{"id":124144,"date":"2018-04-11T09:00:41","date_gmt":"2018-04-11T13:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=124144"},"modified":"2018-04-13T12:15:58","modified_gmt":"2018-04-13T16:15:58","slug":"a-homework-assignment-from-w-h-auden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/04\/11\/a-homework-assignment-from-w-h-auden\/","title":{"rendered":"A Homework Assignment from W. H. Auden"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

W.\u2009H. Auden backstage at the 92nd street Y in 1966. Photo: Diane Dorr Dorynek<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know the backstory on this one. All I have is the assignment below, forwarded to me by my editor:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

What is he even talking about. Actually, I can explain that. The part I can\u2019t explain is how Auden can possibly have thought anything good was gonna come out of this assignment.<\/p>\n

He was a glutton for punishment, I\u2019ve heard. But you\u2019d have to have a screw loose to hand out the above as an assignment. It\u2019s not that the students wouldn\u2019t do it; they\u2019d try. But then you\u2019d have to read the results. Take a sec and imagine the anger.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I had a girlfriend thousands of years ago who told me one of her concepts of hell was having to watch two virgins trying to have sex. For me, it\u2019s watching beginners try to write in meter. O ye who care about this sort of thing, I\u2019m sure you know what I\u2019m talking about.<\/p>\n

Back when I was on Facebook, I used to post limericks every other minute. \u2019Specially birthday limericks. Which of course resulted in my receiving<\/i> birthday limericks, in my turn. Or what people thought were limericks. Here\u2019s my spoof of the type of rhyme and meter to which I was annually exposed:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n

There once was a guy whose birthday it was, named Madrid,
\nAnd those circumstances me to set to writing a limerick bid.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow. And analogously, Auden must have suffered the agonies of the damned when he looked over his students\u2019 attempts to fulfill the requirements of the prompt above. Granted, it cannot have been as bad in 1956 as it would be today. But it has to have sucked.<\/p>\n

The assignment is really<\/i> hard. Let me decipher it for all normal people. I\u2019ll retype it so it\u2019s clearer what he\u2019s asking for:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The problem for the candidate (and Auden certainly knew this) is that the rhythm-making mind rebels against deliberately cutting to a twisted-up pattern. No poet starts<\/i> with an irregular metrical mess and then fits words to it. The thing that happens is one writes loosely (e.g., counting only stressed syllables and ignoring where the unstressed ones fall) such that an irregular mess results<\/i>\u2014hopefully with an attractive ballad feel or something like that. There would be no point whatsoever in a poet\u2019s engineering eight lines that happen to exhaust the possibilities of \u201csubstitutional arrangement\u201d because not one person on Earth would even know the poet had done it.<\/p>\n

Put it this way. Exhausting the possibilities for metrical substitutions is basically an Oulipo procedure. Someone would have to tell you it was there. Even someone who scanned the verses<\/i> would never catch on. Or it\u2019d be 1000-to-1 odds against.<\/p>\n

Let me repeat: Auden knew all this perfectly well, and he knew that setting out to put stressed syllables right next to each other is counterintuitive to almost everybody, especially in short lines. I\u2019ll mark the hot spots in red:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

And worse! Auden didn\u2019t just tell them to write a poem in this meter; he said he wanted it to be a song<\/i>. That means it has to be singable; it can\u2019t just be some brambly thorny nine-eyed web-footed Elizabethan epigram. So on top of everything else, it\u2019s gotta go down smooth\u00a0<\/i>\u2026<\/p>\n

Now surely my editor sent me Auden\u2019s thing knowing it was a medical certainty I would take the bait. (I\u2019ve heard on Twitter she is currently writing a Jane Austen spoof about me, titled Pride and Pedantry<\/i>.) And indeed, within forty-five minutes of receipt, I had rigged up a pile of unmeaning gibberish, just to see what the English language, driven through that meter, would even sound like. Below is what I wrote. I wish I could say it took only ten seconds. Actually, it was really hard.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n

All the girls are cryin\u2019
\n\u2014maroon pickle McGoo\u2014
\nat least ya dad\u2019s tryin\u2019:
\ntryin\u2019 to talk to you<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n
\n

Ya mom\u2019s playin\u2019 possum
\n\u2014hey, maroon and Madrid!\u2014
\nplucking a white blossom
\nand plucking\u2019s all she did<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Oh, whatever; that\u2019s actually kind of good. Sharpshooters will note its resemblance to Edmund Spenser\u2019s mighty roundelay in the August section of T<\/em>he<\/em> Shepheardes Calendar<\/i> (1579). But let\u2019s X-ray it and make sure the meter\u2019s right \u2026<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Good. It\u2019s not a song, it only sorta makes sense, but it does scan. However: all this was days and days ago.<\/p>\n

TODAY I set out to devise the thing I would have actually turned in to W.\u2009H. Auden if I had been in his class at the Young Men\u2019s and Young Women\u2019s Hebrew Association (better known today as the 92nd Street Y) sixty-two years ago. To warm up, I wrote several more stanzas of spangablasm:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n

Mira Buffam Reddy
\nArrived wearing a hat
\nGoodbye to Tom Petty
\nHail and farewell to that<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

\u2026 and so on. And then I was racking my brains to think of a subject for a song<\/i>. (I was reminded of a bon mot I read recently, supposedly coined by my idol, Roger Miller. It was something like: \u201cThe mind is an amazing thing. It starts working before you\u2019re even born, and it doesn\u2019t stop until you sit down to write a song.\u201d)<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been obsessing over the third-century Chinese poet Ruan Ji lately, so I thought he might lend a hand. I wound up translating the first poem in his collection into that stupid meter:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n

Night, and idle notion
\nto rise, play on my lute.
\nThe moon in slight motion,
\nmirrored in curtain folds. \u2190 I know this doesn\u2019t rhyme<\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n
\n

Outside, lonely bird call,
\nhollow over north plains.
\nPacing, I feel words all
\nare nothing. Grief remains.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Just so you can see what all I left out, here\u2019s a legit translation, from An Anthology of Chinese Verse: Han Wei Chin and the Northern and Southern Dynasties<\/i>, trans. J.\u2009D. Frodsham and Ch\u2019eng Hsi (1967):<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n

In the deep of night I found I could not sleep,
\nI rose, sat down, and played my singing lute.
\nMy flimsy curtains mirrored the shining moon,
\nA pure breeze stirred the collar of my gown.
\nA lonely goose called in the wilds outside,
\nA bird hovered crying over the northern woods.
\nI paced up and down, wondering what I should see,
\nBut only sad thoughts came to grieve my heart.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

I was still looking for a song<\/i>, though. I thought maybe a lullaby\u2014? And here, dear reader, is where we bring this whole goat-rodeo clusterfuck to a close. And as for you, W.\u2009H. Auden, wherever you are, may you identify with the crow in the following song lyric and not with the owl. For it is better to talk in one\u2019s sleep than to choke back a sob. A parable.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n

Calmly, coolly, gravely,
\nthe crow talked in its sleep.
\nThe snowy owl bravely
\nswallowed an urge to weep.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The sigh woke the swallow;
\nsnow was falling in drifts:
\ncovering North Hollow,
\nthe robins, jays, and swifts.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

And here\u2019s the X-ray. Goodnight.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Anthony Madrid lives in Victoria, Texas. His second book is <\/em>Try Never<\/a>. He is a correspondent for the <\/em>Daily.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  I don\u2019t know the backstory on this one. All I have is the assignment below, forwarded to me by my editor:     What is he even talking about. Actually, I can explain that. The part I can\u2019t explain is how Auden can possibly have thought anything good was gonna come out of this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1005,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[33690,33692,20867,33691,11051,33693,33694,2160],"class_list":["post-124144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-an-anthology-of-chinese-verse-han-wei-chin-and-the-northern-and-southern-dynasties","tag-cheng-hsi","tag-edmund-spenser","tag-j-d-frodsham","tag-oulipo","tag-ruan-ji","tag-shepheards-calendar","tag-w-h-auden"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nA Homework Assignment from W. H. 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