Thinking Activity on W.H.Auden's Poems

This Blog-post is a response of thinking activity on W.H.Auden's Poems,given by our professor Dr. Dilip Barad Sir. To know more about this task, CLICK HERE.

Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) known as his short name, W.H.Auden was a British-American poet. His poems largely covered politics, moral,love,religion, psychology and his well known poems also centralized in War situation.  

Here are my points of the questions given in the task:

 1)Auden's poems seems to be written in our times for 2022. Justify this in context of pandemic and Russia-Ukraine war.

We studied Auden's three poems in our second paper The Twentieth Century Literature From World War II to the End of the Century. We also studied about War Poetry  in our fifth paper,History of English Literature From 1900 to 2000. Surprisingly we studied and we will study about the literature which were written during the first and second world war in this time called Third World War. 

• Pandemic Reading of COVID-19 with the reference of Auden's poem: 

I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-second Street

Uncertain and afraid

As the clever hopes expire

Of a low dishonest decade:

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.

This is the first Stanza of the poem, 'September-1939'. In this Stanza poet observed several things which actually written to describe the war situation. However the word like 'dives' which means bar if we can see through COVID pandemic, after lockdown Indian government allowed to open several hotels, bars, restaurants with the limitations of time. It was just one year ago. Here I share one e-news clip.

(You can read entire news by click each images given here) 

But still, after opening bars and hotels and other places, the cases of COVID 19 still increased. Even if, the new Variants were coming like Omicron and Delta also. So there is still people wants their daily drink and after gained it, the increasing of cases still going. 

'And darkened lands of the earth' and words like 'anger and fear'. In the context of COVID-19, we recall several incidents that how people were in poverty due to lockdown and they struggled mentally as well as physically.As Vinita Dwivedi mentioned in her article about crisis,((To know more, CLICK HERE)

In contemporary social psychology, Weiner's (1995) Attribution Theory says that “the fundamental tendency of people is to seek explanations for events. Explanations serve to give meaning to events, to enable us to apportion praise or blame, and to predict the behavior of other people, and indeed of other events in our environment.” It suggests that attributions can guide punitive opinions and behaviours toward corporate actors.

Another thing is that, people were migrate themselves from city to village. There is also one documentary '1232 KMS' released in 202, Hindi-language documentary and directed by Vinod Kapri.It is based on  the Indian migrant workers during the COVID-19 pandemic and the impact of the lockdown on them.  Here I shared trailer also.

• Russia-Ukraine War :

Epitaph on a Tyrant

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,

And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;

He knew human folly like the back of his hand,

And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;

When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,

And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

Auden's another poem is 'Epitaph on a Tyrant'. Here Auden mention tyranny of Hitler. The word 'Perfection, of a kind' seems like the leader always try to come with some promises and proposals. But after some years of their ruling, they can't complete their promised. (In India). During this third world war,  Vladimir Putin known as 'Dictator'. The way he used bombs, tanks and by seeing the news and videos we recall the history and the dictatorship of Hitler.The last line also described the history of dictatorship and this picture also shows that how Hitler's cartoon pampered Putin.

As Newstatements news mentioned that, 

Across the world today, people are asking if Putin is a new Stalin. Karl Marx joked that “history repeats itself twice, first as tragedy then as farce”. It doesn’t, but any ruler of the Russian state faces some of the same issues as earlier Romanov tsars and Communist general secretaries. Most Russian leaders have aspired to emulate the achievements of the two pre-eminent modern rulers, Peter the Great and Stalin, both revolutionary tsars, both brutal killers. 

But, mostly Putin compares with Hitler. According to Jonathan Katz, a German Marshall Fund senior fellow and director of Democracy Initiatives, Putin "is this century's equivalent to Hitler, and the threat he poses to Europe, U.S. and global security extends far beyond the current conflict in Ukraine."(VOA News) Also we know that what Putin's demand about to stop attacking from his county's side, is that Ukraine shouldn't the member of  NATO (The North Atlantic Treaty Organization). Also we already studied about how Charlie Chaplin described the dictatorship of Hitler i the Movie,'The Great Dictator'.I also watch the video in Social media that how Ukraine's public created "Molotov Cocktail" to protect themselves against Russia's bombing. It's again shows the highlighting the dictatorship. 

At last, this third world war also impact in worlds Economy, Business, Share-Market etc. We also learn that how we can see surroundings situation and how the leaders of each country take steps towards the War or towards their position also.  

Thank You.