30 October 2019
La lutte continue ...
This site is still a work in progress and has its own dedicated domain at www.historytothedefeated.net. It will remain password protected during its construction, but if you are interested, drop me a note and I will let you in.
Over the course of 2018, it will address those movements which coruscated briefly, before, just as suddenly, being defeated. It takes its title from Auden:
The stars are dead. The animals will not look.
We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and
History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.
So far, there are sections - chapters? episodes? - posted on The Baader-Meinhof Group, the Weather Underground, the Cathars, the Levellers, the Luddites, Spartacus, Harold II and John Cornford and the International Brigades: I'm about half way through John Ball and the Peasants' Revolt - and the struggle continues.
Below you will find the first draft of the introduction, posted here as a kind of 'mission statement', a tease, a free sample. I will be grateful for any feedback.
“I am more than ever of the opinion that a decent human existence is possible today only on the fringes of society.”
Hannah Arendt, letter to Karl Jaspers, 1946
“Woe unto the defeated” lamented Nicholas Salmanovitch Rubashov in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness At Noon, “whom history treads into the dust”.
He was acknowledging the overwhelming power, the sheer weight and ruthlessness, of the state as it manipulates the historical narrative to create a 'useable past'; necessary, as Orwell pointed out, because whoever controls the past, controls the future; and whoever controls the present, controls the past.
Darkness at Noon is set in 1938 in an un-named state (which we know is the Soviet Union during Stalin’s purges). The show trials of that time were an attempt to control the past by controlling the present. They were part of what Hannah Arendt called “a mass re-writing of history” in order to create “a consistently lying reality” which she argued was a - perhaps the - central goal of the totalitarian state. Rubashov accepts this reality and his powerlessness to oppose it:
“I have only one justification before you, Citizen Judges: that I did not make it easy for myself. Vanity and the last remains of pride whispered to me: Die in silence, say nothing; or die with a noble gesture, with a moving swan-song on your lips; pour out your heart and challenge your accusers. That would have been easier for an old rebel, but I overcame the temptation. With that my task is ended. I have paid; my account with history is settled. To ask you for mercy would be derision. I have nothing more to say.”
But for historians and political theorists there is a great deal more to say on behalf of this particular Rubashov and a thousand other Rubashovs, because the work of narrating history never ends. As Christopher Hill pointed out, “History has to be rewritten in every generation, because although the past does not change, the present does; each generation asks new questions of the past and finds new areas of sympathy as it re-lives different aspects of the experiences of its predecessors.”
"An exemplary validity"?
Factual truth may be vulnerable, relative, subject to opinion and interpretation; but history in the form of concrete reality, established by records, eye-witness testimony, documents, monuments, all those elements gathered together in the famous Archive beloved of Jacques Derrida and Carolyn Steedman, must be written over and over again, because it is the narrative itself which gives validity to the actions of individuals. It is the act of telling which imparts truth and significance, which preserves the actions in our memory and, as the Greeks believed (Homer was "the educator of Hellas"), acts as a source of instruction for future generations.
Hannah Arendt calls the narrative process “old-fashioned story-telling”. And Carolyn Steedman characteristically goes further when she speaks of history-writing “as a form of magical realism … the everyday and fantastic act of making the dead walk and talk”.
Nowhere is this more crucial than in our histories of the defeated - those movements, philosophies, revolutions, rebellions and revolts which coruscated briefly before failing and falling into the footnotes of history. As EP Thompson pointed out in The Making of the English Working Class, "only the successful (in the sense of those whose aspirations anticipated subsequent evolution) are remembered. The blind alleys, the lost causes, and the losers themselves are forgotten."
But they are, despite that, and in my opinion, of "exemplary validity". The phrase was coined by Hannah Arendt, to whom this project owes a great deal. Not least because she sees history as being driven by human action, "the only activity that goes on between men without the intermediary of things or matter".
That's why my chapter on the Weather Underground, for example, is entitled Joe and Rose: it is 'about' Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn specifically as well as the Weather Underground in general; why the story of the Baader-Meinhof Gang is seen through the eyes of Ulrike Meinhof; why the 'freeborn' John Lilburne is the focus of the piece on the Levellers; and why Béatrice de Planissoles takes centre stage in my discussion of the Cathars. These are the people who embrace, who exemplify, the lost causes which attract my attention; these are the people whose "actions" make my kind of history.
Like both Arendt and Steedman, I am not 'disinterested' in my story-telling. There will be objectivism (names, dates and all that good stuff) in so far as is possible, but there will also be prejudice and outrage, sympathy and empathy.
But judgement is a different matter.
If a ‘pure’ historical judgement, the equivalent perhaps of Kant’s ‘pure aesthetic judgement’, is possible, and I doubt that it is, this is not where it will be found. If I get close to making a judgement, or you believe I have, it will be an incidental, accidental, consequence of my telling of the story; that is, what I decide to include and omit, the tonality of the language that I use, the sources I choose to believe and those, including the first-hand accounts of participants, which I choose not to. These are judgments, of course, but not with malice aforethought: the needs of the narrative take priority.
And in any case, we need to go one step at a time. I believe that to make an historical judgement of any degree of purity (or honesty or integrity), one must first acquire an historical understanding. Not because "tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner" ("to understand all is to forgive all") - Auden has told us this is not what History does, despite what Madame de Staël probably didn't say. But because, as I suspect Arendt - who described herself as "a kind of phenomenologist" - would argue, judgement is itself an integral part of understanding.
My focus is more modest. It is to relate the facts and understand my protagonists, the actors in the dramas I describe. In so doing, it occurs to me that I shall be writing what is effectively a series of police procedurals, looking in each case, each story, for motive, means and opportunity. Perhaps with a plea in mitigation as an epilogue.
And although I think I know what I shall find in the stories I tell, I won’t be surprised, as I sieve the “Dust”, to be surprised: I do not know, at this stage, what I shall find, identify and conclude from my reading and research because
"... all sway forward on the dangerous flood
Of history that never sleeps or dies,
And, held one moment, burns the hand."
Annabel Herzog, in an essay on political story-telling, observed that in Arendt’s writing about Eichmann, she intended “not to commemorate the defeated and the dead, but to write from their standpoint.”
If I find myself writing in this way, then so be it. It will not be a conscious act: It will be because, in the process of reading and writing, of learning about these histories, I have taken on their voice. I will have become part of the story I am telling.
I invite my readers to maintain a healthy and sceptical distance at that point. Not least because I will have become that fixture of post-modern fiction, the unreliable narrator, as unreliable as the accounts of the participants themselves and those professional historians who have covered the same ground.
To the extent that I am an historian at all, I am, like Stephen O'Shea, "an accidental historian", and the (short) stories I will tell are not fiction and not post-modern. They are - another Arendt word - 'traditional'. They are a series of thematically linked stories about people who tried and failed but whose actions have, perhaps, an "exemplary validity" for all of us.
Or do they? At this point, this is merely an aspiration, because I’m not clear myself.
But I am clear about this: If I have any aspiration beyond the writing itself, it is to ensure that, at the final sentence – itself an arbitrary marker in any narrative, at least as arbitrary as the first - I and my readers will agree with Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the third of the four great regulars at the existentialist café, that “nous avons appris l’Histoire et nous pretendons qu’il ne faut pas l’oublier” (“we have learned history, and we proclaim that we must not forget it.”).
That’s one. The other aspiration, and infinitely more difficult to fulfil, is to emulate Carolyn Steedman. I want to engage in “the everyday and fantastic act of making the dead walk and talk”.
A note on my title
I could have called this collection of histories of the defeated, 'Losers' or something similar; something short, snappy and commercial, perhaps with the addition of an exclamation mark: Losers!
But I am sticking with a quotation which provoked my interest in the subjects of this book in the first place and remains the reason for writing what follows. It comes from the final stanza of a poem called Spain, which has haunted me for half a century. It's a call to arms, written by WH Auden in 1937, a year into the Spanish Civil War.
W.H. (Wystan Hugh) Auden was one of thousands who went to Spain to fight on behalf of the young Spanish Republic against the revolt of the church and generals. He later renounced the poem and denounced its politics, allowing it to be published in Poetry of the Thirties, a 1964 Penguin anthology by Robert Skelton, only if Skelton made it clear that "Mr W.H. Auden considers these five poems to be trash which he is ashamed to have written". (The other four are Sir, No Man's Enemy, A Communist to Others, To A Writer On His Birthday and September 1, 1939.)
It is from Skelton's anthology rather than the uncut pages of my precious first edition that I have taken the text below. The single exception is in the final line: I have kept the initial capital for 'Alas' from the original publication, which is lost in subsequent printings, and even by Auden himself in the reference below, because, in my view, this is not merely an observation. It is History speaking directly to the defeated; it is uttering the word 'Alas'.
Two years after his correspondence with Skelton, in 1966, Auden personally collected his shorter poems in a new volume, published by Faber & Faber. In the foreword, he returns - obsessively you may think - to this poem, explaining its absence.
"Some poems which I wrote and, unfortunately, published, I have thrown out because they were dishonest, or bad-mannered, or boring" he wrote. And because the itch must be scratched, he continues: "A dishonest poem is one which expresses, no matter how well, feelings or beliefs which its author never felt or entertained".
And then he gets specific:
"... much more shamefully, I once wrote:
History to the defeated
may say alas but cannot help or pardon.
To say this is to equate goodness with success. It would have been bad enough if I had ever held this wicked doctrine, but that I should have stated it simply because it sounded to me rhetorically effective is quite inexcusable."
The fact that my title is a direct quotation from what the poet himself judges to be "trash" will tell you that I disagree profoundly.
I do not believe that this poem is "trash". Nor that its final linesI celebrate a "wicked doctrine". (But I agree that it is "rhetorically effective".)
When I first read Spain, more than fifty years ago, I judged it to be a powerful, passionate (if sometimes cynical - see especially the antepenultimate stanza about "the conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder") expression of why those who fought believed their cause to be of "exemplary validity". That remains my verdict and it has sent me back to books which have gathered dust on my shelves for fifty years. They were seminal in my studies then and, second time around, have given me enormous pleasure and enlightenment.
Spain is special. And not merely because it is rhetorically effective. But because Auden renounced it, it is apparently not covered by copyright. So I am going to quote it in full for you:
Spain
Yesterday all the past. The language of size
Spreading to China along the trade-routes; the diffusion
Of the counting-frame and the cromlech;
Yesterday the shadow-reckoning in the sunny climates.
Yesterday the assessment of insurance by cards,
The divination of water; yesterday the invention
Of cartwheels and clocks, the taming of
Horses. Yesterday the bustling world of the navigators.
Yesterday the abolition of fairies and giants,
the fortress like a motionless eagle eyeing the valley,
the chapel built in the forest;
Yesterday the carving of angels and alarming gargoyles;
The trial of heretics among the columns of stone;
Yesterday the theological feuds in the taverns
And the miraculous cure at the fountain;
Yesterday the Sabbath of witches; but to-day the struggle.
Yesterday the installation of dynamos and turbines,
The construction of railways in the colonial desert;
Yesterday the classic lecture
On the origin of Mankind. But to-day the struggle.
Yesterday the belief in the absolute value of Greek,
The fall of the curtain upon the death of a hero;
Yesterday the prayer to the sunset
And the adoration of madmen. But to-day the struggle.
As the poet whispers, startled among the pines,
Or where the loose waterfall sings compact, or upright
On the crag by the leaning tower:
"O my vision. O send me the luck of the sailor."
And the investigator peers through his instruments
At the inhuman provinces, the virile bacillus
Or enormous Jupiter finished:
"But the lives of my friends. I inquire. I inquire."
And the poor in their fireless lodgings, dropping the sheets
Of the evening paper: "Our day is our loss. O show us
History the operator, the
Organiser. Time the refreshing river."
And the nations combine each cry, invoking the life
That shapes the individual belly and orders
The private nocturnal terror:
"Did you not found the city state of the sponge,
"Raise the vast military empires of the shark
And the tiger, establish the robin's plucky canton?
Intervene. O descend as a dove or
A furious papa or a mild engineer, but descend."
And the life, if it answers at all, replied from the heart
And the eyes and the lungs, from the shops and squares of the city
"O no, I am not the mover;
Not to-day; not to you. To you, I'm the
"Yes-man, the bar-companion, the easily-duped;
I am whatever you do. I am your vow to be
Good, your humorous story.
I am your business voice. I am your marriage.
"What's your proposal? To build the just city? I will.
I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic
Death? Very well, I accept, for
I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain."
Many have heard it on remote peninsulas,
On sleepy plains, in the aberrant fishermen's islands
Or the corrupt heart of the city.
Have heard and migrated like gulls or the seeds of a flower.
They clung like burrs to the long expresses that lurch
Through the unjust lands, through the night, through the alpine tunnel;
They floated over the oceans;
They walked the passes. All presented their lives.
On that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot
Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe;
On that tableland scored by rivers,
Our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our fever
Are precise and alive. For the fears which made us respond
To the medicine ad, and the brochure of winter cruises
Have become invading battalions;
And our faces, the institute-face, the chain-store, the ruin
Are projecting their greed as the firing squad and the bomb.
Madrid is the heart. Our moments of tenderness blossom
As the ambulance and the sandbag;
Our hours of friendship into a people's army.
Tomorrow, perhaps the future. The research on fatigue
And the movements of packers; the gradual exploring of all the
Octaves of radiation;
Tomorrow the enlarging of consciousness by diet and breathing.
Tomorrow the rediscovery of romantic love,
The photographing of ravens; all the fun under
Liberty's masterful shadow;
Tomorrow the hour of the pageant-master and the musician,
The beautiful roar of the chorus under the dome;
Tomorrow the exchanging of tips on the breeding of terriers,
The eager election of chairmen
By the sudden forest of hands. But today the struggle.
Tomorrow for the young poets exploding like bombs,
The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;
Tomorrow the bicycle races
Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle.
Today the deliberate increase in the chances of death,
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;
Today the expending of powers
On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.
Today the makeshift consolations: the shared cigarette,
The cards in the candlelit barn, and the scraping concert,
The masculine jokes; today the
Fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace before hurting.
The stars are dead. The animals will not look.
We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and
History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.
La lutte continue ...
This site is still a work in progress and has its own dedicated domain at www.historytothedefeated.net. It will remain password protected during its construction, but if you are interested, drop me a note and I will let you in.
Over the course of 2018, it will address those movements which coruscated briefly, before, just as suddenly, being defeated. It takes its title from Auden:
The stars are dead. The animals will not look.
We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and
History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.
So far, there are sections - chapters? episodes? - posted on The Baader-Meinhof Group, the Weather Underground, the Cathars, the Levellers, the Luddites, Spartacus, Harold II and John Cornford and the International Brigades: I'm about half way through John Ball and the Peasants' Revolt - and the struggle continues.
Below you will find the first draft of the introduction, posted here as a kind of 'mission statement', a tease, a free sample. I will be grateful for any feedback.
“I am more than ever of the opinion that a decent human existence is possible today only on the fringes of society.”
Hannah Arendt, letter to Karl Jaspers, 1946
“Woe unto the defeated” lamented Nicholas Salmanovitch Rubashov in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness At Noon, “whom history treads into the dust”.
He was acknowledging the overwhelming power, the sheer weight and ruthlessness, of the state as it manipulates the historical narrative to create a 'useable past'; necessary, as Orwell pointed out, because whoever controls the past, controls the future; and whoever controls the present, controls the past.
Darkness at Noon is set in 1938 in an un-named state (which we know is the Soviet Union during Stalin’s purges). The show trials of that time were an attempt to control the past by controlling the present. They were part of what Hannah Arendt called “a mass re-writing of history” in order to create “a consistently lying reality” which she argued was a - perhaps the - central goal of the totalitarian state. Rubashov accepts this reality and his powerlessness to oppose it:
“I have only one justification before you, Citizen Judges: that I did not make it easy for myself. Vanity and the last remains of pride whispered to me: Die in silence, say nothing; or die with a noble gesture, with a moving swan-song on your lips; pour out your heart and challenge your accusers. That would have been easier for an old rebel, but I overcame the temptation. With that my task is ended. I have paid; my account with history is settled. To ask you for mercy would be derision. I have nothing more to say.”
But for historians and political theorists there is a great deal more to say on behalf of this particular Rubashov and a thousand other Rubashovs, because the work of narrating history never ends. As Christopher Hill pointed out, “History has to be rewritten in every generation, because although the past does not change, the present does; each generation asks new questions of the past and finds new areas of sympathy as it re-lives different aspects of the experiences of its predecessors.”
"An exemplary validity"?
Factual truth may be vulnerable, relative, subject to opinion and interpretation; but history in the form of concrete reality, established by records, eye-witness testimony, documents, monuments, all those elements gathered together in the famous Archive beloved of Jacques Derrida and Carolyn Steedman, must be written over and over again, because it is the narrative itself which gives validity to the actions of individuals. It is the act of telling which imparts truth and significance, which preserves the actions in our memory and, as the Greeks believed (Homer was "the educator of Hellas"), acts as a source of instruction for future generations.
Hannah Arendt calls the narrative process “old-fashioned story-telling”. And Carolyn Steedman characteristically goes further when she speaks of history-writing “as a form of magical realism … the everyday and fantastic act of making the dead walk and talk”.
Nowhere is this more crucial than in our histories of the defeated - those movements, philosophies, revolutions, rebellions and revolts which coruscated briefly before failing and falling into the footnotes of history. As EP Thompson pointed out in The Making of the English Working Class, "only the successful (in the sense of those whose aspirations anticipated subsequent evolution) are remembered. The blind alleys, the lost causes, and the losers themselves are forgotten."
But they are, despite that, and in my opinion, of "exemplary validity". The phrase was coined by Hannah Arendt, to whom this project owes a great deal. Not least because she sees history as being driven by human action, "the only activity that goes on between men without the intermediary of things or matter".
That's why my chapter on the Weather Underground, for example, is entitled Joe and Rose: it is 'about' Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn specifically as well as the Weather Underground in general; why the story of the Baader-Meinhof Gang is seen through the eyes of Ulrike Meinhof; why the 'freeborn' John Lilburne is the focus of the piece on the Levellers; and why Béatrice de Planissoles takes centre stage in my discussion of the Cathars. These are the people who embrace, who exemplify, the lost causes which attract my attention; these are the people whose "actions" make my kind of history.
Like both Arendt and Steedman, I am not 'disinterested' in my story-telling. There will be objectivism (names, dates and all that good stuff) in so far as is possible, but there will also be prejudice and outrage, sympathy and empathy.
But judgement is a different matter.
If a ‘pure’ historical judgement, the equivalent perhaps of Kant’s ‘pure aesthetic judgement’, is possible, and I doubt that it is, this is not where it will be found. If I get close to making a judgement, or you believe I have, it will be an incidental, accidental, consequence of my telling of the story; that is, what I decide to include and omit, the tonality of the language that I use, the sources I choose to believe and those, including the first-hand accounts of participants, which I choose not to. These are judgments, of course, but not with malice aforethought: the needs of the narrative take priority.
And in any case, we need to go one step at a time. I believe that to make an historical judgement of any degree of purity (or honesty or integrity), one must first acquire an historical understanding. Not because "tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner" ("to understand all is to forgive all") - Auden has told us this is not what History does, despite what Madame de Staël probably didn't say. But because, as I suspect Arendt - who described herself as "a kind of phenomenologist" - would argue, judgement is itself an integral part of understanding.
My focus is more modest. It is to relate the facts and understand my protagonists, the actors in the dramas I describe. In so doing, it occurs to me that I shall be writing what is effectively a series of police procedurals, looking in each case, each story, for motive, means and opportunity. Perhaps with a plea in mitigation as an epilogue.
And although I think I know what I shall find in the stories I tell, I won’t be surprised, as I sieve the “Dust”, to be surprised: I do not know, at this stage, what I shall find, identify and conclude from my reading and research because
"... all sway forward on the dangerous flood
Of history that never sleeps or dies,
And, held one moment, burns the hand."
Annabel Herzog, in an essay on political story-telling, observed that in Arendt’s writing about Eichmann, she intended “not to commemorate the defeated and the dead, but to write from their standpoint.”
If I find myself writing in this way, then so be it. It will not be a conscious act: It will be because, in the process of reading and writing, of learning about these histories, I have taken on their voice. I will have become part of the story I am telling.
I invite my readers to maintain a healthy and sceptical distance at that point. Not least because I will have become that fixture of post-modern fiction, the unreliable narrator, as unreliable as the accounts of the participants themselves and those professional historians who have covered the same ground.
To the extent that I am an historian at all, I am, like Stephen O'Shea, "an accidental historian", and the (short) stories I will tell are not fiction and not post-modern. They are - another Arendt word - 'traditional'. They are a series of thematically linked stories about people who tried and failed but whose actions have, perhaps, an "exemplary validity" for all of us.
Or do they? At this point, this is merely an aspiration, because I’m not clear myself.
But I am clear about this: If I have any aspiration beyond the writing itself, it is to ensure that, at the final sentence – itself an arbitrary marker in any narrative, at least as arbitrary as the first - I and my readers will agree with Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the third of the four great regulars at the existentialist café, that “nous avons appris l’Histoire et nous pretendons qu’il ne faut pas l’oublier” (“we have learned history, and we proclaim that we must not forget it.”).
That’s one. The other aspiration, and infinitely more difficult to fulfil, is to emulate Carolyn Steedman. I want to engage in “the everyday and fantastic act of making the dead walk and talk”.
A note on my title
I could have called this collection of histories of the defeated, 'Losers' or something similar; something short, snappy and commercial, perhaps with the addition of an exclamation mark: Losers!
But I am sticking with a quotation which provoked my interest in the subjects of this book in the first place and remains the reason for writing what follows. It comes from the final stanza of a poem called Spain, which has haunted me for half a century. It's a call to arms, written by WH Auden in 1937, a year into the Spanish Civil War.
W.H. (Wystan Hugh) Auden was one of thousands who went to Spain to fight on behalf of the young Spanish Republic against the revolt of the church and generals. He later renounced the poem and denounced its politics, allowing it to be published in Poetry of the Thirties, a 1964 Penguin anthology by Robert Skelton, only if Skelton made it clear that "Mr W.H. Auden considers these five poems to be trash which he is ashamed to have written". (The other four are Sir, No Man's Enemy, A Communist to Others, To A Writer On His Birthday and September 1, 1939.)
It is from Skelton's anthology rather than the uncut pages of my precious first edition that I have taken the text below. The single exception is in the final line: I have kept the initial capital for 'Alas' from the original publication, which is lost in subsequent printings, and even by Auden himself in the reference below, because, in my view, this is not merely an observation. It is History speaking directly to the defeated; it is uttering the word 'Alas'.
Two years after his correspondence with Skelton, in 1966, Auden personally collected his shorter poems in a new volume, published by Faber & Faber. In the foreword, he returns - obsessively you may think - to this poem, explaining its absence.
"Some poems which I wrote and, unfortunately, published, I have thrown out because they were dishonest, or bad-mannered, or boring" he wrote. And because the itch must be scratched, he continues: "A dishonest poem is one which expresses, no matter how well, feelings or beliefs which its author never felt or entertained".
And then he gets specific:
"... much more shamefully, I once wrote:
History to the defeated
may say alas but cannot help or pardon.
To say this is to equate goodness with success. It would have been bad enough if I had ever held this wicked doctrine, but that I should have stated it simply because it sounded to me rhetorically effective is quite inexcusable."
The fact that my title is a direct quotation from what the poet himself judges to be "trash" will tell you that I disagree profoundly.
I do not believe that this poem is "trash". Nor that its final linesI celebrate a "wicked doctrine". (But I agree that it is "rhetorically effective".)
When I first read Spain, more than fifty years ago, I judged it to be a powerful, passionate (if sometimes cynical - see especially the antepenultimate stanza about "the conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder") expression of why those who fought believed their cause to be of "exemplary validity". That remains my verdict and it has sent me back to books which have gathered dust on my shelves for fifty years. They were seminal in my studies then and, second time around, have given me enormous pleasure and enlightenment.
Spain is special. And not merely because it is rhetorically effective. But because Auden renounced it, it is apparently not covered by copyright. So I am going to quote it in full for you:
Spain
Yesterday all the past. The language of size
Spreading to China along the trade-routes; the diffusion
Of the counting-frame and the cromlech;
Yesterday the shadow-reckoning in the sunny climates.
Yesterday the assessment of insurance by cards,
The divination of water; yesterday the invention
Of cartwheels and clocks, the taming of
Horses. Yesterday the bustling world of the navigators.
Yesterday the abolition of fairies and giants,
the fortress like a motionless eagle eyeing the valley,
the chapel built in the forest;
Yesterday the carving of angels and alarming gargoyles;
The trial of heretics among the columns of stone;
Yesterday the theological feuds in the taverns
And the miraculous cure at the fountain;
Yesterday the Sabbath of witches; but to-day the struggle.
Yesterday the installation of dynamos and turbines,
The construction of railways in the colonial desert;
Yesterday the classic lecture
On the origin of Mankind. But to-day the struggle.
Yesterday the belief in the absolute value of Greek,
The fall of the curtain upon the death of a hero;
Yesterday the prayer to the sunset
And the adoration of madmen. But to-day the struggle.
As the poet whispers, startled among the pines,
Or where the loose waterfall sings compact, or upright
On the crag by the leaning tower:
"O my vision. O send me the luck of the sailor."
And the investigator peers through his instruments
At the inhuman provinces, the virile bacillus
Or enormous Jupiter finished:
"But the lives of my friends. I inquire. I inquire."
And the poor in their fireless lodgings, dropping the sheets
Of the evening paper: "Our day is our loss. O show us
History the operator, the
Organiser. Time the refreshing river."
And the nations combine each cry, invoking the life
That shapes the individual belly and orders
The private nocturnal terror:
"Did you not found the city state of the sponge,
"Raise the vast military empires of the shark
And the tiger, establish the robin's plucky canton?
Intervene. O descend as a dove or
A furious papa or a mild engineer, but descend."
And the life, if it answers at all, replied from the heart
And the eyes and the lungs, from the shops and squares of the city
"O no, I am not the mover;
Not to-day; not to you. To you, I'm the
"Yes-man, the bar-companion, the easily-duped;
I am whatever you do. I am your vow to be
Good, your humorous story.
I am your business voice. I am your marriage.
"What's your proposal? To build the just city? I will.
I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic
Death? Very well, I accept, for
I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain."
Many have heard it on remote peninsulas,
On sleepy plains, in the aberrant fishermen's islands
Or the corrupt heart of the city.
Have heard and migrated like gulls or the seeds of a flower.
They clung like burrs to the long expresses that lurch
Through the unjust lands, through the night, through the alpine tunnel;
They floated over the oceans;
They walked the passes. All presented their lives.
On that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot
Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe;
On that tableland scored by rivers,
Our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our fever
Are precise and alive. For the fears which made us respond
To the medicine ad, and the brochure of winter cruises
Have become invading battalions;
And our faces, the institute-face, the chain-store, the ruin
Are projecting their greed as the firing squad and the bomb.
Madrid is the heart. Our moments of tenderness blossom
As the ambulance and the sandbag;
Our hours of friendship into a people's army.
Tomorrow, perhaps the future. The research on fatigue
And the movements of packers; the gradual exploring of all the
Octaves of radiation;
Tomorrow the enlarging of consciousness by diet and breathing.
Tomorrow the rediscovery of romantic love,
The photographing of ravens; all the fun under
Liberty's masterful shadow;
Tomorrow the hour of the pageant-master and the musician,
The beautiful roar of the chorus under the dome;
Tomorrow the exchanging of tips on the breeding of terriers,
The eager election of chairmen
By the sudden forest of hands. But today the struggle.
Tomorrow for the young poets exploding like bombs,
The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;
Tomorrow the bicycle races
Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle.
Today the deliberate increase in the chances of death,
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;
Today the expending of powers
On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.
Today the makeshift consolations: the shared cigarette,
The cards in the candlelit barn, and the scraping concert,
The masculine jokes; today the
Fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace before hurting.
The stars are dead. The animals will not look.
We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and
History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.