Thank you, fog: W. H. Auden as presiding genius

Renascence, Summer 1997 by Cappeluti, Jo-Anne

Thus, Auden's poem does not manifest what has been called a Modern desire to stop time and order a coherent view of the world. In his attempt to trace what he sees as a descending (i.e., desublimating) history of the lyric imagination, Richard Jackson observes that all such attempts fail, succumbing to the fatality of time (3). It could not be otherwise: when we take as a starting premise that the Romantics begin to deconstruct the imagination's experience, undercutting the imagination's viability and validity by asserting its fictionality, then we see its gradual descent, arriving in postmodernism as something barely alive if not already dead.'

This is not, however, the only kind of "naturalization" process occurring. What may be a failure for a genius is not necessarily a failure for a Genius who succumbs to time as Auden does, not as a volant who would curse the fog for keeping him on the sorry spot of earth, but as one who awakens to find himself fully-not merely-human, in a world with time and (highly visible) space. As the poem dramatizes, it is the tension between the green-world-time of the Christmas holiday and the workworld-time of the world of "work and money" that enables the vision. Instead of concluding with Jackson (and numerous other critics) that the turn to poetry signifies an escape deeper into fiction, I would argue that Auden's use of the Genius voice signifies a return to both the knowable and unknowable aspects of nature, especially to those aspects of our experience that transcend what is empirically verifiable. Along these lines, the poet is "delighted" that the fog has come, giving him a "whole week at Christmas" during which no one can rush into his "contracted" cosmos. This contracted cosmos signifies a naturalized sublime-of a very different kind than that of which Hartman speaks. In demystifying that mode of fiction-making that would lead, for example, volants to curse the fog, Auden affirms a deeper fiction: that bound so intrinsically to the reality of Wiltshire's witching countryside: the silent presence that pervades it.

The poem thus demonstrates Auden's prehension of the paradoxical notion that we can come to know our increasingly indeterminate reality by exploring the non-verifiable realities of fictions. In speaking as what we might call the most fictional voice of all: the voice of a Genius A, a voice that defies ontological or eschatological, linguistic, historicist, Marxist, or psychological approaches, Auden speaks the multi-faceted experience of his postmodern condition. For poetry, as he declared in his elegy for Yeats, "makes nothing happen.... it survives, / A way of happening, a mouth" (CP 248).

In such a way the Genius tradition survives. Poetry makes fiction (that which is not verifiable in empirical terms) real or experiential. In Auden's case, if nature is now a second, fictional self, the poet is so at home with both that he can talk to the fog as if he is talking to himself: "but / for this special interim, / so restful and so festive, / Thank You, Thank You, Thank You, Fog" (CP 888).