Alison’s Blog

Found in Poets.com
From the Academy of American Poets

“The More Loving One”
W.H. Auden

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

• Quatrain Form
• Rhyming couplets (rhyme aabb)- rhyme is masculine, mostly monosyllabic (sing songy)
• Ironic rhyme juxtapositions: well/hell, (I) am/damn, suggests that hell is well and that he is damned by loving the stars (being the more loving one).
• The first, third and fourth stanzas are one sentence enjambed throughout the four lines.
• The second stanza varies in that it is composed of two sentences that are enjambed (2 lines each) and thus presents two ideas. It also includes the only question in the poem. The first sentences (lines 5 & 6) question stands out, imposes the idea of the opposite happening than what he describes. The second sentences answers it. This stanza is conclusive.
• Ironic because for all that he is the “more loving one” he also does not give a damn in the end. Ironic also that the poem is symmetrical and equal (perfect couplets and rhyme) when Auden is talking about an unequal love (he is the more loving one).
• Serious (rhyme scheme indicates, use of swear words in lines 1 & 10) about a silly subject
• Metaphor of unrequited love, (references Renaissance idea of the enjoyment of being in love)

Eye

She sees summer through the eye of the storm,
inside barred by sheer cold blades of thin glass
that holds the heat at bay. She watches from
her bed entombed by blankets soft and tired
She lays, and waits, listens to the soft drip
drip drip of the IV and the hum and
whir of the machines all around. Too tired
to sleep she watches the bend and sway of
the green, green trees outside her window that
do not even reach to the seventh floor.
She looks down upon the world in all its
steaming color like the sweet entrails of
a melon split by heat. This Summer is
no summer at all. So dry the air so
cold the floor, the breath she holds a broken
thing she caresses and, like her hair her
unblemished skin, loses to the greater storm.
Is this how summer abdicates to fall?
The soft drop of layers that make no sound—
the lid that closes soft over the eye.

I go to my computer and type in “form.” Click. A blink of light, the page changes. “Form: The shape and structure of something.” “Form: An established method of expression or proceeding,” “a resting place or nest of a hare” (a hare?!). Click. The page goes away again. I open a blank document. How does one talk about form? I brainstorm:
I think of form first in terms of ballet, the ritualistic convex, concave curving of bodies, achingly arched and feather-light as marionettes. Ballet, that which is gentle and seemingly effortless despite the grueling hours, and agonizing foot cramps that go into the preparation. I think of the discipline to hold those forms erect, poised heavily, delicately, on the tip of the shoe.
I think of form in terms of my kitten, his tiny lean body, muscles quivering as he poses himself on precipices. I admire the way he seems to walk on half of his foot, the tiny pink pads that float him aloft. My kitten is not a resting place for all that, on rainy nights, I long to crawl inside his purr, thrumming in the dark. He is not, of course a nest of a hare (hare hare) but he is an established method of expression and proceeding, behaving as every kitten will and should, so too is he the shape and structure of something (I always say if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it’s probably…), soft and orange he is every inch a kitten, small furry, a veritable whirlwind of gnashing claws.
Ballet, the form of my kitten, they are poetry in motion. I see the verbal possibility in the history of arabesques ground into the soles (souls?) of my old ballet shoes hanging on the door, in the strangely ubiquitous eyes of my kitten. In these things, I see how the form houses the thought. I see how form parallels the idea, gives it shape and moves it forward. Form, to my mind, is the car that I drive in, the body I live in, the bed I sleep in. Form is the delicate skin I slit open and fill with colorings of ideas and song, and tremblingly sew together.
Can form only be described in metaphor? I see the forms of things, note the forms around me but have not yet gone as far as disecting the idea of form itself. I see the skeletons of meaning, yet cannot explain its bones.