Since On a mid-December day, frying sausages for myself, I abruptly felt under fingers thirty years younger the rim of a steering wheel, on my cheek the parching wind of an August noon, as passenger beside me You as then you were.
Slap across a veg-growing alluvial plain we raced in clouds of white dust, and geese fled screaming as we missed them by inches, making a bee-line for mountains gradually enlarging eastward, joyfully certain nightfall would occasion joy. It did. In a flagged kitchen we were served boiled trout and a rank cheese: for a while we talked by the fire, then, carrying candles, climbed steep stairs. Love was made then and there: so halcyoned, soon we fell asleep to the sound of a river swabbling through a gorge. Since then, other enchantments have blazed and faded, enemies changed their address, and War made ugly an uncountable number of unknown neighbors, precious as us to themselves: but round your image there is no fog, and the Earth can still astonish. Of what, then, should I complain, pottering about a neat suburban kitchen? Solitude? Rubbish! Its social enough with real faces and landscapes for whose friendly countenance I at least can learn to live with obesity and a little fame. W.H.Auden One of Auden's later poems, written in 1965. By then his relationship with Chester Kallman had settled into a regular, though not terribly happy pattern. They were still a couple and Auden at least considered himself married to Kallman, but they had long stopped sleeping together. Perhaps Kallman didn't love Auden equally (according to Auden - its odd how little one hears Kallman's views in so much writing on Auden), perhaps he no longer found him sexually attractive, perhaps he was champing at being always seen as Auden's appendage when he sought to be a creative artist himself. So they still continued to spend part of the year together in the house Auden had bought in Austria, but for the rest Auden went to the US, and Kallman went to Greece where at some point he had another lover. Auden accepted the situation and found other lovers for sex. The situation did make him a little bitter though, bringing out all his old insecurities about himself and his complicated feelings about his sexuality. But he never doubted that Kallman was the love of his life and his partner, and it was moments like the one recorded in his poem that kept this constancy. The poem is of a memory that becomes almost a vision, of a time long back when they were first in love and of a perfect moment at that perfect time. Since then things have changed much, in the world and with them, but the memory of that perfect moment, of "You as then you were" has not. And that sustains the poet through all the changes and disappointments of time. Auden knew that love often turns out disappointing, but that disappointment should not negate the reality of what had once happened. To have known real love at least once is to know that "the Earth/ can still astonish" and life has meaning. As to the rest its just living and can be done easily enough. With practice one can even "learn/ to live with obesity/ and a little fame." Vikram
