Mapping the mind and the body: on W.H. Auden's personifications - Critical Essay

In contrast to "The Mind to Body Spoke," the body does get its chance to speak in the enigmatic poem "Memorial for the City." Finished in June 1949, this poem is a "direct result" or "record" of Auden's 1945 Germany trip and is dedicated to the memory of the theological writer Charles Williams, who died in 1945 (Carpenter 337). Hired by the Pentagon because he was fluent in German and knew the country well, Auden toured post-war Germany in summer 1945 to conduct civilian interviews. The Allies wanted to know if prolonged bombing had helped bring about Germany's surrender, and as Auden later said of his stint with the United States Strategic Bombing Survey's "Morale" Division, "We asked them if they minded being bombed. We went to a city which lay in ruins and asked if it had been hit. We got no answers that we did not expect" (qtd. in Pearsall 108). Auden' s long silence about the haunting trip was broken in 1949 with "Memorial for the City," a four part poem.

Part I depicts the world after the Holocaust as a "Post-Vergilian City / Where our past is a chaos of graves and the barbed wire stretches ahead / Into our future till it is lost to sight" (Collected 592). Part II recounts nearly nine hundred years of revolutionary history (from 1075 to 1917) involving cities like Rome, Paris, and Moscow. The chronology lends the part a teleological structure before the action "returns to the present" (Fuller 420) in part III. (4) By the time readers get to part III, the "abolished City" (Collected 594) is hopelessly divided by barbed wire. Auden writes that even "our Image," which is to say the body made in God's image, "has no image to admire, / No age, no sex, no memory, no creed, no name" (Collected 595). When readers get to part IV, this is what they find in the opening lines:

Without me Adam would have fallen irrecovably with Lucifer; he never
 would have been able to cry O felix culpa.
It was I who suggested his theft to Prometheus; my frailty cost Adonis
 his life.
I heard Orpheus sing; I was not quite as moved as they say.
I was not taken in by the sheep's-eyes of Narcissus; I was angry with
 Psyche when she struck a light.
                                                       (Collected 595)

These are the first four lines of an eighteen-line monologue spoken "in riddling terms" (Fuller 420) by a peculiar persona. Since part III ends with the command, "Let Our Weakness speak," Auden provides a name for the persona--the unnamed "image" mentioned earlier in part III--but then leaves the rest to us. Edward Mendelson, the great Auden critic, says all the lines in part IV are "spoken by the body in language it might use if it were autonomous" (322). And yet, how do we understand the monologue here? If the body is speaking in its own terms, then it must be construed as autonomous when we personify it. In other words, Mendelson's "if" is superfluous since autonomy is presupposed by the personification mapping. Still, the riddle is intriguing. On the one hand, since we know that answers to riddles cannot be obvious, we know that "Our Weakness" is not specific enough to answer the riddle's implicit question: who is speaking? Despite the definite article in the poem's title, "the City" that Auden memorializ es is never truly specified as one single city in the poem. On the other hand, Auden's catalog of at least twenty-three allusions in the monologue's eighteen lines gradually moves from the general to the specific and elaborates our mappings.