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1.1 About the author and his relevant life experiences on his Spain writing
Being an Anglo-American poet, Wystan Hugh Auden(1907-1973) is considered the greatest English poet of the 20th century, after W. B. Yeats(1865-1939) and T.S Eliot(1888-1965) and his works have exerted a major influence on succeeding generations of poets on both sides of the Atlantic.
In the year of 1936, W. H. Auden went to Iceland in company with Louis MacNeice, a giant in Irish poetry. They co-operated on the writing of their travels. During Auden’s stay in Iceland, the Spanish Civil War broke out. Auden, like so many young men of the Left in the 1930s, decided to volunteer for service in Spain. He planed to drive an ambulance fighting against Fascism, but the Republican set him to writing and broadcast because they recognized that Auden’s greatest utility to the Left was as a propagandist rather than a soldier. Auden returned from Spain still anti-Fascist, but embittered by his recognition that the political realities of the Spanish scene were far more complicated and equivocal than he had ever dreamed(Grass, 7). Though Auden did not come to the fore himself, he wrote this splendid poem to show his reflection on the historical difficulties of human beings. Auden stressed in the poem that what has been done is tomorrow’s history, people should shoulder the responsibility and act today because history has no way to change.
1.2 About Spain
This poem of a hundred and four lines can be called with accuracy and no depreciation an occasional poem. The poem is essentially a poem for the moment dealing with a straight issue—the struggle in Spain. Especially, it describes the history that led up to the Spanish Civil War. The poem emerged directly from Auden’s eager participation on the Republican side of the war and is out spoken, idealistic, and naive in its unequivocal call for activism in support of the Spanish left.
There is no denying that Spain is a brilliant accomplishment. It is a long verse and every word is chosen elaborately to ensure its aesthetic forms. Whatever adjectives, verbs and nouns, are arranged tactfully to make the style prominent and to make the variation of rhythm unobtrusive.
The repetition and antitheses of the Yesterday-Today-Tomorrow scheme of Spain shows Auden’s asking to meditate on the relationship between the past, the present and the future. The poem starts out with “yesterday all the past”, indicating that the past belongs to history from the very beginning, which lays a historical foundation for the later stanzas.
Yesterday all the past. The language of size
Spreading to China along the trade-routes; the diffusion
Of the counting-frame and the cromlech;
Yesterday the shadow-reckoning in the sunny climates.
Yesterday the assessment of insurance by cards,
The pination of water; yesterday the invention
Of cartwheels and clocks, the taming of
Horse. Yesterday the bustling world of the navigators.
Yesterday the abolition of fairies and giants,
The fortress like a motionless eagle eyeing the valley,
The chapel built in the forest;
Yesterday the carving of angels and alarming gargoyles;
The trial of heretics among the columns of stone;
Yesterday the theological feuds in the taverns
And the miraculous cure at the fountain;
Yesterday the Sabbath of witches; but to-day the struggle.
Yesterday the belief in the absolute value of Greek,
The fall of the curtain upon the death of a hero;
Yesterday the prayer to the sunset
And the adoration of madmen. But to-day the struggle.
What Auden presents, then, is a brilliant selection of the persity of historical phenomena detached from their local contexts and chronological relations. Rather than selecting the high points, he stresses what happens over and over again. The first six strophes which basically share the same sentence pattern, rendering the scenes of yesterday, foil atmosphere to show that history demonstrates men must pay the price for their mistakes. In the meantime, the poet doesn’t lose the sight of the present moment for remaining forever vigilant.