Just a Prod at Auden

Back in the 1930s William Empson wrote his famous - and still well worth reading - poem, "Just a Smack at Auden." I thought I'd have my own say, using the Tanka stanza. As I wrote, two quiet references to Auden's elegy for W.B. Yeats crept in. In the fifth stanza there is a quote from St Paul, 1 Cor. 11.22 (Douay-Rheims translation). Blenheim is Blenheim Palace, surely pretty massive on anyone's scale, (my spelling "massifed" is deliberate).

   I expanded on some of my own feelings about writing in "Meaning," written in April 2016 and posted here on 22 June 2021.

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Your subjects were large,
Your languaged proclivities,
Your scoped poetics,
Immense. And engrossing were
Your rococo’d, modulate

Speech-things, busied with
Ethics in this double-cross,
Back-slap-and-grin world:
A gemmist, you rehabbed words,
Bran-tubbing the O.E.D.

But you were silly,
Unserioused by queerdom,
A wrist-dropped “get her!”
Veining even your starkest
Moralled works. Those epicene

Love songs, unfocussed
By the twink impulse, hidden;
The doctrined poems
Later, Christ typifiying,
Wormed by the harlot, Kallman;

And, in age, your broad
Divagated hold-forths, wealed,
But cricked by your eye
For “trade” and young men blooming:
Well, in this I praise you not!

Oh, for that finalled
“Whoomp!” of braced argumentum –
Arnold’s tense hair-pull,
Say, worrying to terse ends
(A dosing of his father’s

Masculine credo
Would have helped, too). Despite that,
Your gift survived all,
Uneasing, now, “woke” wordcarls,
Popping-eyed for “inclusion,”

Castrated syntax –
All such man-dreamt Ponzi trash!
Massifed as Blenheim
Your work shrugs: what’s consequent
Is virtue; praise; and pity.

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© February 2023