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Mapping the mind and the body: on W.H. Auden's personifications - Critical Essay
Style, Fall, 2002 by Craig A. Hamilton
Perhaps two poems that go furthest in separating mind from body are "The Mind to Body Spoke," one of Auden's first poems, and "Memorial for the City," one of his masterpieces. Dualism runs throughout "The Mind to Body Spoke," a wonderful poem that Auden wrote when he was about twenty. Written around November 1927, the poem opens as follows with this stanza:
The mind to body spoke the whole night through:
'Often, equipped and early, you
Traced figures in the dust, eager
To start, but on the edge of snow
As often then refused me further;
Proffered a real object, fresh,
Constant to every loyal wish.
(English 441)
The poem's four stanzas depict the mind divided from the body in what looks like a conversation. In the opening stanza above, the mind tells us that the body has "traced figures," "refused," and "proffered." These are actions that the body has performed on its own, to the chagrin of the mind. The opposition of the two is also suggested by the mind as a late riser who has chattered all night, while the body is an early riser. In the next stanza, the mind has regrets. The body would not take it to the "Dark Tower," although both body and mind found time "on the hill crest" marching on away from life. But since "applause" contrasts with the "disillusioned bell," the mind and the body perceive events differently in stanza two where the mind will stand in a storm even when the body's physiological reaction to the danger has made it "frantic." Stanza three, however, suggests there was once a moment where mind and body worked in concert, the voice disguising the "jabber of the blood." The body's poise keeps it calm while Auden implies that the mind behind the voice was troubled.
Finally, the three lines of the last stanza are spoken neither by the mind nor the body but by another persona: "Cocks crew, and sleeping men turned over. / Rain fell for miles; ghosts went away. / The jaw, long dropped, stopped a reply" (English 442). The blather of the mind has little effect on the external world although the dropped jaw appears surprised at what it has had to listen to. The poem's final line reveals that the body too is personified. In a rather impersonal tone, the jaw stops the body's "reply" to the mind. Whereas the body can only speak audibly, Auden suggests that the mind is able to speak inaudibly, is able to speak against the wishes of the body or without its help. Whereas the mind is directly quoted in the first three stanzas, the body's reaction is indirectly reported in stanza four. We never know what the body would have said: it wanted to answer the mind but the jaw did not comply. And yet, the ability of the body to act on its own is a sign of its autonomy, just as the will of th e mind to "speak" freely is a sign of its autonomy. Of course, if the mind rather than the body controls the jaw, Auden may be arguing that the body's attempt to reply is actually thwarted by the mind. In this case, the body can never speak for itself even if it exists apart from the mind here as the mind's interlocutor. Either way, my point is that regardless of where we stand on the issue of bodily control, this very dualism comes through to us in the poem via the personifications presented by Auden. In order to yield the active personifications in the poem, human traits like motivations are mapped by readers from a personified source onto the targets of body and mind. More than mere metonyms for a person, the body and the mind for Auden here are individual personified beings at odds with one another. Ironically, the two are realized by the exact same conceptual process of metaphorical personification, which complicates Auden's dualism with regard to poetics in ways hitherto unnoticed.
