Consummation in the woods

A happier sestina poem for a Valentine’s Day card (still time for next year) comes from W.H. Auden.

Or, so I’ve been reminded, following my story of the sad man seeking some serious love lines last Saturday in the newsagent’s queue (See previous post).

The ‘sestina’ (for those who don’t want to click back) is a poem of six line stanzas in which the same six words – in an order decreed in mediaeval Europe – must mark each line’s end.

The one that I first wanted to suggest to the lovelorn youth of Reading, Berkshire,  was by Dante: its six end words were stone, woman, shade, green, hills, grass.

But it is a chilly, gloomy piece – too much so perhaps even for the man moaning at the seller of cardboard greetings.

Auden’s sestina, from ‘The Orators’ (1934) is called, more encouragingly, ‘Have a Good Time’.

Its six words are country, vats, wood, bay, clock and, most important for this purpose, love.

‘Wood’ and ‘clock’ are not so hard for the poet to manipulate.

‘Vats’ is a more challenging choice  – and it is not wholly clear whether Auden is talking of whisky distilleries or the cauldrons of cloth-dyers.

The hero of ‘Have a Good Time’ is an airman of the 1930s, a handsome Greek hero type with appropriate sexual anxiety.

His controllers introduce him with:

‘We have brought you’, they said, ‘a map of the country;
Here is the line that runs to the vats,
This patch of green on the left is the wood,
We’ve pencilled an arrow to point out the bay.
No thank you, no tea; why look at the clock.
Keep it? Of course. It goes with our love.

By the end of the sestina, Auden’s airman of espionage has been much more sexually successful than Dante’s hero.

He gets his ‘consummation in the wood’.

The final three line stanza, which, by the strict rules of old, must also contain all the six words, runs:

Sees water in the wood and trees by the bay,
Hears a clock striking near the vats;
‘This is your country and the home of love’.

There is time enough before February 14 comes round again for other suggestions too.

Comments

[Dion Per Sona]

I was doing you a Valentine verse which I thought would work out quite well, but on second reading I see it needs more work, i.e.: better words, other ideas and more lines.

I may have to start it again.

[Candadai Tirumalai]

A form like the sestina was made for W.H. Auden, who was fond of the Oxford English Dictionary: a master of verbal dexterity and manipulation. He often began his day with the crossword puzzle.

[Nigel Beale]

Interesting that you would go with an image of the American edition of the book (1967) instead of the much earlier English, First (1932)...?