Symbolisation of landscape is one of the major structural patterns in the poetry of W. H. Auden. Aware as he has ever been of the inadequacy of the direct statement for the purposes of poetic art, he has been in search of poetic devices that can fittingly incarnate the ideas about the major situations of the day as well as the universal truths of human psyche and life. Symbolisation of landscape is a method of turning the abstraction into a concrete form and thereby making them take on a new identity. The visual becomes conceptual in the sense that it involves thinking in physical terms of things that are psychic or spiritual…. In [Auden's] poetry, city, like island, mountain, valley, frontier and garden, is an important geographical image which he uses as embodiment of psychic and spiritual states.

Auden uses the city image both in terms of the actual and as symbol of some social, moral or spiritual state…. We notice in his early poetry that the city image is related, on the one hand, to Auden's symbol of the hero—both false and true—who assumes the role of a prospective saviour of the city, and, on the other, to the image of the island which is embodiment of selfish isolation and escape. Thus, this spatial image signifies the normal social and moral life of a community which, by exercise of human will, may either attain its ideal form—the just city, the good place or the city of God—or may degrade into a ruinous order of a moral and spiritual decadence. (p. 86)

[Auden's] view of the significance of the city symbol is much broader and more concrete than any vague and abstract utopian scheme. The significance of this symbol lies in Auden's emphasis on the relation of the individual to society as well as to his own self; and thus this image like many others that we come across in Auden's poetry, enables him to organise his moral and spiritual experience in a concrete pattern. Except in a few poems of places written on particular cities where focus of emphasis is thrown on the place rather than on its emblematic significance, the city image is used in a symbolic frame of reference. (p. 87)

In Auden's early poetry, the city is generally the actual city which is devoid of the values of the ideal and that is why it is disordered, dirty and immoral. In poem XXII of Poems, the images of smokeless chimneys, damaged bridges, locked and deserted power stations picture the industrial ruin, and form a sinister landscape suggestive of moral decadence of the upper classes…. [In] Poem XXXI of Look, Stranger!, 'As We Like It' …, Auden has painted the actual city of our times which is built by the 'conscience-stricken, the weapon-making' and where the 'Wild rumours woo and terrify the crowd'. The poem is highly effective in its description of a world menaced by hatred and fear. It is obvious that a synthesis of Freud and Marx forms Auden's attitude with which he denounces the forces of prejudice, fear and malice. The poem ends on a threatening note of despair which bears echoes of T. S. Eliot's similar depictions of the modern civilization in The Waste Land and 'The Hollow Men'…. (pp. 87-8)

Thus, Auden's humanistic zeal finds expression through the implicit interaction of the actual and the ideal city. In 'Macao' (Journey to a War) Auden paints an ironically realistic picture of the true condition of the immoral city—the city of indulgence. In 'Oxford' (Another Time, Part V), we notice that besides the lively picture of the city and its suburb drawn in a reminiscent manner, the emphasis is on the degenerated condition of man; and Oxford as a modern city embodies our civilization of the present age…. (p. 88)

It is in 'Paysage Moralise' (Look, Stranger!, VII) that the city image is clearly used as a symbol. City is described as an antithesis to islands; and as islands symbolise our isolating and evasive dreams, city is evidently the embodiment of our real life in a society…. Auden mentions the ideal of building the 'just city' … in his most inspiring poem 'Spain 1937'…. What is significant is the fact that the abstraction associated with the image of the city makes it a purely conceptual image, symbolising the unattained form of an ideal existence. It is obvious that the city is either the goal of a man's quest or the symbol of a social ideal which later on changes into the religious ideal of the City of God. (p. 89)

The development of the city of man through several stages as opposed to the City of God which is attainable by no other effort than our full acceptance of faith, is the central theme of 'In Memorial of a City'. Until the City of God is incarnated within the city of man, life goes on without meaning and purpose…. Auden contrasts the condition of the Earthly City belonging to the secular and naturalistic world of the Greeks with the Christian world. The war-torn landscape, which is objectively perceived by the eyes of the crow and the eyes of the camera, and which bears sufficient relevance to the post-war life of our own age, has an implicit double focus; one revealing the misery of the world in time and the other suggesting the 'space where time has no place'. In the naturalistic order of the Greeks, 'gods behave, men die,/Both feel in their own small way'. As opposed to this, the Christian world always adds an eternal significance to the temporal events, and thus composes 'A meaningless moment into an eternal fact'. (pp. 90-1)

Auden saves his description from abstraction [in this poem] by employing mythological and historical figures and literary characters, which, by forces of implicit associations, bring into sharp relief the various forms of weaknesses that brought about their doom. Auden seems to suggest that religious acceptance of our weaknesses, which teaches us humility, can save us from despair; it enables us to wait hopefully for the heavenly city of faith which may redeem the earthly city.

It is worth noting that Auden brings out the significance of the various stages of human civilization by adding precise and appropriate epithets to the central symbol of the city. One can easily discover that what was once an embodiment of a social ideal became very soon a symbol of a juster life and ultimately changed into the city of God…. [The] varying use of this symbol points to different stages of transition that occurred in the course of Auden's career…. (pp. 91-2)

Auden's symbolic image of a city without walls, which he uses as the title of his last volume of poems, embodies the alienated, disintegrated urban society of today. The urban society, according to Auden, is, 'like the desert, a place without limits' (The Enchafèd Flood …); and the walls of the city are 'the walls of tradition, mythos and cultures', which 'have crumbled' … in modern times, making modern man's life directionless and meaningless…. In such a world in which 'the majority lose all genuine taste of their own, and the minority become cultural snobs' (See The Dyer's Hand …), irony proves to be the best method for depicting the prodigies of such a culture. Auden effectively employs this mode of poetic expression in a number of poems of this volume such as 'Prologue at Sixty', and 'Profile'.

The title poem of City without Walls (1969) …, relying on the balanced structure of five-line stanzas, depicts the modern urban and highly technological world of 'real structures of steel and glass' … in which people have turned compulsorily into hermits…. Besides the revealing catalogue of powerful images from the world of today presented in the poem, it is the use of fine irony which characterized the style of the poem, and supports and enlivens its ideational structure. It is largely through the employment of subtle and effective irony that Auden succeeds in exposing the incongruities of the modern world…. The pang of cancer [for example] is ironically described as the modern substitute of Crucifixion, and the implied contrast between a purely physical ailment born of some psychic malady and the selfless spiritual sacrifice heightens the effect of the intended irony. (pp. 92-3)

Thus, Auden's use of the city emblem reveals his consistent reliance on the imagistic structure of poetry, instead of the purely sequential one. Although there has been only a partial replacement of the logic of syntax by the logic of metaphor, the use of this image in the fifties and afterwards exhibits an obvious advancement over that of the poems of the thirties. In the later poetry we find a fusion of the reflective and the imagistic styles in place of a style born of the fusion of the discursive and the imagistic which is characteristic of the thirties. Secondly, in poems such as 'In Memorial of a City' and 'City Without Walls', the city image becomes the central symbol in a poem of elaborate meditation on human life. Lastly, Auden's varying use of the city image also reveals his intellectual development from a secular humanist to a religious believer, as [well as] the ideational nature of his poetry. (p. 94)