September 1 1939 Auden Analysis

“September 1, 1939” by W.H. Auden is a poem that embodies a moment in time of human vulnerability and an end to an era. The title has much more meaning than being so random date. September 1, 1939 was a date that most of us know and have read in our history books growing up. This date signified the date that Adolf Hitler and his German army invaded Poland, which was one week after the signing of the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact. In other words this date lives in infamy as the date World War II started and the stained horrors of Nazi Germany. Auden’s poem does a great job of putting his feelings of an end of a decade and ushering the new thats latched onto a global war. This causes the speaker to ponder the thoughts of war and the causes of war on

The story begins with Auden establishing the setting with the speaker sitting in a “dive” that located in midtown Manhattan, New York. Auden is specific on the location addressing the street that the dive is located “On Fifty-Second Street” (line 2). The poem consists of nine stanzas with eleven lines . There is no recognizable form that Auden uses in this poem. There is also no pattern to the rhyming or the rhythm in the poem, this could be a way of creating the unstable and uncertainty that the poem’s theme is relating to. Auden captures the speaker’s feelings of uncertainty and fear for not only their future, but the future of civilization as a whole “Waves of anger and fear” (line 6) and in the line “And darkened lands of the earth,/ Obsessing our private lives;/ The unmentionable odor of death” (8-10). This lines establish the mood and theme that Auden was eluding to in the poem of fear, anger, and pain. This also translates to the poems tone of anger and distrust of the the 1930’s socialist schemes that failed in preventing another war. “ From Luther until now/ That has driven a culture mad/ Find what occurred at Linz,/ What a huge imago made” (line 14-17), Auden references that Martin Luther’s ideas ultimately drove a whole culture mad, until a child who grew up in Linz, Adolf Hitler, inherited a fundamentally flawed worldview that turned him into a “psychopathic god:” (line