Critics of W. H. Auden's "In Praise of Limestone" have often been lulled by the poem's casual voice into overlooking its seriousness. It has been said, for example, to betray a "frivolity [that] has modulated into a quixotic, religious playfulness" ([Richard] Johnson) or the "indulgent … humor" of a "family portrait of Mother Nature" ([Edward] Callan).

A good reading of "In Praise of Limestone," it seems to me, should account for the poem's centrality to the Auden corpus (it introduces, but one, both Nones and the concluding quarter of Collected Shorter Poems); such a reading should also incorporate our understanding of Auden's historical, cultural, and religious concerns of the post-war decade. The poem presents, I believe, a panorama of Western history, stretching from antiquity into the so-called post-Christian era, the poet's perspective being specifically, though only anecdotally, Christian.

"In Praise of Limestone" at once calls to mind several attributes of Eden from Auden's paradisical wish-list in the The Dyer's Hand:

Landscape

Limestone uplands like the Pennines plus a small region of igneous rocks with at least one extinct volcano. A precipitous and indented sea-coast.

Religion

Roman Catholic in an easygoing Mediterranean sort of way. Lots of local saints.

Auden remarks, as well, in a discussion of the sacred: "Many of us have sacred landscapes which probably all have much in common, but there will almost certainly be details which are peculiar to each." He makes it clear that his own sacred landscape is historical, "a world of unique events and unique persons," and that "tradition now means a consciousness of the whole of the past as present." Significantly, however, Auden blames Luther and Descartes for the destruction of "sacramental analogies" to the "phenomenal world." "In Praise of Limestone," I am suggesting, is the poet's attempt to rediscover the sacramental quality in nature, a quality still animate in the "under-developed" regions of the Mediterranean South—in particular Italy below Rome, the Mezzogiorno—but thoroughly extirpated in the Germanic North by Protestant asceticism and modern science.

If this is so, "In Praise of Limestone" refutes the orthodox, "Whiggish," positivistic understanding of post-Reformation European history. The idea of the progressive enlightenment of the North is particularly evident in J. A. Symonds' massive Renaissance in Italy, a work Auden would most probably have known. Interestingly, Symonds used geological tropes to distinguish Latin, Mediterranean Europe as "backwaters and stagnant pools" of superstition from the scientific and rationalistic North, driven by the "tidal stress of cosmic forces." In the century-long religious struggles, Symonds imagined that northern Europe "heaved like a huge ocean in the grip of a tumultuous gyrating cyclone." "In Praise of Limestone" is a re-vision of this positivistic, Protestant understanding of modern history, a re-valuation of Europe's southern, cultural backwaters.

In "Good-bye to the Mezzogiorno," Auden calls Germanic Europe the "gothic North" and the Latin, Mediterranean world the "sunburnt otherwhere." "In Praise of Limestone" extends the place-centered "psychic geography," paysage moralise, into the realm of spiritual history. The locus of the poem is the South—Ischia, presumably, but many other Mediterranean shores could serve as well. Limestone forms the geological substrate of the Latin South, and, more significantly to the poet, Latin culture is itself a substratum of the spirit: geological elements symbolize profound spiritual differences between North and South that have grown out of the particulars of European history.

The cultural contrast between North and South is represented most clearly in the poem's insistent distinction between voice and vision. The poet speaks from within the spiritual tradition of the Gothic North, although he is a loving barbarian. The Latin South remains the observed "otherwhere," envisioned but voiceless.

"In Praise of Limestone" begins by attributing to the Mediterranean world the qualities of limestone; the poet, by contrast, is of other mettle: "If it form the one landscape that we, the inconstant ones. / Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly / Because it dissolves in water…." Limestone is, of course, a sedimentary rock, nicely connoting the sedentary, domestic qualities of Mediterranean civilizations: stratum accreted on strata like Minoa or Schliemann's Troy. It is a calcium compound rich in recycled organic material, shell and bones accumulated and compacted over eons. In its strata are traces of the individual organisms left as a fossil record of the past. The mineral is thus a geological metaphor for history. And the civilizations shaped by the Mediterranean are, with good reason, identified with limestone, since the calcium makes the stone water-soluble and, therefore, easily eroded by the action of tides and waves.

The result is life-sustaining: "caves and conduits … a private pool for its fish … / Its own little ravine whose cliffs entertain / The butterfly and the lizard." The poet then begins to invest this nurturing environment, the Mediterranean region in general and Latin civilization in particular, with a distinctly maternal personality:

      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
       That for all his faults he is loved; whose works are but
      Extensions of his power to charm?

The poet sees Mediterranean civilization as an expression of sibling rivalry, "a child's wish" domesticating the limestone substance of nature. "From weathered outcrop / To hill-top temple," formalizing "appearing waters" in "conspicuous fountains," transforming "a wild to a formal vineyard." Figuratively, the male in Latin cultures is the child who builds to please the eternal Mother, and the structures reflect the life-sustaining domestic concern of that Mother as the limestone itself is "built" into ecological niches, caverns, ravines, and basins by the Mediterranean mother-figure.

Lines 21-43 characterize the fundamental human qualities, spiritual as well as social, that limestone-based Mediterranean cultures nurture. The poet notes the innocent warmth and anarchic volubility of the

      band of rivals as they climb up and down
       Their steep stone gennels in twos and threes, at times
      Arm in arm, but never, thank God, in step;
       … knowing each other too well to think
      There are any important secrets….

These indulged child-rivals play under the eye of the eternal feminine; they share an understanding that enforces rivalry at the same time it encourages unspoken intimacy. Most important, it precludes their conceiving of abstract causes and dicta that enlist both the best and the worst of human allegiances, and they are therefore "unable / To conceive of a god whose temper-tantrums are moral / And not to be pacified by a clever line / Or a good lay." The double entendre of the latter propitiation, suggesting both hymn and the readiness to coax with sexual favors, reinforces the female quality of Mediterranean religiosity.

According to the poet, then, Latin theodicy makes no provision for an angry God-the-Father, who, unmoved by ingratiating gestures, drives the sons out of the house into the cold homelessness, "the granite waste" of an alien universe: "They have never had to veil their faces in awe / Of a crater whose blazing fury could not be fixed." Here the poem suggests the rumblings of an angry God as well as the phallic symbolism of a volcanic cone erupting with the pent-up energy of irrepressible anger. In contrast to this primal, undomesticated power of patriarchal aggression, the Mediterranean Urmutter, whose "rounded slopes" conceal a "silent system of caves and conduits," is comfortingly humane.

Pampered and protected, the sons of Mediterranean nurture occupy a locality "Adjusted to the local needs of valleys / Where everything can be touched or reached by walking" and have never had to look out "into infinite space." They have always stayed home, insulated from the world of uprooted nomads, who must bump into evil, without and within: "born lucky, / Their legs have never encountered the fungi / And insects of the jungle, the monstrous forms and lives / With which we have nothing, we like to hope, in common." The "we" of this last line again enforces the sense of otherness or "Northern-ness" of the poet's voice and identity and, by extension, his identity with the God of moral temper-tantrums, blazing fury, and infinite (perhaps inhuman) enormity.

Unacquainted with the possibility of profound evil, however, the adolescent "band of rivals" is itself incapable of enormities: "when one of them goes bad, the way his mind works / Remains comprehensible." Neither absolute evil nor absolute sanctity is a possible outcome of Mediterranean spirituality: "to become a pimp / Or deal in fake jewelry or ruin a fine tenor voice / For effects that bring down the house, could happen to all / But the best and the worst of us…." Again, "effects that bring down the house" suggests the domesticity of evil in its Latin manifestation and the local, familiar, almost familial, psychological purpose it serves: "To receive more attention than his brothers."

In the first half of the poem, that preceding the ellipsis at line 43, the poet has spoken publically as a representative of his tradition, using the first person plural. He has spoken also in a sermonic imperative: "mark these rounded slopes"; "hear the springs"; "examine this region"; "Watch, then, the band of rivals." The rhetoric has been discursive and public; the perspective, historical; the audience, fellow communicants of Northern spirituality. In the latter half of the poem, another voice is heard, one that most often speaks privately, as "I." The audience has shrunk from a cultural community addressed sermonically to a single intimate addressed as "Dear."

In the latter half of the poem, Auden gives the Northern terrain voices, but the limestone landscape of the Latin South remains the observed object of the ode. The poet speculates about the reasons that extremes of good and evil seem to prefer colder climates: "… I suppose, / The best and worst never stayed here long but sought / Immoderate soils where the beauty was not so external, / The light less public and the meaning of life / Something more than a mad camp." The spiritual attributes of the Gothic North are personified by means of geological metaphors in lines 47-59. The hard ascetic sanctities of Protestantism are "granite wastes" that cry to the indolent, indulged sons of Latindom: "Come!… How evasive is your humour, how accidental / Your kindest kiss, how permanent is death." The Faustian temptations of science and technology and the monsters, the "Intendant Caesars" of political and ideological empires are "clays and gravels" purring "Come!… On our plains there is room for armies to drill; rivers / Wait to be tamed and slaves to construct you a tomb / In the grand manner: soft as the earth is mankind and both need to be altered."

The real animus of modernity is natural force, personified as "oceanic whisper"; it is "an older colder voice," this faceless power that erodes limestone and all the human jetties and levees against nihilism. This voice of benign indifference whispers and fetches "the really reckless": "I am the solitude that asks and promises nothing; / That is how I shall set you free. There is no love; / There is only the various envies, all of them sad."

Anthony Hecht has recently associated the triad of geological voices—the call of granite and of clays and gravels and of oceanic whispers—with the three temptations of Christ in Luke 4:1-13, respectively, spiritual pride, worldly powers, and the existential freedom implicit in suicide. The context of the poem relates these temptations to modern, post-Christian equivalents, which the poet suggests have grown out of the ascetic Protestant tradition of the Gothic North.

The Dynamo, as Auden calls the faceless forces of modernity in his essay, "The Virgin and the Dynamo," represents the regimenting, arithmetical power of science, bureaucracy, and the state. The Mediterranean world of limestone—"the sweet home"—cannot maintain a separate identity against these corrosives of modernity. It cannot possess "the historical calm of site / Where something was settled once and for all." The "settled" here again calls to mind the sedentary domesticity of Mediterranean cultures and the sedimentary stratification of their historicity.

But the Mezzogiorno is not merely a "dilapidated province" for German tourists (or English poets), an otherwhere "connected / To the big busy world by a tunnel." Its very existence questions the legitimacy of all Gothic abstractions on which modernity is based; "it disturbs our rights," the poet insists, our aesthetic, ethical, and spiritual "Great Power" assumptions. Even poetry has become the exponent of those modernist orthodoxies, naturalism and subjectivism. The poet is now "Admired for his earnest habit of calling / The sun the sun, his mind Puzzle, is made uneasy / By these marble statues which so obviously doubt / His antimythological myth…."

The Northern abstracting mind is distracted not only by marble beauty but also by hot carnal pleasure readily at hand: "these gamins, / Pursuing the scientist down the tiled colonnade / With lively offers, rebuke his concern for Nature's / Remotest aspects." Here, one is reminded of Mann's Death in Venice: the melting of Germanic will; the danger that the embrace of sordid pleasure poses to the Gothic sense of self; the contagion of disease corrupting that most abstract of entities, the soul. In this context, the reference to a young man "displaying his dildo" (line 12 of the poem as it appeared in Nones before Auden excised the phrase from the version in Collected Shorter Poems) fits much better.

The poet, assuming his private voice to the intimate, confesses his own Gothic vulnerability to forbidden pleasure: "I, too, am reproached, for what / And how much you know." He prays for protection against moral dissolution, which threatens to destroy the basis of his human freedom, to reduce him to the level of "beasts that repeat themselves" and elements "whose conduct can be predicted." Against this threat, the poet invokes "our Common Prayer, whose greatest comfort is music / Which can be made anywhere, is invisible, / And does not smell." "Common Prayer," of course, alludes to the Anglican liturgy, but beyond that, the "our" suggests a wider reference to Protestant spirituality of which the Prayer Book is an expression. The invisibility and incorruptibility of music calls to mind a line from Lincoln Kirstein's "Das Schloss": "Bach begs nothing but absolute all-mastering order." It is in this order, I think, that the poet finds at once the glory, the consolation, and the danger of Gothic spirituality. All-mastering order is superhuman, and the superhuman is in constant danger of hardening into the granite of the inhuman. Thus, the abstractions of science threaten to reduce humanity to something sub-human, a beast without freedom or a substance obedient to natural forces. The substantiality of limestone transformed into art is a spiritual declaration of independence from this naturalistic determinism.

In the concluding lines, the poet turns to the spiritual possibilities of human substance. Death, material dissolution, is a natural force, and one that is as certain and abstract as science. The "we" of the poem confirms this Gothic mortification of the flesh: "In so far as we have to look forward / To death as a fact, we are right." Death is a biological force, just as erosion is a geological force. The poet clings to "our Common Prayer" as the only hope for human freedom, and yet he is reproached by the worldly beauty of the Mezzogiorno.

"In Praise of Limestone" finally transcends these two partial views through the promise of resurrection. Resurrection raises humanity out of the geological metaphor, as the sculpting of stone into athletes and fountains raises stone out of the purview of natural forces.

      … if bodies rise from the dead
        These modifications of matter into
      Innocent athletes and gesticulating fountains.
        Made solely for pleasure, make a further point:
      The blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from,
        Having nothing to hide.

Resurrection will reconstitute the individual corporeal elements, cleansed and transmuted by faith, into permanent form. Both elements of Auden's complex analogy are thus brought together. In nature, human material is formed into civilization as the forces of geology formed limestone: by sedimentation. The human art of sculpting marble—limestone transformed by fire—into human and aesthetically humane forms is like the resurrection of the human material into a purged and permanent form. As the vehicle of both metaphors, limestone is to be praised.

The poet concludes in his voice of private address to the intimate: "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." Resurrected nature, as distinguished from the resurrecting power, is imaginable in this world only in the beauty and pleasure of icons. Their provision is the Mezzogiorno's "worldly duty which in spite of itself it does not neglect." The poet associates this Latin spiritual vision with the eternal feminine; he perceives the Urmutter—sedentary, domestic, and fertile—in the civilization of the Mezzogiorno. It is a foreign, if beatific, vision and one he can only learn as second-sight.

The resurrecting power, the Word, is understandable to the strictly Gothic sensibility only in terms of abstractions of music and moral systems, notions of divine justice and majesty. The poet speaks from within this Gothic tradition of spirituality; but what he sees, finally, is the glory of the world and, thereby, the complementary nature of the two personalities of Western Christianity.