Stefania Bochicchio – BA English year 2014/15
Reading Literature – second assignment
Part Two
Critical Commentary on
Refugee Blues (1939) by C. W. H. Auden
A strong interest and involvement in music permeate the artistic career of C. W. H. Auden: from his work for several opera libretti to the doomed undertaking in 1963 to write the lyrics for the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha and culminating, perhaps, with the collaboration with the famed Catalan musician Pablo Casals in 1971 to write the 'unofficial' hymn for the United Nation.
Refugee Blues is the second poem, in chronological order, in which Auden uses 'Blues' in the title, the other being 'Funeral Blues', now better known as 'Stop all the clocks'.
In the case of Refugee Blues the metrics fits perfectly the canonical form of US deep-south blues, to the point that, upon reading it out loud, one can almost hear the typical call-and-response pattern of traditional songs and several successful attempts have been made to set its text to music.
It is not difficult to fathom why Auden chose this frame, stripped of its musical padding, to convey the plaintive lamentations of his narrator: like the African slaves of the plantations of the 'Deep South' who originated the genre, the German Jewish speaker of this poem (and his/hers silent companion and addressee) is uprooted, deprived of his/her previous identity and collocation in society, disowned by the Fatherland and thus destined to be shunned and made a stranger.
The first of the twelve stanzas of three verses which make out the poem opens with a monosyllabic 'Say' which immediately demands attention and has the same sound equivalence to an 'Hey'. The hypothetical 'ten million souls' of the city of the two protagonists is an hyperbole (as no city in 1939 had that great a population) designed to stress that, even amongst the myriad of its inhabitants and in the gamut of their social stratification, there is no place for the narrator and his/her companion.
The sense of loss for a Country to which one can belong, even though its continuing physical existence is still vouched by geographical maps, as highlighted in the second stanza, is reflected mirror-like in the third and fourth, where lack of official recognition for legal documentation means civil death. And, though the paper in passports has an organic origin in the tree cellulose used to make it, it has lost the ability to 'blossom anew'. Old yews, having retained their roots, have the capacity for seasonal renewal/rebirth; old passports, cut off from official, lymph-giving recognition, are dead, meaningless papers.
It is perhaps worth noting here the choice on the part of Auden of including the imagery of a yew tree, traditionally planted in the graveyards of Christian churches, in the list of contrasting elements cited by his Jewish narrator.
The false politeness of the committee, as we go from rejection and hostility by an individual (the Consul encountered in the forth stanza) to the enmity of a group in the fifth, brings more despair, as the empty gesture of offering a pointless chair and the request to return the following year fail to address the gravity and urgency of the plight at hand.
The timeless 'rationale' behind the recurring rejection of refugees through time and different political situations is voiced by the utterance attributed to an individual speaking on behalf of a collective, as the speaker of the public meeting of the sixth stanza maintains that 'If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread'.
But this sorry and desperate situation was in the air as the rumbling of distant thunder signalling an approaching storm. Auden wrote Refugee Blues in the Autumn of 1939, after the Nazi Party closed down in July of that year the remaining Jewish enterprises in Germany that
