[In the following essay, Berger examines the content, structure, and central themes of "In Time of War."]

Auden's poetry of the thirties is suffused by a sense of diffuse crisis, or crises—economic, social, military—so there is no clear line of demarcation separating peace and war in his poetry. In fact, there is very little represented peace in the early poems; moments of refuge are always shadowed by the sense of what they defend against. Early on, Auden tries to imagine the role of poetry during revolution, or in a postrevolutionary society. This is the plot of "A Summer Night," written in 1933. By the end of the decade, however, revolution has given way to war and the concept of a social avant-garde seems already to belong to an unrecognizable past. Auden's journeys to the various sites of wars in Spain and China are balanced by his journeys away from these hot spots—to Iceland and New York. In any event, the journey often seems more important than the destination. Although it inhabits so many named places of contention, his poetry nonetheless seldom seems topical, except perhaps for the masterful "Letter to Lord Byron," whose satirical brio feeds on direct hits. The common reader in all of us latches onto those titles and poems where the reference to historical time and place is most recognizable—"Spain 1937," "September 1, 1939"—which might be one reason for Auden's disavowal of them. But it is more characteristic of Auden to blur spatial and temporal markers. He assigns and disperses blame and guilt, equates and differentiates nations. Stances, attitudes, are identified as inimical to "our" health, but who exactly the enemy is remains unclear, nor can we easily identify who "we" are. The aggressor may not be identified, but the burden of the victim is clear, as in "Refugee Blues," where Auden brilliantly uses the literal "burden" of the ballad, its tailing refrain, to accentuate the lament of the refugee and his lack of a responsive audience: "But they weren't German Jews, my dear, but they weren't German Jews."

The sonnet sequence "In Time of War," later titled "Sonnets from China"—though apparently only one of the poems was actually written in China—plays as many variations upon the dialectic of topicality and distancing as one might imagine. First published in the Isherwood/Auden volume Journey to a War (1939), an account of the collaborators' fifteen-week "tour" of China in 1938 during the Sino-Japanese war, the twenty-seven poem sequence displays an acute sense of the difference between journeying to, and standing in the time of, a war. Auden takes extraordinary care to distinguish between observers and participants, but he also complicates the category of the observer, not limiting it simply to the touring poet/journalist who seldom came close to the front. (Indeed, the threat of Japanese air attacks behind the lines extended the concept of the "front.") One of the poem's most durable discoveries involves locating ways in which strategizing generals and tactical technocrats are themselves observers—with the power to send others to their deaths. Auden displays a sharp sense, even in 1938, of how bureaucratized the coming war will prove to be, how strong a role in slaughter will be played by "the intelligent … with all their instruments for causing pain"; by "the conversation of the highly trained"; by "bombardiers remote like savants." The world of difference between Auden and Yeats can be compressed into their contrasting representations of modern aerial bombardment. In "Lapis Lazuli," written in 1936, no expertise is required to "Pitch like King Billy bomb balls in / Until the town lie beaten flat." No comparison I know of has been made between "In Time of War" and "Lapis Lazuli," though such a cross-reading would be a valuable one. Think of Yeats's Chinamen, with their "ancient glittering eyes," perched above it all. Auden's exemplary Chinese man, on the other hand, is the dead soldier of the sonnet, "Far from the heart of culture he was used," who "added meaning like a comma, when / He turned to dust in China."

Before turning to a sustained reading of the sequence I need to say a word about which text I am using, for this is, after all, Auden, which means that the textual situation is a complicated one. "In Time of War" is the title of the "full" twenty-seven poem sequence as it appears in Journey to a War. Readers of Auden's Collected Poems will find a revised, rearranged twenty-one poem sequence called "Sonnets from China." Those using the Edward Mendelson edition of the Selected Poems will find the "original" longer poem once again under the title "In Time of War." But there is still another choice, the text of the poem in Mendelson's The English Auden, where we find the full sequence plus the crucial dedicatory sonnet to E. M. Forster, which served as the dedicatory epigraph to the whole volume, Journey to a War. I characterize the Forster sonnet as crucial because Auden himself chose to end "Sonnets from China" with a revised version of the poem. Mendelson makes the sonnet to Forster something of an epigraph for the sequence, which strikes me as an inspired move. So, it is this fullest version of the poem, the one in The English Auden, that I regard as giving the reader more interpretive choices than any other. This is important, because I share Mendelson's opinion that "In Time of War" is "Auden's most profound and audacious poem of the 1930's." But it seems to me that readers are kept from realizing the full power of this poem when they cannot even be sure what to call it, nor how many sonnets it contains, nor where it really begins and ends. Tedious textual untangling of the sort that I have just had to perform can only get in a reader's way.

The opening dozen sonnets of "In Time of War" enact that Journey to a War of the volume's title, for they describe a genealogy and a chronology, if not a history, of civilization that, while inexorably forward marching, also demonstrates, at every turn, the inextricable involvements of culture with violence, progress with error. (Error, especially, is a crucial term in the sequence; its closing poem announces that we are "articled to error," as if this were an inherited fallibility.) The sonnets from this first movement of the sequence, though marked by archaic tokens and topoi, avoid any reference to specific place and time, thereby keeping a sehematic open-endedness, an allegorical applicability to all times and places; they belie their prefatory stationing in the poem by their ever-present descriptive usefulness.

     VI
 
     He watched the stars and noted birds in flight;
     The rivers flooded or the Empire fell:
     He made predictions and was sometimes right;
     His lucky guesses were rewarded well.
 
     And fell in love with Truth before he knew her,
     And rode into imaginary lands,
     With solitude and fasting hoped to woo her.
     And mocked at those who served her with their hands.
 
     But her he never wanted to despise.
     But listened always for her voice; and when
     She beckoned to him, he obeyed in meekness.
 
     And followed her and looked into her eyes;
     Saw there reflected every human weakness,
     And saw himself as one of many men.
 
     VII
 
     He was their servant—some say he was blind—
     And moved among their faces and their things;
     Their feeling gathered in him like a wind
     And sang: they cried—"It is a God that sings"—
 
     And worshipped him and set him up apart,
     And made him vain, till he mistook for song
     The little tremors of his mind and heart
     At each domestic wrong.
 
     Songs came no more: he had to make them.
     With what precision was each strophe planned.
     He hugged his sorrow like a plot of land.
 
     And walked like an assassin through the town,
     And looked at men and did not like them,
     But trembled if one passed him with a frown.

These are not moments to be put behind us, for we have overcome nothing they emblematize. "We," now, are equally that "he" of poem after poem who begins by exerting his strong predilections, but ends, time and again, defeated, implicated, bewildered. As Stan Smith describes it: "Each of these crises of disappointment is a social and an epistemological one, and 'In Time of War' links the two by situating each sonnet as a moment of knowledge in a particular knowing subject—a moment which carries with it, too, a complementary ignorance, that finally puts an end to that moment." The only concession Auden makes to the historicity of these vignettes comes by way of the speed of his narration, as the rise and fall of cultural actors and actions, the completion of cycles, are captured in portrayal, if not fully apprehended. They become, therefore, examples of poetic historiography, as opposed to history proper.

Within the sequence as a whole, the present, the in-time of war, arrives in sonnet 13, interestingly enough, with a song of praise: "Certainly praise: let the song mount again and again / For life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face … Some people have been happy: there have been great men." Though "history, always, opposes its grief to our buoyant song," though Auden has presented the genealogy of culture operating with a kind of machine-like precision, the story is not predetermined or fatalistic. Men and women, as sonnet 2 tells us, were not expelled from the garden: "They left." From sonnet 13 on, "In Time of War" is studded with references to the present, to the here and now; within this particular sonnet there is a strong homophonic pun on "hear" and "here": "But hear the morning's injured weeping." The fourteenth sonnet might be said to initiate full moral cognition of history's lesson to the autobiographer: the calamities that have happened to others can indeed happen to me, "who never quite believed they could exist, / Not where we were." This poem also marks an interesting counterpoint to a moment narrated by Isherwood in another passage from the book. Passing a Japanese gun emplacement, Auden and Isherwood were somewhat disappointed when the guns did not open fire. In a remark perfectly poised between a lament and a boast, Auden says: "You see, I told you so … I knew they wouldn't … nothing of that sort ever happens to me."

Three poems later in the sequence there is a stunning rhyme of "now" with "Dachau," pointing to the unreadability of the still-to-be-revealed present. The sonnet in which this rhyme occurs, "Here war is simple like a monument," tells us much about Auden's attitude toward the poet's task and the poet's limits with respect to representing a violent or evil present. The sonnet points to the growing abstractness involved in the conduct of a modern war, with its emphasis on communication, with indeed the predominance of communication, so that "a telephone is talking to a man." Auden concentrates on the distant, removed strategist of war, the engineer or tactician with his penchant for maps, plans, ideas, he who most tellingly embodies the abstracting tendency of culture itself, as predicted in the earlier genealogical sonnets. Occasionally, the map points to a place whose name alone does indeed mean something: "Nanking, Dachau."

     But ideas can be true although men die,
     And we can watch a thousand faces
     Made active by one lie:
 
     And maps can really point to places
     Where life is evil now;
     Nanking, Dachau.

The close conjunction of life and evil points to the latent material or graphic pun spelled out by the word evil itself: live spelled backwards, the reversal of life, the turning of life against itself. Evil is a strong word for Auden; his customary terms of reproach more often involve words such as error or mistake. But the map simply points. The poet/observer follows the pointing, takes the point. It is worth nothing that Nanking and Dachau are the first named places to enter "In Time of War." They disturb the poem's level anonymity. These named places cannot yet be schematized, nor can they simply be equated with earlier places. They punctuate their present uniqueness with the simple punctuation of a period. They breed no commentary, as yet. They mark a point of silence.

"In Time of War" searches constantly for what the poet might indeed say—not so much in order to change history, as to avert, or interrupt some persons from their destructive course, and to cheer up others who are tempted to despair. Those familiar with the poem might recognize in my words allusions to the poem's overt gestures toward two modern writers never before or since conjoined, but here placed alongside each other as complementary figures who show, each in his different way, some strong use of his art to save, in a limited sense, himself and some others. These figures are Rilke and Forster. Rilke died in 1926, Forster, though living until 1970, published his final novel, A Passage to India, in 1924. When we note how many of Auden's poems from the mid-thirties through the early forties are addressed to writers, we should also observe that almost all of these figures were dead. This cannot simply be explained in terms of some elegiac imperative, for many of these poems were not addressed to the recently dead—witness the poems to Melville, Byron, Voltaire, Rimbaud, Edward Lear, Henry James, Rilke. The better question is: why was Auden so open to commemorating dead writers? What equation between the writer and death struck him so forcefully that he sought these subjects? And how might it have been related to his sense of imminent, or arrived, global catastrophe?

Rilke and Forster float to the surface in Auden's account as if they were the modern avatars of those anonymous, genealogical ancestors limned in the first part of "In Time of War." Of the present time, they are granted features, marks of identity, no longer recognizable in their precursors, though vestiges of schematic or anonymous portrayal still remain. But the question arises: do they change in any way the balance of power between poet and prince?

     To E. M. Forster
 
     Here, though the bombs are real and dangerous,
     And Italy and King's are far away,
     And we're afraid that you will speak to us,
     You promise still the inner life shall pay.
 
     As we run down the slope of Hate with gladness
     You trip us up like an unnoticed stone,
     And just as we are closeted with Madness
     You interrupt us like the telephone.
 
     For we are Lucy, Turton, Philip, we
     Wish international evil, are excited
     To join the jolly ranks of the benighted
 
     Where Reason is denied and Love ignored:
     But, as we swear our lie, Miss Avery
     Comes out into the garden with the sword.
 
     XXIII
 
     When all the apparatus of report
     Confirms the triumph of our enemies;
     Our bastion pierced, our army in retreat,
     Violence successful like a new disease,
 
     And Wrong a charmer everywhere invited;
     When we regret that we were ever born;
     Let us remember all who seemed deserted.
     To-night in China let me think of one,
 
     Who through ten years of silence worked and waited,
     Until in Muzot all his powers spoke,
     And everything was given once for all;
 
     And with the gratitude of the Completed
     He went out in the winter night to stroke
     That little tower like a great animal.

I have already discussed the different positioning of the sonnet to Forster in the different versions of the sequence. But it is important to mention that in the ordering of The Collected Poems, the Rilke sonnet is third from last, so the two poems are more openly connected. Auden changes some of the lines but the explicit dedication to Forster remains. Rilke, on the other hand, is never named directly, only kenningly referred to by way of Muzot, his Swiss minicastle. Rilke and Forster emerge, necessarily, as differing paradigms, but it is also important to think about the peculiar way each is invoked within the poem. Auden's quirky way of summoning each figure into the poem might put us on guard against glorifying mere aesthetic solutions to political and social problems.

The poem calls on Rilke without naming him openly, relying on the reference to Muzot, or perhaps to the tower, to spark recognition. This obscure, insider's reference asks the reader to acknowledge the myth of Rilke, or at the very least his celebrity, all of which is nicely supported by the heraldic tower, site of sublime poetry from Milton to Yeats. (Could one ever imagine Auden inhabiting a tower?) Yeats, a more pertinent example for Auden than Rilke, garners more critique than homage in the famous elegy. But Rilke, whose politics were fairly problematic in their own right, whose appeals to versions of organic selfhood could only have aroused skepticism and alarm in Auden, whose very pose as poet was so theoretically inimical to Auden—this same Rilke comes close to standing as a lonely figure of resistance, a rallying point for all who feel "deserted." He is said to have been "Completed" by his vision—quite a Yeatsian condition—which of course means that death was soon to follow. This sheds some light, perhaps, on Rilke's curious position in the sequence, for two sonnets earlier Auden writes: "The life of man is never quite completed." The kind of completion achieved by Rilke, and sought here by Auden as consolation in a moment of political despair, represents a profound renunciation of the poet's role in struggle as enunciated in "Spain 1937," or the poet's role in the evolution of society, as seen in "A Summer Night" from 1933. But perhaps the most interesting way of contextualizing the example of Rilke is by reading him back into those earlier portraits of poet figures from what "In Time of War" leads us to believe is an earlier historical time. Sonnets 6 and 7, which I quoted earlier in the essay, excavate ancient models of sublime poets who are undone when they discover that they are "one of many men," or "tremble" if they are disapproved of. The independent, interpretive reader is led by Auden, I believe, to tie Rilke back into these examples, or to read those examples forward toward him, as a way of gaining perspective on the modern poet's supposed singularity. Rilke's greatness is cast in the image of the ancient. He is dangerous because alluring, and especially alluring in time of war, yet Auden nonetheless calls on him.

The example of Forster, whether placed at the head of the sequence in the form of a dedication, or used as the final, coda-like poem, is less generic than Rilke. Nothing about Forster, at first glance, appears to be in the high-heroic mold. Here is Isherwood from his 1961 book, Down There on a Visit, explaining what Forster stood for in 1938—to him and, presumably, to Auden as well:

Well, my England is EM: the antiheroic hero, with his straggly mustache, his light, gay, blue baby eyes and his elderly stoop. Instead of a folded umbrella or a brown uniform, his emblems are his tweed cap (which is too small for him) and the odd-shaped brown paper parcels in which he carries his belongings from country to town and back again. While the others tell their followers to be ready to die, he advises us to live as if we were immortal. And he really does this himself, although he is as anxious and afraid as any of us, and never for an instant pretends not to be. He and his books and what they stand for are all that is truly worth saving from Hitler; and the vast majority of people on this island aren't even aware that he exists.

Forster threatens to break the mold; nothing in the genealogical scheme of the opening sonnets prepares us for an artistic figure who interrupts us. The word bears thinking about: to interrupt is to break continuity, which is what a modern novelist like Forster might be said to do—far more so than Rilke. He checks us. One way he does so is by reminding us that the inner life shall pay, even as we lose ourselves in Hate, which Auden seems to equate with engagement in International Evil—either to resist that evil, or to promote it. Forster might seem an odd sponsor of the inner life but it is precisely because he avoids "the little tremors of the mind and heart" that he captures, according to Auden, the true measure of inwardness. Forster's distance from song, from melos, his channeling of his writing spirit into characters, leads Auden to make the reader dwell on the particulars of Forster's fictional world. Named fictional characters enter the poem—Lucy, Turton, Philip, Miss Avery—who serve as guarantors of the artist's engagement with the materiality of the world. Furthermore, this is a world seen not as international evil but as local complication. The enemy, as the example of Forster teaches, is abstraction—though Auden himself is much given to it, as the first part of "In Time of War" demonstrates. Forster cannot be read abstractly; his characters must be hasped onto.

The example of Miss Avery, outside her context, is unintelligible. She is the ghostly housekeeper of Howard's End who appears in the garden at the end of the climactic chapter 41, after Charles Wilcox has hit Leonard Bast with the blade end of the sword: "They laid Leonard, who was dead, on the gravel; Helen poured water over him. 'That's enough,' said Charles. 'Yes, murder's enough,' said Miss Avery, coming out of the house with the sword."

By citing so peculiar a moment, so idiosyncratic an event—though one that ends with emphasis on the prototypical sword—Auden advocates a kind of pointed, nonabstract warfare. This sword-in-hand moment comes by means of a fictional character, a woman, who only uses the sword to rebuke the lie of a man who claims not to have really used it. Auden says that Miss Avery "comes out" as "we swear our lie," thus equating us with Charles Wilcox. The point here, I think, is that the sword gathers authority for Auden as long as it is not used for what it was intended. Auden—through Forster through Miss Avery—invokes the sword only to use it against the grain.

This is how writers resist, as writers, In Time of War, according to Auden in 1938.