Rethink.

The More Loving One
W.H. Auden

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

Commentary:

But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

Auden proclaims this to us in the first stanza, and I wonder: Is it true? (I certainly don’t think so. Indifference is very cold.)

Later on, we hear this from the speaker:

If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

“More love,” of course, can very easily translate into hate. Any of us who love know this. We know how disappointed we can be because of love, and we know that hate takes a variety of forms. One of the more prominent forms it takes is a type of indifference, an attempt to be dead to the world so one cannot be hurt again. If indifference truly is the least we have to fear, then the wish to be more loving is inconsistent with that “fact.” So Auden has some explaining to do:

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

The attitude of the speaker here – an attitude we are tempted not to reflect on because he has chosen to personify “stars,” and we would rather make sense of that – is that of “indifference.”

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

And this indifference, of course, pushes our speaker to embrace the infinite void, total darkness, a darkness so “sublime” it cannot be truly embraced until death (“a little time”). Indifference, obviously, is the problem for Auden’s speaker. We can’t be indifferent. Hence we should be “more loving,” divorced from a temptation to indifference.

A very cleverly constructed poem, where the 3 stanzas seem to complement the first, but in fact refute it.

• A Thought on Stanley Kunitz’s “The Abduction”
• Emily Dickinson, “It is an honorable Thought” (946)
• Emily Dickinson, “A Thought went up my mind today” (701)
• Musee des Beaux Arts
• The Distance of Love: On Auden’s "Are You There?"

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