The Loving Ones
A poet reads Auden and reflects on love, joy, and suffering in an anxious age.
By Whitney Rio-Ross
At the age of twenty-five, I was in the midst of a years-long physical and mental health decline. My life was more questions than answers, colored by fear and increasing pain. So I did what any young woman facing her body’s limitations and mortality would do. I got married.
It wasn’t a hasty decision to land a husband’s health insurance, though that was a perk. My husband and I had dated for over a year and been engaged for several months’ emergency room visits, prescriptions, and ever-changing diagnoses. Of course I wanted to be healthy at the outset of my marriage, but there was no assurance that I would get better, whatever that even meant. We couldn’t wait for my body to heal if we wanted to get married in this lifetime.
Few people at the wedding knew anything was wrong with me. Those who did, aside from my mother, only heard parts of the story. I craved joy, not pity. We wanted to enter a covenant, not Lifetime melodramas scripted by distant relatives. So we made our vows and communed with our friends. We danced for hours, knowing full well that I would collapse at home and spend the next day in bed.
W. H. Auden greeted our wedding guests. The chances of us looking back through a book of wedding attendees’ signatures hovered just above zero, so we used his collected works as our guest book. We could count on returning to the poems. Auden first wooed me with his long poem For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio. The poem had been on my mind in the weeks leading up to the wedding, and not only because we married during Advent. In this Christmas poem, and throughout his work, Auden understood the issue of timing.
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Christians should ultimately look toward resurrection and therefore see beauty and grace despite their losses, but mourners also see a truth: death ruins.
My wedding was the most joyful day of my life, slipped into a season of brutal pain and grief. The lavender tossed when we left the wedding hall perfumed the car for weeks. On good days, the scent felt like memory’s kiss. But when my head throbbed past the point of reason, it was a taunt. The day had been a kind intermission, not a turning point. Time moved mercilessly forward with yesterday’s struggles, and for a while, things only got worse.
Auden’s famous “Funeral Blues” begins,
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. (l. 1-4)
Everyone has or will feel these lines, be it at someone’s death or another personal tragedy. Our world stops and shatters while the rest of it goes on, ignorant of our breathless grief. The everyday grows callous and loud, and though we should not blame strangers for their glares or smiles, we do. In “Musee des Beaux Arts,” an ekphrasis of Breughel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Auden notes that suffering “takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along” (ll. 3-4). Our individual worlds end, but the planet won’t pause on our suffering’s account. Moreover, it will continue turning in directions directly opposite ours. A man signs divorce papers the day his friend celebrates an anniversary. A woman has a baby one day, and the next evening her sister loses one.
For the suffering, these endings, small and unnoticed as they are in the crowd, are not a subplot but everything. The lover in “Funeral Blues” calls the departed “my North, my South, my East, my West / My working week and my Sunday rest” (ll. 9-10) and continues,
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good. (ll. 13-16)
We could call this response idolatry. No person should be another’s everything, and the universe still contains great goodness once that person is gone. I do not, however, suggest saying this to those in grief. Christians should ultimately look toward resurrection and therefore see beauty and grace despite their losses, but mourners also see a truth: death ruins. We can acknowledge that death is not earth’s or the self’s end, but we are betraying the gospel to pretend it isn’t the enemy. Defeated or not, death destroys. And so it feels offensive when the sky spins on as if death were a mere accident. This theme opens Auden’s “The More Loving One”: “Looking up at the stars, I know quite well / That for all they care, I can go to hell” (ll.1-2). I don’t believe we should go on hating the world when we suffer great loss. But I believe we’re allowed some rage at its apparent indifference.
Healthy people love using vaguely heroic language when talking about the sick. On a literal level, it is darkly amusing to hear someone call me “strong,” given my inability to lift a plate with one hand. My husband believes that people use words like strong and brave when the sick have not “given up.” He says that I have continued living and loving. However, I was not particularly loving during the worst years. I tried to keep up with friends and be kind to my family, but my success rate wasn’t impressive. I think that, mostly, healthy people are relieved and sometimes impressed when the sick don’t insist that the world is worthless due to their personal misery.
I don’t imagine that I will be a graceful mourner when I lose certain people. I know my grief will consume me if my husband dies before I do. I doubt my theology will be at its best and assume that I will dabble in utter despair more than I should. I might tell God to go to hell, but the last time I did that, God asked if I’d read the whole book. When it comes to being sick, though, I allow the world more indifference. There are levels of physical exhaustion and pain that obliterate the outside world. You can go past the despair of saying there is nothing good on this earth. In those moments, there is only nothing. But when you are outside of those moments, knowing that another might be waiting for you, there’s a choice. You can resent poorly timed sunshine, or you can love someone who bathes in it.
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We’re ever in the garden, mistaking rotten, false control for sustenance.
For the Time Being is a surprisingly political poem, which sets it apart (and in my view, above) most Christmas poetry. Most Christmas art limits its scope to the manger scene, perhaps splicing scenes to include the wise men. These works are important and can be artistically impressive. However, we must also confront the earthly and political context of Christ’s birth.
The world before Jesus’s arrival strongly resembled our own. People worshipped their chosen gods or none. They attended weddings and funerals. They cooked dinner and waged war. They paid taxes. In the Advent section, Auden’s narrator explains that people’s lives went
From sword to ploughshare, coffin to cradle, war to work,
So that, taking the bad with the good, the pattern composed
By the ten thousand odd things that can possibly happen
Is permanent in a general average way. (351)
Such apparent irreverence toward suffering is disturbing. Saying that war is not extraordinary but simply what one can expect appears to ignore its devastation at large and shrugs off the thousands or millions whose worlds are destroyed. Yet the narrator is correct in this long view. Whether or not we care to admit it, we grow used to such things. We weep at mass shootings and natural disasters. We might try to help the victims through donations, protests, and legislation. Unlike Auden’s characters, we can even watch the world fall apart through YouTube and know of tragedies in towns with names we struggle to pronounce.
Sadly, the narrator claims that the people have accepted this cycle, war and all. These words come before he explains their true fear. They aren’t terrified by the pattern they live but the seconds of silence when they see it all from a distance, when they must face evil’s abyss and their need for a miracle, “for no nightmare / Of hostile objects could be as terrible as this void” (352). When they are momentarily removed from their immediate, accepted pattern, it appears unbearable. It therefore makes sense that an unexpected disruption could trouble those not facing the void. Auden understands that even the greatest miracle can be unwelcome when the cycle feels safe. Yes, the routine brings grief, but as devastating as grief may be in the moment, it’s what they can expect. We’ve all thought this way; we shield ourselves with understanding and take comfort in what we have come to know, even if we loathe it. We’re ever in the garden, mistaking rotten, false control for sustenance.
To be fair, those who were unhappy with Christ’s disruption had a point. Although we’d rather dwell on angels and sheep, Jesus didn’t bring much immediate joy to the world; his existence ushered in a killing spree. While Jesus escaped his first murder sentence, the rest of Bethlehem paid for his birth. The heavenly host’s song led to screams from the parents who watched their sons slaughtered. Behold the fruits of interruption.
Auden’s Herod is not thirsting for this blood. At the beginning of his speech, he’s a hilarious character, applauding himself for meager accomplishments and pouting over petty inconveniences. He’s a real politician. This attitude naturally leads him to infanticide. He isn’t trying to wage war but avoid one. Though he tells himself that this child is nothing special, he knows that if his people believe that God really has been born on earth, chaos will ensue. Herod must remove this disruption before it gets out of hand, and though he claims, “I don’t want to be horrid” (194), by his calculations, these children of Bethlehem are a reasonable price for peace.
Lately, I’ve heard death marching behind every miracle, and the church calendar has only made it louder. This pattern that I have moved and prayed through for years has proven untimely. This year’s Lent felt appropriate as we watched a pandemic ravage the world, but surely things would be better in April. Yet Easter dawned on mass burials. Then Pentecost came in as wails of grief and cries for justice while the blood of Black bodies paved the way to an all-too-ordinary time—a time when our abused creation blazed to ash. Perhaps we should have kept death on our foreheads the whole year. Celebrating resurrection and preaching joy feels nearly blasphemous. When I hear a baby cry this winter, I don’t know if it’s Jesus or one who took his place.
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It is a strange mercy to marry in sickness, grief, or poverty, though I would never wish it on anyone.
In our second year of marriage, a new neurological medication soothed my temporal lobe enough for me to inch out of the dark fog that had plagued me for years. Parts of my mind and personality that I’d counted lost finally returned. Later, we learned more about my immune system’s flaws and that, while symptoms could be partially managed, the condition was chronic and the damage done. It wasn’t good news, but treatment allowed my body to improve to a limited extent.
The truth is that despite the pain and the grief my illness still brings at times, the last two years have been held together by moments of ecstatic love. I want all the clocks started again. I want every star. In “In Sickness and In Health,” Auden writes:
Let no one say I love until aware
What huge resources it will take to nurse
One ruining speck, one tiny hair
That casts a shadow through the universe (ll.25-28)
It is a strange mercy to marry in sickness, grief, or poverty, though I would never wish it on anyone. We didn’t get to enjoy the young, wild, and free years my younger self had assumed were guaranteed. And watching someone you love lose themselves, whether physically or mentally, can break you. But entering in sickness with no assurance of future health made any degree of wellness a startling grace. The timing let us eventually wake anew to love’s dazzling mystery and ask, “Who showed the whirlwind how to be an arm, / And gardened from the wilderness of space / The sensual properties of one dear face?” (ll. 70-72).
Yet even after years of personal suffering, I can only say I am blissful in my marriage as a confession: forgive me, world, for I have joy. When my personal world revived, others’ were spiraling in the other direction with loneliness and divorce. Because of this, I no longer talk about my marriage much when people ask how I am, except in passing comments that “things are good” so no one suspects dissatisfaction. I offer facts in a generally pleasant tone.
That was before 2020’s mounting catastrophes. As with everyone, this year has hurt us. We miss friends and family and have worried for our many loved ones who contracted the virus and other diseases. We’re always calculating the risks associated with work and small errands because things could go very poorly if I get COVID-19. On Christmas, we watched news clips of a bomb destroying blocks of our own city. However, a lot of my life has stayed the same—no driving, mostly working at home, always trying not to catch a virus. I also kept my part-time job, don’t live near any forests for people to set on fire, and have never faced racial oppression. Comparatively speaking, I am doing okay. And so when I am struck by the sheer delight of laughing, dancing, or falling asleep with the one I have and hold, guilt soon follows. I want to apologize for love and assure my imaginary accusers that I’m still in enough pain to excuse my happiness in an apocalypse.
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God is the constant interruption, often unwanted and rarely on our time, but always needed.
In his long war-time poem The Age of Anxiety, Auden follows four lonely characters facing the possible end of the world. None are in immediate danger, but none feel totally removed from World War II. In fact, Malin is a medical officer on leave, Emble is in the navy, and Rosetta is a Jew living in America. The four begin as strangers at a bar, each caught up in their own miseries and unfulfilled hopes. They think of others who are in or have moved out of their lives, and none are settled in a happy marriage or steady friendship. They remain silent until the radio shares war updates and concludes by asking listeners to buy bonds. Finally, they must bear their common anxiety together. They cannot share their personal afflictions, but the war is their common tongue. It is also too much for any of them to bear on their own.
Half of the poem consists of a collective dream journey they take, which they realize at the end was an unsuccessful attempt to escape the real world and all of its anxieties. When they wake up again at the bar, they take the party to Rosetta’s home, where she and Emble have a drunken, spontaneous wedding ceremony. It’s a ridiculous scene that the two will be embarrassed by in daylight, but Auden explains, “In times of war, even the crudest kind of positive affection between persons seems extraordinarily beautiful, a noble symbol of the peace and forgiveness of which the whole world stands so desperately in need” (516). He’s right. It’s why we send each other viral videos of toddlers hugging. We crave reassurance that love can and will be.
Of course, we can resist this craving. Resistors sit quietly on their barstools, too consumed with their own worlds to cry for the one everyone else grieves. The possibility of new friends could invite more anxieties, so they settle for a loneliness that resembles peace in low lighting.
The end of the world only matters if you love it or those in it. As she sobers, Rosetta calls her sleeping short-term lover “My doom, my darling” (518). This is my favorite definition of a lover. Or a friend. Or a child. We give anyone we love the permission to doom us. They may betray us, madden us, die on us. Weddings are promises to sing our beloved’s funeral blues.
Even giving birth guarantees suffering, because despite our efforts to keep a child safe and supply them with only perfect love, this is a broken, breaking world. Mary sees this in For the Time Being. Auden speeds past the manger scene but allows her a private moment with her newborn son:
Escape from my care: what can you discover
From my tender look but how to be afraid?
Love can but confirm the more it would deny.
…
In your first few hours of life here, O have you
Chosen already what death must be your own?
How soon will you start on the Sorrowful Way? (380)
This is a mother’s confession; she cannot save her son from the Sorrowful Way he must one day take. She is also mourning his inevitable suffering and her own. Though her baby escapes the death awaiting his neighbors, it is only temporary. She has given birth to the world’s salvation and her own devastation.
I have a hard time imagining a way of escaping all human love, but let’s say it’s possible. Let’s imagine that a person could isolate themselves in a way that would make them impervious to the grief caused by caring about others. This is, of course, a hell of one’s own making. It also, unfortunately, won’t work in the end. At the end of The Age of Anxiety, Malin recognizes that we can never escape the one who can grieve and love us most:
In our anguish we struggle
To elude Him, to lie to Him, yet His love observes
His appalling promise; His predilection
As we wander and weep is with us to the end. (532-33)
There is no escaping grief, because despite even our best efforts, there is no escaping the loving one. God is the constant interruption, often unwanted and rarely on our time, but always needed.
In his poem “The More Loving One,” Auden writes, “If equal affection cannot be, / Let the more loving one be me” (ll. 7-8). As a gay Christian in the twentieth century, Auden knew something about longing, unequal affection, and the inevitable suffering in and for love. These lines are the Christ-like response to indifferent stars, a world at war, and impending heartbreak.
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I hope most will bring me joy but am certain that all will cause me pain.
So I will love my husband without apology in apocalypses, small and grand. I will love him while dancing and sniffing the lavender at a friend’s wedding. With his and God’s help, I will better love my friends, family, and the earth we have been given in this anxious age. I hope most will bring me joy but am certain that all will cause me pain. My dooms, my darlings.
The two of us will weep and pray for this world while trusting in its transformation. And I will recite the final chorus in For the Time Being, next to a friend’s wishes that we be granted joy from the Lover of our souls:
He is the Way.
Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness;
You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.
He is the Truth.
Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety;
You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.
He is the Life.
Love Him in the World of the Flesh;
And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.
Whitney Rio-Ross holds a Master’s in Religion and Literature from Yale Divinity School. Her writing has appeared in Sojourners, Reflections, America Magazine, LETTERS Journal, The Cresset, St. Katherine Review, The Other Journal, and elsewhere. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Birthmarks and teaches at Trevecca University in Nashville, Tennessee, where she lives with her husband.