The Lurcher-Loving Collier: Auden’s music
George Szirtes

These notes are by necessity perfunctory, no more than the beginning of an idea perhaps, about the power and value of Auden in terms of what Eliot called ‘the auditory imagination’. Here’s a very short early Auden lyric, one that I fell in love with as a young poet, and continue to love saying..

From Twelve Songs

O lurcher-loving collier, black as night,
Follow your love across the smokeless hill;
Your lamp is out, the cages are all still;
Course for heart and do not miss,
For Sunday soon is past and, Kate, fly not so fast,
For Monday comes when none may kiss:
Be marble to his soot, and to his black be white.

June 1935

It is the second of the twelve songs, written by Auden in his committed Marxist stage, that stage being the most remarkable for his production of song. We think of the others in the same cycle: The Song of the Beggars, that begins:

"O for doors to be open and an invite with gilded edges
To dine with Lord Lobcock and Count Asthma on the platinum benches
With somersaults and fireworks, the roast and the smacking kisses"

Or “Let a florid music praise” which is Song III, or “Dear though the night is gone” (Song IV), or “Fish in the unruffled lake” (V), or one my other favourites ‘Autumn Song’ that begins: Now the leaves are falling fast, / Nurse’s flowers will not last, / Nurses to their graves are gone, / But the prams go rolling on” with its mixture of nursery tale, surrealism and political scope, right down to the comical song that is number XII, set by Benjamin Britten as a song for cabaret, as indeed were numbers IX (Funeral Blues) and X (Johnny). Britten set a number of the others in song cycles too, including “O lurcher loving collier”. Clearly, the poems titled Twelve Songs actually did lend themselves to song.

Auden had the model of Brecht before him, and was to collaborate with Brecht, but his song lyrics are generally based on the English tradition, now of anonymous songs such as he collected for the Oxford Book of Light Verse, and now on lyrics of the Elizabethan period such as employed by Shakespeare in his plays (and we mustn’t forget one of Auden’s great works of the late middle period, The Sea and the Mirror, which is based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, with songs for Miranda and Trinculo and discursive poems – another central interest of Auden’s – for Caliban and Sebastian etc.).

Song and discourse carve twin channels right through Auden’s oeuvre, with theatre, or the idea of theatre, not too far behind. Somewhere at the back of the song element lie the old ballads from Percy’s Reliques – Sir Patrick Spens and Twa Corbies and the 18th century ballad, Edward, Edward. These find form in Auden’s own ballads which, to my mind, are less beautiful than the songs.

What makes them beautiful? Is it sheer sound? The melody and lilt of

O lurcher-loving collier, black as night,
Follow your love across the smokeless hill;

begins, appropriately enough for a song that starts with lurchers – the working man’s hunting dog - with a literal lurch forward, plucking its music of l’s and c’s, guttural working towards plosive, settling in the second line with a rhythm that takes the leaps of the first and replays them more steadily, more quietly, that smokeless hill faintly recalling Wordsworth’s smokeless air in his sonnet Upon Westminster Bridge.

But abstract music in poetry is never quite music nor ever quite abstract. There is the essay by the late John Press where he reflects on an old consensus that since the most beautiful sounds in English were the consonants ‘v’ and ‘l’ and the most beautiful vowel the dipthong ‘I’, the most musically beautiful line in English verse must be Edgar Allan Poe’s : “The viol, the violet, and the vine”, as in “Up many and many a marvellous shrine / Whose wreathed friezes intertwine / The viol, the violet, and the vine” (from ‘The City in the Sea’). Press pointed out that the line “The vile, the violent and the swine” were very close in sound but very far from beauty by virtue of their associations.

It isn’t purely the sound of Auden’s poem that launches itself into the memory with the effect of a gust of wind or the springing leap of a hunting dog, it is partly the address to the collier – the miner to whom few poems would have been addressed - partly the reference to lamps and cages in such lyrical context, and partly the simple polarities of black soot and white marble that assume such naturalness under the sway of the rhythm. There is also the Lawrentian elementalism and energy to help the song move through its brief life. It is industry reset as pastoral, but without a heavy programme. It is, in effect, a dance springing lightly on its feet.

These brisk sallies into an impulsive, melancholy delight owe much also to Shakespeare’s songs from the plays: to “When that I was and a little tiny boy” from Twelfth Night, to “Full fathom five” in The Tempest, to “How should I thy true love know” from Hamlet, and the marvellous rest.

The line from Shakespeare to Auden must pass through William Blake in terms of song. Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience are full of that naturally golden music and proverbial energy. 

Isn’t Shakespeare’s:

Golden lads and girls all must
Like chimney sweepers come to dust

from Cymbeline, a precursor of Blake’s

Ah, Sunflower weary of time
Who countest the steps of the sun

The lyric momentum in both of these songs is partly rhythmical, but just as importantly, a function of the balance between the proverbial and the original. The joke of the Cymbeline song about chimney sweepers coming to dust is balanced by the proverbial idea of the golden lads and girls, the golden age, the golden boys. The spell of Blake’s Sunflower is partly musical – the swoop of the w in weary after the open mouthed cry of sunflower – and partly the tension between the received idea of the sweet golden clime and the visionary pale virgin shrouded in snow.

So, in Auden’s lurcher-loving collier we find the tension between the archetypal contrast of black and white, soot and marble, the folk name of Kate, and the image of the mine with its cages and lamps.

Everywhere you go in Auden – in the songs in The Dog Beneath the Skin, as much as in Paul Bunyan, the libretto he wrote for Benjamin Britten – you find the same interlinked gifts of song and discourse, combined in Dog with the ability to build rich ‘helmeted airman’ style landscapes out of observation and the song instinct.

For myself as a poet Auden, perhaps more than Eliot – though of the two I consider Eliot’s achievement in his three major poems, Prufrock, The Waste Land and the Four Quartets – dramatically more intense, and perhaps more substantial - was of vast important in allowing my semi-European ear to hear the burnished notes of English song via the intellect and by way of the auditory imagination.