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W.H. Auden

Refugee Blues

More challenging questions!

Lorraine Knickelbein
Grens High School
Updated: 4 March 2014
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The poem, which was written about six months before the outbreak of the Second World War, deals with a German Jewish couple struggling to get a passport. They have lost their home and country, and are filled with helpless despair.

The poem contains repetition and is written like a sad blues song which was made popular by African Americans at about the same time. The refrain at the end of each stanza echoes the melancholy tone.



ABOUT THE POET

Wystan Hugh Auden is regarded by many as the most influential poet of the 20th century, a man who inspired other giants of the poetic world such as C. Day-Lewis, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender.

He was born in 1907 in York, the son of a medical practitioner and a university-educated mother. He attended Oxford University where he graduated in 1928 with a lowly 3rd class degree in Literature.

While at Oxford, he became known for his poetry and his eccentricities and, most notably, for his series of homosexual relationships.

Auden became a schoolmaster, which later allowed T.S. Eliot to criticise him for allowing his pedantic teaching style to influence his poetry.

In 1935 he married Erika Mann, a German lesbian who needed to escape from Germany. The marriage was one of convenience, designed purely to provide her with British citizenship.

During the 1930s Auden became enamoured with left-wing politics and social causes, although he would later tire of the contradictions inherent in this. Eventually he would claim that politics and art could never be combined.

In January 1939, shortly before the outbreak of war, he sailed for New York. Because this was seen as desertion from his homeland which was about to be embroiled in conflict, he lost much of his reputation in England. As a result, he settled in the United States and eventually took out citizenship there.

While in the United States, he established a permanent relationship with the 18 year old poet, Chester Kallman, who would become his lifelong companion.

Auden would lecture literature at several universities, including Oxford where his tenure demanded that he give only three lectures per year. He would die in Vienna in 1973, shortly after delivering a guest lecture.

Have you looked at the questions
in the right column?
TEST YOURSELF!
Read the left column and then answer
the following questions:



"Say this city has ten million souls."
  • Explain why Auden has chosen the word "souls". (3)

[Need help?]




"Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's no place for us."
  • Comment on the contrast in this quotation. (6)

[Need help?]




"In the village churchyard there grows an old yew,
Every spring it blossoms anew:
Old passports can't do that, my dear, old passports can't do that."
  • Why does the poet specifically refer to a "yew"? (4)

[Need help?]

  • What is the significance of the word "anew"? (3)

[Need help?]




"The consul banged the table and said,
"If you've got no passport you're officially dead":
But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive."
  • Examine the contrast in these lines and the implications thereof. (4)

[Need help?]




"Went to a committee; they offered me a chair;
Asked me politely to return next year:
But where shall we go to-day, my dear, but where shall we go to-day?"
  • How does Auden focus on the inefficacy of the committee? Refer to the words "committee" and "chair" in your answer. (4)

[Need help?]

  • The word "politely" is usually a positive word. Explain why it has a negative connotation in this stanza. (3)

[Need help?]

  • What is the implication of the words "next year"? (3)

[Need help?]




"But where shall we go to-day, my dear, but where shall we go to-day?"
  • Examine the significance of the word "to-day" in the context of the stanza. (3)

[Need help?]




"If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread."
  • What is this a reference to and why has it been included? (4)

[Need help?]

  • The poet repeats the words "my dear" in the last line of each stanza. What is his reason for doing so? (3)

[Need help?]




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