My seminar paper will focus on The Sea and The Mirror, Auden’s poetic commentary on The Tempest. The paper will discuss the ways in which Auden has extended upon the original text to reflect his own readings of the play and to discuss poetic imagination and reality and how the two interact. I will mainly use Ariel and Prospero’s relationship as a guide for these discussions, firstly in Chapter 1 of the poem in which Prospero speaks to Ariel and secondly in Chapter 3 where Caliban speaks both to the audience and as the audience.
Auden comments on The Tempest at some length in his critical essay Balaam and His Ass, in this essay Auden takes Ariel to represent ‘the invisible spirit of imagination’ Chapter One of the poem shows Prospero speaking to an unresponsive Ariel about his fate upon leaving the island. Prospero says:
I am glad that I did not recover my dukedom till
I do not want it; I am glad that Miranda
No longer pays me any attention; I am glad to have freed you,
So at last I can really believe I shall die
Prospero, by renouncing his magic and freeing Ariel is also renouncing the world of imagination that he has cocooned himself in. Prospero’s magic has created a safe and self-serving world that protected him from reality, his real responsibilities and real external threats, at the centre of this magical world was Ariel. Now that Prospero will no longer have Ariel to create his world of imagination, he can finally believe he will die. In Balaam and His Ass Auden argues that;
Imagination is beyond good and evil […] I have to put my imagination to work, to limit its playful activities, to imagining those possibilities which, for me, are both permissible and real; if I allow it to be the master and play exactly as it likes, then I shall remain in a dream-like state of imagining everything I might become, without getting round to ever becoming anything.
We can argue that this is the version of Prospero that Auden is representing in The Sea and The Mirror, the version that has surrendered to Imagination and forgotten what was permissible and real. In The Tempest Prospero’s suspension in his imaginative world is ever-present, he constantly tries to become a good ruler and a good father, while also attempting to become the terroriser at the centre of his own revenge play, but he never fully becomes any of those things as he is too busy with his illusions and tricks.
Despite Prospero’s plan never coming together as he intended, he does regain his Dukedom and is set to leave the island, but he no longer wants this anymore. Auden has taken the Prospero of the original text, that says ‘every third thought shall be my grave’ (The Tempest, v. 1. 311) and expanded upon it to argue that Prospero is still not getting around to ‘becoming anything’. Prospero is so preoccupied with his death at the end of The Tempest is because he has so fully immersed himself in the world of imagination, that he can no longer operate in the real world. Later, in Chapter One of The Sea and The Mirror Prospero states:
Now our partnership has been dissolved, I feel so peculiar:
As if I had been drunk since I was born
And suddenly now, and for the first time, am cold sober, […]
Now, in my old age, I wake, and this journey really exists,
And I have actually to take it.
Here, Prospero is linking his imaginative world to Ariel as intoxication, in stark opposition to reality. Fuller argues, ‘the creative imagination is responsible for the denial of a reality that has to be faced’ Inevitably, as Prospero did not have full control over Ariel’s playful imagination, he has to suffer reality again without him, perhaps explaining Prospero’s reluctance at freeing Ariel through-out The Tempest.
At the time that Auden was writing The Sea and The Mirror he had recently left behind England, and a war-torn Europe, to live in America where he became an academic lecturer. Auden believed The Tempest to be Shakespeare’s ‘Ars Poetica’, his mediation on art in the poetic form, he would later go on to describe The Sea and The Mirror as his. The poem seems to be most distinctly commenting on poetry and art in Chapter three, the section assigned to Caliban. Chapter Three is by far the longest section of the poem, for a long section of which Caliban is ‘echoing’ the voice of the audience in a Jamesian, prose style.
Toward the end of the section in which Caliban is speaking as the Audience, the voice becomes very concerned that Ariel was not returned to his ‘arboreal confinement’. They fear that not only has Caliban been let into Ariel’s world, but Ariel has been let into Caliban’s, saying; ‘If the intrusion of the real has disconcerted and incommoded the poetic, that is a mere bagatelle compared to the damage which the poetic would inflict if it ever succeeded in intruding upon the real. We want no Ariel here.’ This section of the poem portrays Ariel as a chaotic character, which goes against general readings of Ariel as a friendly, ethereal spirit. In Balaam and His Ass Auden argues that ‘Ariel […] is beyond good and evil; he can neither love nor hate, he can only play.’ This would suggest that as the spirit of imagination Ariel cannot tell if it is doing harm as it is only acting on impulse, it is how imagination is wielded that decides whether it is a force for good or bad.
The voice of the audience here seems to be arguing that Ariel, as a representation of poetic imagination, needs to be kept under control. It is ok for him to be free for the duration of the play in order to create entertainment, but once the play has ended, he cannot intrude into the real world or he will create chaos. Considering that The Sea and The Mirror was written in the midst of World War Two, Auden may be attempting to distance art from politics, thereby exempting art from the tense political atmosphere of the nineteen-forties.
Following on from this section Caliban goes on to describe the struggle that the artist has in reconciling his imaginative spirit and what Fuller refers to as ‘man’s fallen sensual nature.’ By describing Ariel to be a loyal servant, that eventually corrodes and leaves only Caliban in his place, ‘the dark thing you could never abide to be with.’ Here Auden has taken direct wording from Caliban in The Tempest and used them to show the other side of art, the real as opposed to the imagined. By including this section in Caliban’s chapter Auden has created the poetic scales on which he attempts to balance poetic imagination and the real, being left entirely with Ariel or Caliban is disastrous both for art and reality.
However, Auden offers no reconciliation within the poem, McDowell suggests that Auden is warning that ‘art has a complex and subtle relationship to life; in itself, it can neither be accepted nor rejected as a guide to experience.’ In Balaam and His Ass Auden argues that a dialogue is needed to truly show the extent of a character’s thoughts, and this is ideally shown through a master-servant relationship , but he has also shown that a dialogue is needed within the creation and absorption of art to truly balance the real and the imagined.
By reading The Tempest, The Sea and The Mirror and Balaam and His Ass alongside each other we can see that Auden is using his own poetry to express and expand on his interpretation of The Tempest, while simultaneously providing comment on the nature of art itself and its balance with reality, as he believed Shakespeare to be doing in The Tempest.
Bibliography
Auden, W.H., The Sea and The Mirror, ed. by Arthur Kirsch (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003).
Auden, W.H., ‘Balaam and His Ass’, in The Dyer’s Hand (New York: Random House, 1962), pp. 107 – 145.
Fuller, John, ‘The Sea and The Mirror’, in A Reader’s Guide to W. H. Auden, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1970), pp. 157 – 166.
McDowell, Frederick P.W., ‘The Sea and the Mirror’, in Auden: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Monroe K. Spears (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964), pp. 142 – 52.
Mendelson, Edward, ‘Auden, Wystan Hugh’, in ODNB, (2011), <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/30775> [accessed 25 November 2018].
Orgel, Stephen (ed.), The Tempest, Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Smith, Stan, ‘My Father’s Prick: The Long Poems’, in W.H. Auden (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), pp. 152 – 168.
Volpicelli, Robert, ‘Saying Otherwise: Speech and Allegory in W.H. Auden’s WWII Lectures’, Textual Practice, (2017), < https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2017.1308965> [accessed 25 November 2018].