Auden and the Music of the Syllables
(The following is an edited version of a talk I gave on May 28, 2025, introducing the“Master Poets Critical Seminar: The Forms of Auden” I led at the 2025 Poetry by the Sea Conference.)
When I first encountered W.H. Auden’s poetry well over a half century ago, I was attracted to the feel of the voice conveyed on the page.
Here was a relaxed, urbane, and ironic style unlike that of the other Modernist poets I still love and continue to be influenced by—Pound, Yeats, Eliot. Vibrating with intensity and ambition, those poets had special appeal to me when I was young.
Auden in 1956.
Auden’s poems, by contrast, often sounded like essays and were shaped in intriguingly odd and indecipherable ways.
What, for instance, was the form of “Musée des Beaux Artes”? The poem on the page is a mixture of “casually irregular lines” as Auden biographer Edward Mendelson calls them. And yes, the poem rhymes if you examine it closely, but in a subtle and unfamiliar way.
And then there was “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” a deeply moving, traditional sounding elegy that realistically put forth the truth of being a poet in the twentieth century. The three parts of the poem feature different line lengths, meters, and rhyme schemes.
I sensed in my twenties that Auden, with all his nuances and complexities and his matchless cache of techniques, would be a poet I could return to as a resource in future years.
One particularly inspiring aspect of Auden was his willingness to go against the grain of poetic tradition while remaining quite mindful of form. It stimulated a sense of permissible freedom in me.
For example, I began to notice that Auden had ways of ending lines that I hadn’t seen before. There were poems with entire stanzas of feminine endings, or lines that each end on an unstressed syllable. Here, with my boldfacing, is the first stanza of “This Lunar Beauty”:
This lunar beauty
has no history
is complete and early,
if beauty later
bear any feature
it had a lover
and is another.
In addition, some Auden poems alternate feminine endings with masculine ones, lines that conclude on an unstressed syllable. For instance, “Journey to Iceland” features feminine endings in the odd numbered lines and masculine endings in the even numbered lines. We can hear this in its opening quatrain, (the boldfacing is mine):
And the traveller hopes: " let me be far from any
Physician"; and the ports have names for the sea:
The citiless, the corroding, the sorrow;
And north means to all: "Reject."
Another fertile field of experimentation ploughed by Auden was the use of variations on perfect or true rhyming. The critic Malcolm Cowley noted that Auden used “vowel rhymes with differing consonants (like brain-bait); consonantal rhymes with differing vowels (like brain-brine, [following] the ‘slant’ rhymes invented by Wilfred Owen); and weak rhymes on unaccented syllables (like blessing-bring-bumping).”
Such rhyming, while it might wrong-foot some readers, can provide a wider range of expressiveness and musicality beyond perfect rhymes. Further, by altering the traditional placement of stress, rhyme variations can foreground the unique music of the other syllables in the line, combining conversational tones with lyricism.
You can hear a richness of syllable sounds in “The Journey,” a poem Auden wrote in his early twenties:
To throw away the key and walk away,
not abrupt exile, the neighbours asking why,
but following a line with left and right,
an altered gradient at another rate
That was the first time Auden used slant rhymes with initial consonants (right/rate, wall/well), according to Mendelson. It’s a rhyme scheme inspired by Wilfred Owen’s method in Owen’s great and haunting poem “Strange Meeting.”
In moving away from perfect rhymes, Auden seems to emphasize assonance (“an altered gradient at another rate”) and alliteration (“but following a line with left and right”).
But perhaps Auden’s most radical—and most exciting—technical innovation is in his use of syllabics.
To describe Auden’s native give for traditional meter, Cowley turned to a phrase from Alexander Pope. Auden, Cowley said, could very well be thought to have “lisp'd in numbers”—or spoken prosodically perfect lines as an infant.
Auden’s own impatience with that gift seems to have been a factor in his increasing preference for syllabic verse rather than accentual-syllabic meters. That move might also chime with his transition from Anglo-Saxon influences to Greek and Roman ones as well as to his migration from England to America in 1939.
But call it rebelliousness, independence, or, simply, impudence, there’s a certain quality of personality that comes through in Auden’s writing that may have fueled his impulse to compose poems veering from the modes of traditional English poetry.
To be sure, English rhythms are prominent in many of his most memorable lyrics and ballads: “If I Could Tell You,” “The Three Companions” (“O where are you going, said reader to rider”), the sonnet “Rimbaud,” and many others.
As ingrained as English measures were in Auden’s poetic sensibility, however, he had an enduring interest in Latin verse, especially that of Horace. Quoting Ezra Pound, Robert Hillyer writes that “at almost all stages of his career [Auden’s verse] encompassed numerous “attempts to give an English version of Horace.”
Much of Horace’s appeal for Auden, particularly in the latter stages of Auden’s career, was doubtless in the balanced, relaxed, and expansive tone of Horace’s poetry. As Auden says in the voice of Horace’s followers in “The Horatians,” a syllabic poem written in 1968:
We can only
do what it seems to us we were made for, look at
this world with a happy eye
but from a sober perspective.
To convey that combined sense of a happy eye and a sober perspective in his poems, Auden employed quatrains featured in Horace’s odes, including alcaics and sapphics.
Though Auden’s lines made no attempt to mimic Horace’s quantitative prosody and have no consistent stress patterns, he recreated line by line the syllable counts of Horace’s original forms, according to Hillyer.
The results were extraordinary. Under the influence of Marianne Moore, who composed in syllabics earlier and more predominantly than Auden did, Auden may have syllabified an earlier version of “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” after he dined with Moore and her mother in November 1939, according to the English poet and author John Fuller.
Written in alcaic quatrains in an elevated yet direct tone that’s both classical and utterly contemporary, the Freud elegy is to me is one of the greatest poems in the language. It both breaks your heart and instructs you how to live.
When there are so many we shall have to mourn,
When grief has been made so public, and exposed
to the critique of a whole epoch
the frailty of our conscience and anguish,
Of whom shall we speak? For every day they die
Among us, those who were doing us some good,
who knew it was never enough but
hoped to improve a little by living.