“No, God has placed me exactly
where I’d have chosen to be”
(“No, Plato, No,” May 1973)

A priest encounters some odd patches of human life, ones that run against the grain of society’s supposed autobiography. People may think God is for the old, who have always been old. Fun is for the young, who will always be young. The more scientific we think ourselves, the more we seem to accept this fantasy, against which biology continually testifies.

Instead, I meet people at the end of earthly life, often in extreme physical disfigurement, and later see the obituary photos of their gorgeous bloomed past. The now-devout tell me the stories of their wild youth. And teenagers talk about prayer.

W.H. Auden in his old age struggled with death’s impending, sensed his body’s decay, and bore through it with verse. “No, Plato, No,” which he wrote four months before his death in September 1973, cherishes the unity of his body and soul:

I can’t imagine anything
that I would less like to be
than a diincarnate Spirit,
    unable to chew or sip
or make contact with surfaces
    or breathe the scents of summer
or comprehend speech or music
    or gaze at what lies beyond.

While he can’t imagine something so boring, he writes that…..

“…..I can, however, conceive / that the organs Nature gave Me, / my ductless glands, for instance, / slaving twenty-four hours a day / with no show of resentment,” are maybe themselves a little bored. Maybe they “dream of another existence.” “Yes, it well could be that my Flesh / is praying for ‘Him’ to die, / so setting Her free to become / irresponsible Matter.”

The flesh lusts against spirit and spirit against flesh. Auden sees his spirit longing to pull the flesh toward itself, but the flesh would rather stay in bed. Yet while his flesh can pray only selfishly, for its owner’s death, his flesh can still pray.

On the occasion of visiting a friend in a nursing home, Auden chronicled the stages of elderly flesh’s decay. “Old People’s Home” assesses the “nuance of damage” to each old person’s health. He wonders if those fittest are the worst off, for

“intelligent of what has happened and why, they are obnoxious to a glum beyond tears.”

What has happened? Those who “appeared when the world, though much was awry there, was more spacious, more comely to look at” have aged during the generation when Western cultures first chose to store their elderly in segregated homes. They are “stowed out of conscience” — out “from” a sense of duty and out “away from” their culture’s predominating sense of self.

Nearing his own death, Auden again engages in biological prayer:

“Am I cold to wish for a speedy / painless dormition, pray, as I know she prays, / that God or Nature will abrupt her earthly function?”

Yet as a theological term, “dormition” ushers the flesh beyond biological death, into a new and unforeseen life of blessedness. Job sensed its dawn: “Yet in my flesh shall I see God.”

The Cathedral’s Auden reading group read these poems for our final meeting in March. Over several months we tested the poetry with our own lives and experiences. This is one of writing’s great gifts: lest we suspect life of being mechanistic, it allows us to wonder at life.

Dormition of the Virgin, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c 1556 — *Dormition of the Virgin*, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c 1556

Especially as he aged, Auden seems in his poems to test his own experiences, especially death’s approach. Yet an early poem we read for that last session shows a somewhat different Auden.

“May” (1934) differs from the aged Auden, who sees with clear eyes and with hope. The young Auden crying out here lauds the month of May, exuberantly, confidently, but with tinges of bitterness and less hope than the Auden who faced imminent death.

The real world lies before us,
Brave motions of the young,
Abundant wish for death,
The pleasing, pleasured, haunted:
A dying Master sinks tormented
In his admirers’ ring,
The unjust walk the earth.

Auden’s idyll captures the idol that youth always makes of itself. Why is it that the real world always “lies before us,” never with us? Why is “adulting” ever a few more milestones away? In other words, how can the elderly perceive “what has happened and why,” while the young slog along in the flesh?

Abraham Entering the Angels, Rembrandt, 1656 — *Abraham Entering the Angels,* Rembrandt, 1656

It was with felicitous coincidence that the weekend of our final meeting was Laetare Sunday, and the Roman Catholic lectionary read from Ephesians 2:10: “We are his handiwork.” Paul’s word there is the lovely ποίημα (poíema), cognate of “poetry.”

God has, in poíema’s basic sense, fashioned us. After Homer, the word took on the explicit sense of crafting poetry: God has wrought us, shaped each of our lines, “written you on the palms of my hands” (Isaiah 49:16). In the Septuagint, the word sometimes means “sacrifice.”

The Sacrifice of Isaac, Chagall, 1966 — *The Sacrifice of Isaac*, Chagall, 1966

And is this not “what has happened and why” when it comes to life and death? If our lives are not our own, if we are fashioned and bought at a price, then even our death and decay may be made part of the authorial inscription, part of the poetic process we both engage and undergo.

Auden’s praying flesh — inscribed in his literal body and in his written corpus — testifies to life beyond biology, to a new and risen form we may fill by God’s greatest poetry and most awesome sacrifice, in the Resurrection of the Son.

Here is the strange flowering of all Auden’s puzzling over what temporary human lives should make out of time. “Easter” by George Herbert, Auden’s poetic Anglican forebear, complements Auden well:

Can there be any day but this,
Though many sunnes to shine endeavour?
We count three hundred, but we misse:
There is but one, and that one ever.