W.H. Auden and Late Antiquity

In using this blog as a commonplace book of poems I find interesting or beautiful, I particularly enjoy collecting modern poems about late antiquity and the end of the western Roman Empire. Here is my most splendid find to date. Not only is it gorgeous but there are many delightful evocations of late Roman history. Behold!

The Fall of Rome

for Cyril Connolly

The piers are pummeled by the waves;

In a lonely field the rain

Lashes an abandoned train;

Outlaws fill the mountain caves. 

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;

Agents of the Fisc pursue

Absconding tax defaulters through

The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send

The temple prostitutes to sleep;

All the literati keep

An imaginary friend.

Cerebrotonic Cato may

Extol the Ancient Disciplines

But the muscle-bound Marines

Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar's double-bed is warm

As an unimportant clerk

Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK

On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or poetry,

Little birds with scarlet legs,

Sitting on their speckled eggs

Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast

Herds of reindeer move across

miles and miles of golden moss.

Silently and very fast.

~ W.H. Auden, in The Zoo of the New ed. Nick Laird and Don Paterson (New York, 2017), 110.

The outlaws in the mountain caves? Really existed. Meet the baguadae, a shadowy group of rebels in fifth century Spain and France, who have been seen as a group of lower-class freedom fighters against the tyranny of the late Roman state.

The tax defaulters? Upper class families in the empire's cities (scholars usually call them civic elites) opting out of their traditional social and financial responsibilities to fund the building of infrastructure and public buildings; host circuses, chariot races, and other entertainments; and serve in government positions was a well-known problem in the late Roman world; the imperial state's fading abilities to collect taxes (especially in the western Empire), has been one of the explanations put forward for its collapse.

The private rites of magic? One of the most fascinating and bizarre bits of Greco-Roman religion are the mystery cults. (I tell you, I cannot wait for someone to write speculative fiction based on the absolute gold mine of creativity that is the mystery cults.)

The literati with imaginary friends? Based on the letter writing that was going on, accurate.

The military mutinying for food and pay (or to get their general into a position of power)? Happened all the time.

The flu-infected cities? Waves of disease are known to have struck the late antique world, thought scholars have recently pushed back against the idea of an overwhelmingly destructive outbreak of plague in the sixth century Mediterranean.

And those are only the first things that come to mind! I can't immediately think of historical echoes for formal dress getting fancier, Cato, the clerk complaining about their job in the margins of an official document, but that's not to say they aren't there. Auden was professor of poetry at Oxford in 1956-1961, a time when Oxford was an important centre for late Roman studies--among other connections worth noting, during Auden's professorship the great late antique historian Peter Brown was just beginning his career. It wouldn't surprise me if there are more late Roman Easter eggs worked into the poem that I haven't spotted.

None of that matters for appreciating the poem as a poem, of course, but hopefully knowing these little details adds an additional level of enjoyment to your reading experience.