Lullaby

"Lullaby' is among Auden's famous poems, although it doesn't give the reader a feel of the lighter, more amenably Romantic/romantic elements of his genius. Strange not to find any worthwhile comments/critiques of this popular poem on the NET!

Having taught the poem to two batches of English majors of my college I have grown to have a rather lively, but complex relationship to the poem. The love is for the simple diction and the uncompliacted syntax of the poem, which agree with the delicate constitution of my undergrads. I also love the way Auden develops the theme of the immense value of human affections, however faulty, however frail, in a world grown shrill and with dry moralisings on the one hand and the harshnesses of our obligatory, loveless interactions with each other. Auden's interest in her mother's faith -- Roman Catholicism -- makes itself felt in the pantheistic and almost mystical faith in "Universal love and hope". One remembers the concluding stanzas of Wordsworth's 'Immoratlaity Ode' in the context.
The dramatic situation in the poem is left shadowy: only at the very end of the poem do we dimly guess that the speaker might have been loving and talking to a prostitute. Auden's mature acceptance of the humanity of human love is eveident in the 2nd.stanza, where he equates physical love - the act of love-making to a "hermit's ecsatsy": Lovers of English poetry are bound to be reminded of Donne's 'Cannonization'.
One argues with him, however, over the idea that the sort of heightened physical and spiritual union the stanza talks about could be achieved with someone the speaker does not have a deep relationship with. Maybe, the speaker does not meet with a casual aquaintance, after all. There seems to be an element of vagueness about the nature of the relationship he shares with the owner of the "sleeping head", however unfaithful. Perhaps the lady in question was once in a deep bond with the speaker and the two have met again after a separation, during which the lady had to suffer "nights of insult" (nights of loveless love-making').
The third stanza evinces an eagerness on the part of the speaker to enjoy whatever the fleeting present has to offer before it dies away unobserved "like vibrations of a bell". This has nothing, however, in common with an Andrew Marvell's hedonistic 'carpe diem'(cf. 'To His Coy Mistress'). Auden's anxiety seems to be more about affections than about orgasms. Here is a world-weary, disillutioned soul come to rest in the quiet comforts of shared tenderness and companionship, and pysicality, even if this can never (again) be anything more than a one-night fling. (Here again one gets the nagging feeling that the speaker and the woman in the poem had a deeper bond at a point of time beyond the temporal ambit of the poem: the poet could helped our imaginations a little more by ampler suggestions.) The reference to the "dreaded cards" is obscure: are they business cards which stridently claim the dues payable to the world by the speaker and his companaion for stealing a night of tenderness between them?
The poem closes with a prayer by the speaker for his short-term companion and lover: One is reminded here of the cosing lines of Coleridge's 'Dejection: an Ode', where the earlier poet prays for the cheerfulness and blissful life of Sarah Hutcinson. The prayer in Auden's poem is more deeply suffused with the tints of a worldly-wise matuirity, though. And its a prayer almost paternal in its tender solicitousness: note the affectionate references to the woman's "dreaming head" and "knocking heart"! The eagerness of the speaker for her eyes and her throbbing heart to find "the mortal world enough" seems to betray the struggle he had himself had in order to accept the less that satisfying rewards of the mortal world. Has he succeeded fully in that struggle yet? Or does he, like Matthew Arnold, still find himself torn between