Memorial for the City by W. H. Auden

First published: 1949; collected in Nones, 1951

Type of poem: Elegy/meditation

The Poem

“Memorial for the City” is a four-part meditation of 147 lines dedicated to the memory of Charles Williams, the English Christian theologian who died in 1945. The “City” of the title is all cities as they aspire to become “the City of God,” as in the epigram quoted from Juliana of Norwich (c. 1342-1420).

Part 1 takes the view of a crow alternating with the lens of a camera; neither the animal nor the machine recognizes a spiritual dimension. Their view is that of Homer (c. eighth century b.c.e.), who narrated a world without the “meaning” of history since Christ. A crow can sit atop a crematorium and not care what is burning, in the same way that a camera can cover a battle without passion. Events of destruction and despair simply happen, from burning towns to weeping town officials. Natural beauty is the continuing, indifferent landscape for human suffering—the result is a deceptive picture of reality.

The Roman poet Vergil (70-19 b.c.e.) marked the period of transition from pre-Christian to Christian Rome. That city is in ruins after the devastation of World War II, but its destruction does not produce in us the grief of ancient Greeks. Pagan and Classical culture is history as “a chaos of graves”; the present state of postwar Europe suggests a future of “barbed-wire” stretching ahead without end. In concentration camps for prisoners of war and displaced persons, we bury the dead and bear misfortunes with a fortitude that we do not understand.

The second part catalogs Christian history to explain the present refusal to despair. Emperors and popes struggled with one another and produced a new kind of city: a center of civilization, a city-state in which people lived without fear of one another. Religious and spiritual values replaced secular and carnal ones; merchants and scholars helped to build “the Sane City,” which welcomed learning and spiritual love, which placed public order before private desires. Then Martin Luther attacked the Roman Church as corrupted by material wealth, so Rome became “the Sinful City” during Europe’s Protestant Reformation.

Then people began to look into the workings of nature and politics. What they found, to begin the Renaissance, was a nature without a soul, and those princes who took nature as their guide became ruthlessly ironic and efficient as machines. One consequence was the French Revolution, when Mirabeau (Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti) “attacked mystery” in Paris. He and his followers aimed to build “a Rational City,” but Paris turned against the Revolution, “used up Napoleon and threw him away.” “Heroes” of Reason inspired searches for perfection, for noble savages uncorrupted by civilization: “the prelapsarian man.” Europeans searched for “the Glittering City,” braving danger and despair. They found, instead of unfallen humanity in a golden city, a New World as a place for “the Conscious City.”

Part 3 examines the ruins of a city bombed during the war. Barbed wire runs through the city, into the countryside. Images of the barbed wire run through one’s dreams. It is the symbol of the human predicament, the inhumanity and corruption over which people trip and make fools of themselves. If the wire is a mirror of our spiritual condition, however, there is something behind the mirror: an “Image” which does not change as people change. It is an image of indifference. This “Image” is the “flesh” of “Adam waiting for His City.” It is also “our weakness,” which speaks the words of Part 4.

The poem ends with a dramatic monologue by “Our Weakness”—the voice of Adam, our human flesh. In human weakness is divine strength, for weakness is the fracture of pride. Therefore Adam did not become Lucifer and fall into absolute evil, because Adam was too “weak.” Even classical gods and heroes were used by human weakness. Saints and lovers were fulfilled by weakness, and characters of great literary and musical imagination were products of saving weakness. These are the figures of mistakes and errors, vices and illusions, but they are the evidence of limitation and need; weakness causes people to discover their sinful selves, and that may rescue people from pride.

Forms and Devices

Each part of “Memorial for the City” is composed of a different verse form: first is an irregular, measured verse in three stanzas rhyming only on concluding couplets; second are nine regular, unrhymed stanzas of seven lines each; third are five regular, rhymed stanzas of six lines each; fourth are eighteen long, unrhymed lines, each line a completed sentence, most beginning with “I.”

This variety of verse forms reinforces the variation of history, a main subject of the poem. Yet the primary device for developing the poem is an ironic use of metaphorical images of sight: from the balancing of crow and camera, with their cold, two-dimensional views of a static nature, to the mocking mirror between viewer and the Image of Adam, to the mirrors and photographers of Metropolis. One must break through the animal view, the mechanical vision; one must look past the mirror that reflects, to find the constant Image of impersonal Adam shared by all humanity.

The central symbolic image examined through the eyes of the crow, the lens of the camera, and in the reflection of history’s mirror is the City. The poem marks the changing character of cities by abstracting a representative feature of the city at each significant phase of its development, turning that feature into an epithet, and capitalizing both epithet and city to suggest a personified entity: thus, European history is a movement of changing characters, from the “Post-Vergilian City,” to the “Sinful City,” “Rational City,” “abolished City,” and, beckoning all, the city Adam awaits, “the City of God.”

An effective way to identify each city with its special historical era is to cite a person whose life contributed a particular quality to mark the city. Pope Gregory identifies the city in the sixth century; Martin Luther names it in the sixteenth century; and Mirabeau transforms it in the eighteenth century. Persons of history, however, become mixed with characters of myth, legend, and literature in the last section of the poem: from Prometheus to Captain Ahab. Such devices shape a poem of dense allusion to a history more product than producer of imagination.