The Caliban Beneath the Skin: Abstract Drama in Auden's Favorite Poem

The imagination must be put to work in this way. Leashing Ariel the imagination to Caliban, Auden dramatizes what he calls in the essay "Hic et Ille," how to make an artistic - rather than self-indulgent - use of the "riposte" to his own "reflection" (Dyer's Hand 94). As he puts it in the essay "Balaam and His Ass," this includes making artistic use of only those possibilities that for the poet are both "permissible and real" (Dyer's Hand 133): possibilities that lead the poet to what Auden repeatedly called the "actual self."(17) On this point, the task of the poet rests in paradox. As Auden was keenly aware, the poet must learn not only to hear this other voice but, having heard it, to repeat it, to act as if he or she had become that "actual" self. In this case, the only way in which the poet "can be 'true to himself' is by 'acting,' that is to say, pretending to be what he is not" ("Genius and Apostle," Dyer's Hand 439).

In Auden's greatest apology for the imagination, Caliban is precisely an actor. He is the only one who has heard the "real Word," the only one who has made use of the imagination in this way. As a result, Ariel has fallen in love with him. Revealed in the "Postscript," that action occasions or generates the address to the audience, an event that engenders Ariel's love for Caliban. Caliban thus finds his beginning in his ending - and vice versa. As with the dog-skin, his owner is not present; in Caliban's case, in fact, the owner or dramatist/poet is "dead."(18) While critics have always assumed that the dead author to which Caliban refers is Shakespeare, the continuity between the dog-skin soliloquy and Caliban's address foregrounds the possibility that the dead author is Auden and that it is a feigned death, a dog-sleep for the imagination; the permissible imagination comes to life only when the ego is sleeping or "dead."(19)

Like the dog-skin's soliloquy along these lines, Caliban's address to the present moment (he is keenly aware of the importance of its existence) comes from the timeless realm of recursively interwoven events that refer to the world before and after the world of the "play." When the imagination speaks, Auden seems to be dramatizing, time is suspended. In the imagination's world of recursive echoes, it becomes impossible to tell what is a reply to what. Such echoes are more than mimetic, and it would be impossible to trace them back to the original event. The conscious ego or self is in some sense asleep. But a spokesperson for the imagination, Caliban is wide awake throughout the address: "No, we have not dreamt it. Here we really stand" (Collected Poems 443). What the imagination speaks and the fact that it speaks at all is an actual event. Caliban's assertion is thus the antithesis of Mrs. Hotham, Francis' murderess in the dog-skin play, who in an attempt to console Iris says at the end of Dog-skin, "You must have had a bad dream" (Plays 292).

Caliban is adamant about the importance, the authenticity, of what the imagination can say to the present moment, and he is keenly aware that the audience would rather go back into some golden past they think more empirically real or into some golden, more spiritually real future. As with the dog-skin soliloquy, however, Caliban's address is an apostrophe to time. As an apostrophe, it addresses that absent entity as if it were present, not saying explicitly as the dog-skin, "Ticker! Ticker! Are you awake?" but expressing that urgency in every line; as the individual is caught between foolish longings for either some golden past or some golden future, he or she can easily ignore the necessity of choosing to see the "ungarnished offended gap between what you so unquestionably are and what you are commanded without any question to become," the actual, the genuine self (Collected Poems 442).