New Year Letter - W.H. Auden

January, like the two-faced god Janus of its namesake, is a time both for looking forward and reflecting back. In "New Year Letter," W.H. Auden contemplates the changing calendar and the "vast spiritual disorders" of the ages.

Situated on the eve of 1940, the poem begins at an ominous period in history. The decade of the 1930's had seen an increasing pattern of international aggression, with invasions by Japan, Italy, and culminating in the invasion of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union to precipitate World War II. But The Double Man (1941)--of which "New Year Letter" is the centerpiece--takes its title from a quote by the essayist Michel de Montaigne, reaching as far back as the 16th century: "We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe, we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn."

Montaigne was diagnosing the violence in his own time, having been born into a Jewish family with experience in the Spanish Inquisition. Several of his relatives were persecuted, forced to convert to Christianity or keep their Judaism a secret. As Charles Williams explains, "the kind of faith [Montaigne] beheld active round him... had... killed 800,000 human beings and wrecked nine towns and two hundred and fifty villages--that faith had first been a hypothesis and had been generally translated into the realms of certitude by anger and obstinacy and egotism."

Nevertheless, "New Year Letter" was written at a time when Auden was becoming convinced that Christianity and social justice were mutually related. Auden, at this pivotal moment in his own life and in world history, exiled to the United States and began drawing on theology (especially that of Søren Kierkegaard and Charles Williams) as a source for his poetic insight.

The end result is a rich and relentlessly searching poem, at once topical and universal. It pays homage to Auden's literary heroes, including a metaphorical "Ishmael hunting his lost love, / To harpoon his unhappiness / And turn the whale to a princess." It is an erudite metaphysical discussion of history, evolution, and faith, and a meditation on our inexorably divided self and our tendency to morbid self-disowning, well worth (re)reading at the New Year.

New Year Letter:

Supplemental:

• Reflections on W.H. Auden's New Year Letter by Gil Baile
• In Our Time
• "Herman Melville" poem by W.H. Auden (1939)
• Notes on "New Year Letter"

Extracts:

• "Europe was in a decade dim: / Upon the future’s trembling rim / The comet hovered." (Clarel, 2.4)
• "Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye." (Moby-Dick, 85)
• "Bonds sympathetic bind these three— / Faith, Reverence, and Charity. / If Faith once fail, the faltering mood / Affects—needs must—the sisterhood." (Clarel, 1.25)
• "...the god Janus never had two more decidedly different faces than your sea captain." ("Etchings of a Whaling Cruise")
• "On deck! shout it out, you forecastle-man, / Shout “Sail ho, Sail ho—the New Year!”" ("The Admiral of the White")

This meetup is part of a series on The Crescent and the Cross.