Essay: September 1st 1939 by W H auden (what I've written so far)

The following essay will talk about one of the most famous poems written by W H Auden: “September 1st, 1939" whose title, which is a date, refers to what happened in that day. It talks about the beginning of the Second World War and the tragic results of that conflict. In this essay I will focus on some of the stanzas that called my attention in order to reflect on what the author felt about that event which entails several consequences for people who lived there.

On September 1st, 1939, the invasion of Poland by German-Nazi armies entailed the beginning of the Second World War. German forces led by Hitler decided to expand their territory in Poland, a country whose army was easily defeated. As a consequence of that conflict, many people, especially Jew people who lived in the surrounding, were tortured and killed and a large amount of houses where destroyed.

In the first days of the Second World War, the poem was written by W. H Auden as a description of the context in which the poem took place. In the first stanza Auden describes the situation as a “dishonest decade” by emphasizing his disapproval (from) the destruction of the places and the killing of their inhabitants after the war. Therefore, Auden depicts the landscape which had been affected by the conflict:

“Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night”.

The last two sentences of this stanza demonstrate Auden’s repudiation for this situation which was regarded as the cruellest in that decade.

The last four lines of the second stanza are even more surprising. In this part of the poem, readers can rescue a kind of message concerning to the importance for schoolchildren in learning about the unfavourable results of a conflict in where both sides harm each other:

“I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return”.


The third stanza is based on Auden’s disagreement about the concept of “Democracy” which had been wrongly interpretated by dictators in that decade. The author makes a critique on “the elderly rubbish they (dictators) talk”, which affects the real concept of Democracy. Auden expresses that dictators’ speeches are mostly based on wrong ideologies that increase suffering and pain in a nation.

Personally I think that this is a poem in which the disapproval of a context affected by the war is clearly stated. As a reader, I could focus on that historical event by reading it. By this I mean I could imagine the context of the conflict: destroyed places, oppressed people, and armies fighting for what they wanted, and so on. What most impressed me is the emphasis put by the author when they described the event.

This poem, apart from being a critique of German army decision to invade and attack the territory where many innocent people died, it is also a way that Auden chose to convey the readers something crucial that he experienced. Since Auden lived in a context where people were forced to follow the rules of the dictators, the publication of this poem in those decades could have been a real risk, because he mostly critiqued the decision of powerful leaders which were involved in the invasion of Poland. In spite of being oppressed Auden decided to publish what he wrote in 1940, and this piece of poetry would lead the readers to reflect on a society which unfortunately opted to solve problems by violence.