to the union as a “marriage,” (rather forward-thinking for the times); he wore a ring. Yet by the time he completed the Oratorio his views on the relationship had evolved, and he saw Kallman more as his child than his lover. By winter 1942 they shared a house but not a bed, an arrangement that would remain.
Likely he was thinking about religion.
“Therefore at every moment we pray that, following Him, we may/Depart from our anxiety into His peace.” (Oratorio,The Meditation of Simeon)
Both of Auden’s grandfathers were clergymen. In 1940 he joined the Episcopal Church, returning to the Anglican communion he had abandoned as a boy. Whether what he saw in war and in his private life affected this return to faith is unclear, but most signs point in that direction. He desired certainty in something, even as he accepted that faith finds its center in doubt. His verse allowed him to tease out this puzzle, among others. In his poems he could try on ideas via the voices of his characters.
Likely he was thinking about war.
“These are stirring times for the editors of newspapers: History is in the making; Mankind is on the march.” (Oratorio, The Summons)
Auden had moved to the States in 1939, much to the shock of his English intellectual peers who publicly criticized him for deserting them on the eve of war. Auden may not have stood and fought but he wrestled with war’s consequences in his poems, and the explicit references to military action in the Oratorio remind us that even generals can question the necessity of force.
And undoubtedly he was thinking about Christmas, about the myths and romances we tell ourselves at this time of year.While there is no shortage of academic analysis on the Oratorio it remains, at base, a Christmas story. The Christmas story, made relevant for us today, tonight, thisChristmas; the Christmas story as filled with doubting leaders and anxious wise men; with arguments between Thought, Intuition, Sensation and Feeling; with a Star of Nativity who warns us of her charms. (And wherein Herod admits his flaws.) This is a dream of the Nativity play with characters at once seduced by and afraid of the story’s conclusion. The birth of Christ is poetically sublime.
Love. Religion. War. Christmas. How can these things, all based in part on the faith in ideas, be reconciled with cool, rational analysis? What makes sense about falling in love with a man thirteen years your junior? How is this related to the sense of believing in the birth of Christ, or the extermination of a race, or the ritual of placing colored lights on an tree? Something in Auden aimed to reconcile these things, and this is why perhaps the strongest speech in the entire work goes to Herod, the intellectual, the doubter. Herod sees that once his people accept the story of the Nativity, all Hell will break loose. He has led for twenty years, and done well; his public is peaceful, if ignorant. He sees that they are “homesick for disorder.” The people have outgrown the old myths, and they long for something new. They “kick Poetry downstairs and yearn for Prophecy,” and Herod is unclear as to whether this is a good thing. Why does he have be the one to live through it.
When we think about Christmas (or the holidays) we think about guilt; we feel anxious; we feel hopeful. This is what makes the Oratorio timeless. Auden forces us to see our contemporary desires in the Nativity. We are the Wise Men. We are Herod, too. We cannot escape the story’s relevance to our own, and we cling to its promise just as we mourn the loss of its passing. Pray for us romantics, pray. Indeed. We cannot help it; we want the story to end well at the same time as we know its ending. The Time Being is always now, and so we wait.
Seven years ago, in the wake of the terrorist attacks, Auden’s September 1, 1939 (we must love one another or die) was an Internet sensation. The poem reflected the pathos unique to a culture on the brink. Now, again in search of silver linings, we might find one in this poet’s prescience, and in the fact that his world went on then, and we must believe ours will do so now.
Lea Carpenter Brokaw is a writer and the former Deputy Publisher of The Paris Review.