Time will say nothing but I told you so,
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

There are no fortunes to be told, although,
Because I love you more than I can say,
If I could tell you I would let you know.

The winds must come from somewhere when they blow,
There must be reasons why the leaves decay;
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

Perhaps the roses really want to grow,
The vision seriously intends to stay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

Suppose the lions all get up and go,
And all the brooks and soldiers run away;
Will Time say nothing but I told you so?
If I could tell you I would let you know.

Auden always argued that few could match Kierkegaard’s acuity of insight into the historical (choice-driven) aspect of human experience. But he came to believe that for Kierkegaard—and many who succeeded him, “bowled over” by his brilliance as Auden had been—our life in nature is at best an embarrassment. (With perhaps pardonable exaggeration, Auden remarked of Kierkegaard that one “could read through the whole of his voluminous works without discovering that human beings are not ghosts but have bodies of flesh and blood.”) And for Auden this deficiency is properly described as theological: Kierkegaard, and other Christian thinkers who share his disregard for embodied human nature, neglect clear and vital Christian teaching about God’s redeeming love for this physical world, this whole Creation.

Much later in his life, Auden would borrow a musical metaphor from Dietrich Bonhoeffer and say that Kierkegaard was a “monodist, who can hear with particular acuteness one theme in the New Testament—in his case, the theme of suffering and self-sacrifice—but is deaf to its rich polyphony.” And for the Auden who emerges in the pages of this volume, the unique power of Christian doctrine is its polyphonic character, its capacity to address every dimension of our being, to give a comprehensive account of how history and nature relate, and—decisively in Christ’s incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection—how they may be reconciled. In a 1955 essay about his conversion—the only straightforward one he ever wrote—he put the main point in this way:

As a spirit, a conscious person endowed with free will, every man has, though faith and grace, a unique “existential” relation to God, and few since St. Augustine have described this relation more profoundly than Kierkegaard. But every man has a second relation to God which is neither unique nor existential: as a creature composed of matter, as a biological organism, every man, in common with everything else in the universe, is related by necessity to the God who created that universe and saw that it was good, for the laws of nature to which, whether he likes it or not, he must conform are of divine origin.
And it is with this body, with faith or without it, that all good works are done

As Mendelson points out in Later Auden (1999), the best book anyone has yet written about the poet, it was in 1948 that Auden “began to write poems about the inarticulate human body”—the part of us that does not and cannot talk, or think, or have faith in God, but which Christ died to redeem, along with the rest of creation which, as St. Paul says, groans in anticipation of its deliverance. Cardinal Newman distinguished between “notional” and “real” assent, and while Auden gave notional assent to the physical Resurrection of Jesus, and to the credal claim that “we look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come,” he always struggled to make that assent real. But he understood these affirmations to be absolutely central to orthodox Christianity and necessary to a true embrace of the goodness of Creation.

from Alan Jacobs’ The Poet’s Prose, in B&C

Well, so that is that.  Now we must dismantle the tree,

Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes—

Some have got broken — and carrying them up to the attic.

The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,

And the children got ready for school.  There are enough

Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week —

Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,

Stayed up so late, attempted — quite unsuccessfully —

To love all of our relatives, and in general

Grossly overestimated our powers.  Once again

As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed

To do more than entertain it as an agreeable

Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,

Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,

The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.

The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,

And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware

Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought

Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now

Be very far off.  But, for the time being, here we all are,

Back in the moderate Aristotelian city

Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid’s geometry

And Newton’s mechanics would account for our experience,

And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.

It seems to have shrunk during the holidays.  The streets

Are much narrower than we remembered; we had forgotten

The office was as depressing as this.  To those who have seen

The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,

The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all… .

W. H. Auden, For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, lines of which were quoted by the Rev. Fr. Billy Shand in his sermon today.

Mary

Oh shut your bright eyes that mine must endanger
With their watchfulness: protected by its shade
Escape from my care: what can you discover
From my tender look but how to be afraid?
Love can but confirm the more it would deny.
Close your bright eye.

Sleep. What have you learned from the womb that bore you
But an anxiety your Father cannot feel?
Sleep. What will the flesh that I gave do for you,
Or my mother love, but tempt you from His will?
Why was I chosen to teach His son to weep?
Little one, sleep.

Dream. In human dreams earth ascends to Heaven
Where no one need pray nor ever feel alone. 
In your first hours of life here, O have you
Chosen already what death must be your own?
How soon will you start on the Sorrowful Way?
Dream while you may.

W. H. Auden

On the one side are these colossal Proustian memory bullies who get 1,800 pages of recollection out of a mere cookie-bite. They traipse around broadcasting their conspicuous displays of recall as if quoting Auden were the Hummer of conversational one-upmanship. On the other side are those of us suffering the normal effects of time, living in the hippocampically challenged community that is one step away from leaving the stove on all day.

This divide produces moments of social combat. Some vaguely familiar person will come up to you in the supermarket. “Stan, it’s so nice to see you!” The smug memory dropper can smell your nominal aphasia and is going to keep first-naming you until you are crushed into submission.

Your response here is critical. You want to open up with an effusive burst of insincere emotional warmth: “Hey!” You’re practically exploding with feigned ecstasy. “Wonderful to see you too! How is everything?” All the while, you are frantically whirring through your memory banks trying to anchor this person in some time and context.

A decent human being would sense your distress and give you some lagniappe of information — a mention of the church picnic you both attended, the parents’ association at school, the fact that the two of you were formerly married. But the Proustian bully will give you nothing. “I’m good. And you?” It’s like trying to get an arms control concession out of Leonid Brezhnev.

Your only strategy is evasive vagueness, conversational rope-a-dope until you can figure out who this person is. You start talking in the tone of over-generalized blandness that suggests you have recently emerged from a coma.

Sensing your pain, your enemy pours it on mercilessly. “And how is Mary, and little Steven and Rob?” People who needlessly display their knowledge of your kids’ names are the lowest scum of the earth.

[David Brooks] 

               Now, did He really break the seal


               And rise again? We dare not say;


               But conscious unbelievers feel


               Quite sure of Judgment Day.

               Meanwhile, a silence on the Cross,


               As dead as we shall ever be,


               Speaks of some total gain or loss,


               And you and I are free

               To guess from the insulted face

               Just what appearances He saves


               By suffering in a public place


               A death reserved for slaves. 

                                   — WH Auden, Friday’s Child