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

Style, Spring, 1999 by Jo-Anne Cappeluti

Another technical device involves turning back the clock. In the world of the play, the dog-skin begins to speak as the clock strikes one; as the dog-skin's speech progresses, subsequently referring to action outside of the world of the play, it becomes "nearly" one in the story. The dog-skin's owner, whose story the dog-skin is retelling, discusses the German offensive in "March of' 18" (Plays 273). Such references to different times, moreover, actually make us question the dog-skin's relationship to time and his awareness of it. Since it has no sustained sense of time, it seems as if it experiences events either in momentary or timeless fashion. We do not know, for example, if the dog-skin became a poet before or after his owner left, that is, whether the first part of his soliloquy alludes to a time that took place before or after the second part of his speech. Perhaps he learned to be a poet by imitating his original "master," but the issue of when that took place is not important to him. In this respect he is a vivid example of what, echoing the audience, Caliban declares about time in the world of the imagination: "[T]he dramatic mystery is that they [the imagination and her friends] should always so unanimously agree upon exactly how many hours and days and years to skip" (Collected Poems 426).

Part of such talking, moreover, involves echoing what the dog's owner said to it. The dog-skin says, "I'm giving you his own words. Whisky always made him a bit rhetorical" (Plays 273). Here we see a dramatization of what happens when the imagination speaks; such inner dialogue is marked, in part, by echo.(13) Certain words or sentences that mean one thing in one context take on added levels of meaning when repeated; for example, the dog-skin repeats its owner's declaration, "Every time I hear that [guns fired] I say to myself: You fired that shell." Such a declaration already emphasizes the self as both speaker and audience; when repeated by the imagination, however, such a declaration emphasizes a contrast between I and You. In other words, the imagination says to itself, "You [meaning the owner] fired that shell." The imagination thus creates an audience of self listening to the self, a phenomenon of which Auden makes much greater use in Caliban's address.

All of these characteristics of the dog-skin's speech are designed to draw in the audience. The more he talks, the more we wonder how he talks, especially when, at the end of his speech, he declares, "Heavens, it's getting light and you've forgotten to strike! Hurry up! [The Clock strikes six.] I think someone's coming and my lodger is waking up" (Plays 274). At this point, the dog stretches, Francis gets out of the skin and tiptoes out of the room. The audience strongly suspects that, although they are seeing Francis, what they have heard was not Francis because the story that the dog-skin tells does not reflect Francis' point of view. At the end of the play, the audience's suspicion is confirmed when Francis, the missing heir, tells his story.