Poetica: Excerpt from For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio by W.H. Auden
By Lanie Anderson
Welcome to Poetica, the monthly poetry column of Shadowlands Dispatch! This month, we are pleased to feature an excerpt from For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio by W.H. Auden, followed by an analysis and reflection by Lanie Anderson, Shadowlands Dispatch Editor-in-Chief. We hope you enjoy this timely poem for the holidays!
Excerpt from For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio
By W.H. Auden (February 21, 1907—September 29, 1973)
Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree,
Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes—
Some have got broken—and carrying them up to the attic.
The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,
And the children got ready for school. There are enough
Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week—
Not that we have much of an appetite, having drunk such a lot,
Stayed up so late, attempted—quite unsuccessfully—
To love all of our relatives, and in general
Grossly overestimated our powers. Once again
As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed
To do more than entertain it as an agreeable
Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,
Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,
The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.
The Christmas feast is already a fading memory,
And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now
Be very far off. But, for the time being, here we all are,
Back in the moderate Aristotelian city
Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid’s geometry
And Newton’s mechanics would account for our experience,
And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.
It seems to have shrunk during the holidays. The streets
Are much narrower than we have remembered; we had forgotten
The office was as depressing as this. To those who have seen
The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,
The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.
For the innocent children who whispered so excitedly
Outside the locked door where they knew the presents would be
Grew up when it opened. Now, recollecting that moment
We can repress the joy, but the guilt remains conscious;
Remembering the stable where for once in our lives
Everything became a You and nothing was an It.
And craving the sensation but ignoring the cause,
We looked round for something, no matter what, to inhibit
Our self-reflection, and the obvious thing for that purpose
Would be some great suffering. So, once we have met the Son,
We are tempted ever after to pray to the Father:
“Lead us into temptation and evil for our sake.”
They will come, all right, don’t worry; probably in a form
That we do not expect, and certainly with a force
More dreadful than we can imagine. In the meantime
There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair,
Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem
From insignificance. The happy morning is over,
The night of agony still to come; the time is noon:
When the Spirit must practise his scales of rejoicing
Without even a hostile audience, and the Soul endure
A silence that is neither for nor against her faith
That God’s Will be done, that, in spite of her prayers,
God will cheat no one, not even the world of its triumph.
Analysis and Reflection
By Lanie Anderson
Although For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio was published by Random House on September 6, 1944, we 21st-century readers feel right at home among these last lines, spoken by the oratorio’s narrator. Decorations that “have got broken,” children that must be “got ready for school,” “enough Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week”—all of these are post-Christmas rhythms we’re familiar with.
If Auden were here today, I imagine he would not be surprised but might balk at the pressures on a parent to buy matching Christmas pajamas, capture and mail the perfect family photo, daily find new mischief for the Elf on the Shelf—and manage to do it while “laughing all the way.” For many of us, the following lines from Auden are perhaps some of the most painful and familiar of all:
Stayed up so late, attempted—quite unsuccessfully—
To love all of our relatives, and in general
Grossly overestimated our powers.
Whether because of our own limitations, the absence of a late loved one, or the brokenness of familial relationships, each of us feels the weight of a world marred by sin, annually having “overestimated our powers” to “love all of our relatives” in the ways we had hoped.
This excerpt that comes at the end of For the Time Being is part of Auden’s only explicitly religious work. The oratorio—and even this excerpt from it—is rich with allusions to philosophy, history, culture, politics, psychology, and theology. We cannot possibly explore them all here, but my hope is to introduce you to this work and its power to harken us back to the reality of Advent at Christmas and year-round.
Against the backdrop of World War II, Auden began writing For the Time Being about two months after his mother’s death in August 1941. Already wrestling with the truth of his Christian upbringing, his mother’s death was significant in Auden’s return to his childhood faith, and the oratorio is published in her memory.
Readers of this excerpt and Auden’s larger work pick up on his criticisms of the consumerism, materialism, and rationalism surrounding him, especially during the Christmas season. The average citizen is only able to entertain “the actual Vision”—God Incarnate’s entry into human history—as little more than “an agreeable Possibility.” If Karl Marx thought “religion” was “the opiate of the masses,” Auden hints that the opiate of the masses for him is akin to those habits of chronos (sequential or “clock” time) and classical philosophies that claim to account for the entirety of man’s experience:
But, for the time being, here we all are,
Back in the moderate Aristotelian city
Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid’s geometry
And Newton’s mechanics would account for our experience,
And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.
Auden was not opposed to philosophy. He was a rigorous student of disciplines like philosophy, history, psychology, and theology. But Auden had come to believe that “the Christian faith can make sense of man’s private and social experience, and classical philosophy cannot.”1 For Auden, one of the effects of sin was alienation from and disintegration between the seen and the unseen; the temporal and the eternal; the immanent and transcendent.
Auden’s depiction in this part of his oratorio of people, especially at Christmastime, who crave and chase down a sensation while “ignoring the cause” is reminiscent of what G.K. Chesterton calls “the carpre diem religion”:
“It is true enough, of course, that a pungent happiness comes chiefly in certain passing moments; but it is not true that we should think of them as passing, or enjoy them simply ‘for the moments’ sake. To do this is to rationalize the happiness, and therefore to destroy it… Suppose a man experiences a really splendid moment of pleasure. I do not mean something connected with a bit of enamel, I mean something with a violent happiness to it—an almost painful happiness… These moments are filled with eternity; these moments are joyful because they do not seem momentary.”2
Without the cause of such joy-filled moments at Christmastime, “The Christmas feast is already a fading memory,” and even liturgical events like Advent, Lent, and Easter become a part of “ordinary” time and are emptied of their transcendent meaning.
If not the joy-filled magic and moments of Christmas, what can shake us from our slumber and awaken us to the time between “two advents, to be thankful for the salvation brought by the first Advent and to be soberly penitent in light of Christ’s inevitable return in judgement?”3
For Auden, strict obedience to our Lord also won’t do it:
…once again we have sent Him away,
Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,
The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.
Without grasping “the actual Vision” of Advent, we’re like moralistic children, begging to remain Christ’s servant and promising to obey this time, yet we cannot keep our word or God’s Word—Auden’s play on “His”—for very long.
Auden views suffering as having the the potential, more than anything else, to redeem the time being:
So, once we have met the Son,
We are tempted ever after to pray to the Father:
“Lead us into temptation and evil for our sake.”
Influenced heavily by the writings of Charles Williams and Søren Kierkegaard, Auden saw suffering as central to the Christian life, and the death of his mother, affair of his lover, and harrowing evils of World War II seemed to plunge Auden deeper into a life of faith and clearer vision of God.
In A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis writes about how the death of his wife also had an iconoclastic effect on his vision of God:
I need Christ, not something that resembles Him… A really good photograph might become in the end a snare, a horror, and an obstacle.
Images, I must suppose, have their use or they would not have been so popular. (It makes little difference whether they are pictures and statues outside the mind or imaginative constructions within it.) To me, however, their danger is more obvious. Images of the Holy easily become holy images–sacrosanct. My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself… Could we almost not say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence?4
This shattering and refashioning of our ideas of God through suffering is one mark of God’s presence. It is often a means of redeeming time “From insignificance” and defeating “the world of its triumph.” In the introduction of Alan Jacobs’ edited and republished version of For the Time Being, Jacobs writes,
Auden’s purpose in “For the Time Being” was to steer between these two dangers, to avoid the “archaeological curiosity” as well as the “entertaining myth",” and thereby to present the Nativity narrative as nothing less than a kairos moment, an opportunity for his readers to see “the time being” as infinitely rich in possibility and infinitely demanding of choice.5
The arrival of God incarnate and the reality of his Kingdom is neither an “archaeological curiosity” nor an “entertaining myth.” These icons must be shattered. Until they are, a Christmas of “carpe diem” sentimentality, consumerism, moralism, and rationalism will always capture the social imaginary, and the world will triumph.
The Time Being ends with the following chorus:
He is the Way.
Follow Him through the land of Unlikeness;
You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.
He is the Truth.
Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety;
You will come to a great city that has expected your return for yours.
He is the Life.
Love Him in the World of the Flesh;
And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.
At Christmastime and always, let us seek the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
—Lanie Anderson is Editor-in-Chief of Shadowlands Dispatch and a member of The Society for Women of Letters Leadership Council. She earned her MDiv with a specialization in Christian Apologetics from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and also holds a BA in English from the University of Mississippi. Lanie has written for Christianity Today and The Center for Faith and Culture. She currently stays home with her two children and works remotely, helping nonprofit organizations with their marketing and fundraising efforts.
W.H. Auden, quoted in W.H. Auden, For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, ed. Alan Jacobs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), xvii.
G.K. Chesterton, Heretics (New York: Barnes & Noble Inc., 2007), 55.
Alan Jacobs, ed., For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, xix.
C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, in The C.S. Lewis Signature Classics (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2017), 684.
Jacobs, ed., For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, xxxviii.