Every Human Love

I teach Modern British Poetry in the Spring, and so W. H. Auden’s early love poems always fall during Valentine’s week. And every year I return to the full humanity of a 1937 poem Auden later titled “Lullaby” (Lay your sleeping head, my love). In yesterday’s class, we entered this startling poem about the ephemeral fullness and “ordinary swoon” of one person’s love for another. It opens with an invitation that is tender and bracing at once:

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;

I and you could be anybody, as the body parts Auden writes into his love poems are rarely restricted to a single gender. The only restriction here is a shared one–the limitations (the faithlessness, the guilt) of being human. We are not divine like Venus; we are not the idealized figures of traditional love poems; we do not live happily ever after like Cinderella. We are “living creature[s]” like the beloved in this poem; we are made “of Eros and of dust,” Auden would write in “September 1, 1939.”

“On the stroke of midnight,” Auden tells us here, “ecstasy” and “certainty” will vanish. Yet in seizing “this night,” the speaker finds the “mortal, guilty” beloved to be “entirely beautiful.” There is a plenitude even in disenchanted love, which jazz musician Tord Gustavsen captures in this lush setting of the opening to Auden’s poem.

In the morning, Auden’s speaker offers a benediction for the lover to leave sustained (“fed”) through this “mortal world” they have created together, so that the lover can survive any “nights of insult” in the future. Just as the poem acknowledges our imperfections, it acknowledges our vulnerability in opening ourselves to another. The I and the you will part at morning, but the you can now “pass / Watched by every human love.” Every kind of love that one person bears for another.

A former student of mine said Auden’s love poems were “the most democratic” he had ever read. Whatever our sexuality may be, we can enter these poems and know they are ours. For they include everyone–if you’re human.

Happy Valentine’s weekend.
-MB