Their Lonely Betters Flashcards
Summary
deals with the cosmos of his garden, poem of under-statement in the Frostian manner, which expands on Auden’s contemporary interest in the difference between natural life and the life of man
‘It seems to me only proper that words
/Should be withheld from vegetables and birds’
‘A Robin with no Christian name ran through / the Robin anthem which was all it knew’
reminiscent of the, as yet, unfilled individual of “Prime”, the robin has no Christian name and no attendant responsibilities which the adjective implies
what is the fundamental difference between human and animal language?
the unique ability of humans to prevaricate; ‘Not one of them was capable of lying’, and human language’s reflexiveness; man can contemplate its own mortality ‘There was not one which knew that it was dying’
end of the poem emphasises squarely…
the responsibility on man to invest language with meaning, indicates the almost religious depth of duty Auden felt towards his vocation
form?
short, four stanza lyric poem
when was it probably written
1950
John Fuller:
the tone of the poem comes from Robert Frost, one of Auden’s earliest influences; the ‘promises to keep’ seem to be a direct allusion to Frost’s similarly proportioned poem ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’.
Edward Mendelson:
composition took place as Auden was reading the works of the philosopher Kierkegaard and theorising the difference between first- and third-person speech. ‘First-person speech was the product of a personal responsibility, of words spoken in one’s own name by an I addressing a second-person you. Third-person speech reduced oneself to an anonymous he or she or they.’
rhyme scheme?
AABB constant to emphasise the uniqueness of words bc they can rhyme
