An aubade is a song to a lover departing at dawn; in 1937, poet-critic William Empson published a poem in that tradition titled simply “Aubade.” Empson is famous these days as the author of Seven Types of Ambiguity but also still esteemed for the poetry that he wrote mostly in the 1920s and 30s. His poems can be extraordinarily difficult to understand, influenced by Donne, but bearing the hallmarks of Empson’s polymathic mind and the astonishing rapidity of thought that can make the criticism both invigorating and uniquely difficult. “Aubade” does not present all the challenges of Empson’s poetry, and this because they are alleviated by one of the poet’s imaginative accomplishments, absent elsewhere: a sure sense of occasion and place, in time and the world, holding up the articulation of principles of political action and courage that transcend those circumstances. It concerns Empson’s time in Japan in the 1930s, and his recognizing the need to leave and return to Britain. It is a poem about the necessity of seeing that one cannot evade taking a political stand, not out of recklessness, but for the sake of self-preservation and a comfortable dignity of life:

Aubade

Hours before dawn we were woken by the quake.

My house was on a cliff. The thing could take

Bookloads off shelves, break bottles in a row.

Then the long pause and then the bigger shake.

It seemed the best thing to be up and go.

And far too large for my feet to step by.

I hoped that various buildings were brought low.

The heart of standing is you cannot fly.

It seemed quite safe till she got up and dressed.

The guarded tourist makes the guide the test.

Then I said The Garden? Laughing she said No.

Taxi for her and for me healthy rest.

It seemed the best thing to be up and go.

The language problem but you have to try.

Some solid ground for lying could she show?

The heart of standing is you cannot fly.

None of these deaths were her point at all.

The thing was that being woken he would bawl

And finding her not in earshot he would know.

I tried saying Half an Hour to pay this call.

It seemed the best thing to be up and go.

I slept, and blank as that I would yet lie.

Till you have seen what a threat holds below,

The heart of standing is you cannot fly.

Tell me again about Europe and her pains,

Who’s tortured by the drought, who by the rains.

Glut me with floods where only the swine can row

Who cuts his throat and let him count his gains.

It seemed the best thing to be up and go.

A bedshift flight to a Far Eastern sky.

Only the same war on a stronger toe.

The heart of standing is you cannot fly.

Tell me more quickly what I lost by this,

Or tell me with less drama what they miss

Who call no die a god for a good throw,

Who say after two aliens had one kiss

It seemed the best thing to be up and go.

But as to risings, I can tell you why.

It is on contradiction that they grow.

It seemed the best thing to be up and go.

Up was the heartening and the strong reply.

The heart of standing is we cannot fly.

The best commentary on the poem comes in a 1963 interview of Empson by Christopher Ricks. In it, Empson refuses excessive claims on behalf of the poem, and, though flattered, is made uncomfortable even by Ricks’ commonsense reading of it:

Ricks: I think it’s poems like ‘Aubade’ and ‘Reflection from Rochester’ which run most in my mind, but it’s true that they are very much harder to talk about, aren’t they? We know where we are with all that Donne/Metaphysical line, we talk about your calm you’re your poise and so on, whereas the late ones are pretty difficult to criticize. The late ones are pretty difficult to criticize.

Empson: Well, they were meant to be plain good sense, what everyone was feeling about the occasion; they’re meant to be very much about the political situation. ‘Aubade’ is about the sexual situation. When I was in Japan, from 1931 to 1943, it was usual for the old hand in the English colony to warn the young man: don’t you go and marry a Japanese because we’re going to be at war with Japan within ten years; you’ll have awful trouble if you marry a Japanese, and this is what the poem is about. But, of course, the critic—as it is so far away and so long ago—simply doesn’t know that’s what it’s about.

Ricks: Yes, but it does get difficult all the same. At the end of ‘Aubade’ I can see what it’s about, but I’d find it very difficult to translate into French.

Empson: Well, I suppose it chiefly meant that you can’t get away from this world war if it’s going to happen, and that it isn’t any use thinking you can go to the South Sea Islands—lots of people got awfully caught by thinking they could get right away to the South Sea Islands—the very centre of the more important parts of the war. London was a good deal quieter. It just says, ‘All right, we can’t marry, we must expect to separate.’  But it’s the last verse you’re thinking of. I just thought there ought to be more in it to claim the puzzle was larger. It’s kind of passive endurance. We have to put up with it, we can’t avoid this situation of history. It’s pretty flat, I should have thought. I can tell you why people make revolutions: they feel a conflict and they don’t know what they expect, and they make a revolution merely because they get so irritated. It seemed the best thing in this case to leave the house; and I would leave Japan after my three years. It seems sensible to do something about it, whereas in fact you can do nothing about it, so eventually the country will have to resist. Surely that’s enough for it to mean, isn’t it? Owing to your beautiful sympathy and your expecting it to be good, you thought it meant something wiser.

Ricks: Why I think it’s so good is that the two refrains are quite incompatible in the first two-thirds of the poem. Now, at the end, they start to swap over in a curious sort of way, and start to merge into quite a different attitude: it seems to me that it’s about on the one hand, the tragic principle of integrity and dignity and so on, and also about a comic principle, of decency and comfort. Why I think it’s so good—‘it seemed the best thing to be up and go’ — is because it doesn’t—as everyone now thinks—insist that looking after oneself, or not going mad, is terribly ignoble. The danger of the tragic principle is one kind of soulishness by which this other principle comes to be thought of as mere expediency.

Empson: You get a good deal of Chadbandism now, that’s quite true, yes. If I was moralizing now, like most middle-aged men in most periods, I would moralize in a rather low-minded way. That’s a good reason for not writing poetry at my time of life.  I sympathize with what you say. But after all, if you’re saying that the conflict is between ‘the heart of standing is you cannot fly’ and ‘it seemed the best thing to be up and go’—if you are an Englishman with the right attachments living in Japan, you could leave Japan and go back to England, where you might resist the forces of evil, the invader.[i]

I admit to finding the poem more riddling than “plain good sense” and think that the wording of the poem suggests that Empson’s final remark is correct and that it bears out Ricks’ observation that the two principles on which the poem stands—“time to get up and go” and “the heart of standing is that you cannot fly”—come together quite neatly: “go” and “fly” have been equated up until this point, so that “cannot fly” cancels out “up and go.” But here, at the poem’s end, “time to get up and go” is a call to “stand” and go where one can face the enemy, rather than fly. This is why “Up was the heartening and the strong reply.”

Ricks makes the subtle claim that the two converge into an attitude that holds within itself both the tragic principle of dignity (prepared to waste itself by dying for a noble cause) and the comic principle of comfort (unwilling to sacrifice, but content to waste), and these two both exist in the final lines: there is no option but to stand and fight, and so one is not doing so out of a potentially heroic self-sacrifice—but instead, at least conceivably, one does so in order that one can lie back down, get back to the business of life and love. The poem reaches a means of accepting that one must get up and go and do what is right, and that the heart of taking a stand is the feeling that one can do nothing else. Courage felt as a necessity becomes true courage because it acknowledges risk as unavoidable; the alternatives are foolhardy recklessness and cowardice, the former courting risk without sufficient warrant and the latter shirking from duty.

The shift, as Ricks says, comes about two-thirds of the way through, with “Tell me again about Europe and her pains,” where “again” is the speaker returning to the case, willing now to be persuaded. Then, in the next five-line stanza the speaker wants more, with impatience and haste, no longer satisfied to mull the competing claims: “Tell me more quickly what I lost by this.” Something was lost by his having to leave, but there is also a skeptical attitude, challenging someone to say just how much exactly could have been lost by his calling “no die a god for a good throw.”

John Haffenden’s explicatory notes suggest this might involve two puns on sexual intercourse (“a good throw” being a “good lay”), and that makes sense, since the speaker of the poem gets up after a kiss, but before sex. He is among these alternatives, refusing to call the die a god for a good throw and also believing two people from different cultures can share a kiss but had best leave it there: a kiss, given the circumstances, is all they can do without putting themselves in greater danger. But the greater judgment here and elsewhere has to do with assessing risk, knowing just how much can be seized from fortune, refusing to worship as a god the die that itself is subject to the whim of the gods or fate or chance. “Tell me with less drama” does not want the loss to be presented in tragic light, the necessity of departure. The good sense of self-preservation should not, as Ricks says, be thought a moral failing or an intolerable loss.

If “Tell me again about Europe and her pains” marks the turning of the corner, the other side of the corner, where the corner has come into view but has not been turned, is in the triplet just before:

I slept, and blank as that I would yet lie.

Till you have seen what a threat holds below,

The heart of standing is you cannot fly.

It is all too easy to fail to slow the imagined voice reading Empson’s poetry aloud. The rapidity of movement and leaps of thought between clauses can be mistaken for a speed of delivery. It is essential that this not happen with the first line, where the pause in the comma after “slept” can be heard with the duration of an ellipsis, so that the line sings slow and deep, like a fallen king in Shakespeare, yearning after oblivion but also lulling himself into a stupor and acceptance of his fate; he must summon the strength to up and go, though he would go on lying in place and lying to himself. “What a threat holds below” seems to stretch for the rhyme on “below,” but in this case the effect of stretching for a rhyme is felt as a stretching out to grasp the immensity of what has dawned on him: “below” opens into hell and returns to the place on which one stands. One stands in place when one does not see that there is a threat opening beneath one’s feet that makes it impossible to remain in place. And this is the arrival at the corner: he would like to remain lying to himself that he can stay in place (stand), as if it were necessary for him not to leave, impossible for him to do so (because of what he sees the world to offer), but the threat below makes it impossible for him to feel that flight is a bad option. Seeing the threat that holds below, it is no longer impossible to remain standing in place, and it becomes instead a necessity to take a stand. The last line contains two possibilities of what it means: standing as remaining and standing as fighting, where the former is a refusal to fly away and flee, and the latter is a recognition that one must fly towards danger, knowing this not to be fleeing at all.

This also marks the corner around which the poem turns, because it is at this moment that the poem shifts from the personal to the political. The preceding stanzas were about the two lovers, but this one has become about much more, while being about the lovers still. The poem realizes how the two principles converge. In the first few stanzas, the lovers were wrenched apart by an earthquake and by circumstances that remained unspecified, even if the political valence of those circumstances is suggested by the language as in the line “none of these deaths were her point at all”; in that phrase, the emphasis is on misunderstanding, the problem of translation, and not the deaths themselves. The deaths are there, but they are “not her point,” which is instead something more intimate and exclusive to the pair. Their love is both more and less than politics.

But it is the political that matters at the poem’s close as the political threat allows for a reconciliation of the two principles that arise out of the dilemma of whether he should remain with her or leave. In the context of politics, “standing in place” does not mean remaining, but standing strong in what one believes, and its being the right thing to up and go, means turning away from love to politics. The reconciliation is afforded by the movement from one framework of action to another, so that the commitment to both principles remains even as their meanings alter because of what each principle entails in the new framework. Alongside the speaker and the woman, the two principles are the actors in the poem’s drama, which presents—to put it in lofty terms—the emergence of political consciousness out of private consciousness, the growth of political virtues from private desire. In the final line, the self-directed “you cannot fly” has become “we cannot fly,” “we” encompassing the speaker and lover, but also encompassing a public that extends beyond them both. It is that “we” from which flight is impossible.

“It is on contradiction that they grow,” Empson writes of “risings” in the final stanza of the poem. “Risings” takes in a broad range of possibilities: standing to go, sexual risings, political stands, revolutions and uprisings, but also the risings of thought and feeling. It is a wonderful word because its plainness and flatness (it is any vertical movement from a position of rest) allow so many senses to dance with one another upon its surface. But as interesting is the singular “contradiction,” if you had to select one keyword of Empson’s critical mind, this would be the one, with his most famous statement an ethical principle that extends to all of life that is not art: “Life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that cannot be solved by analysis.”  Though I’m certain his sense of the word is more finely attuned than mine, it is not always easy to grasp what he means by it because it extends far beyond Aristotelian logic. This poem, though, gives a better sense of all that it might mean.

“Aubade” imagines an overlaid series of tensions, which we might call, as I think Empson would, “contradictions.” It begins with the earthquake, the rubbing together of tectonic plates, but soon takes in the tension of man and woman (a sexual friction paralleling that of the earthquake), English and Japanese languages, English and Japanese commitments, East and West, private and political, love and war, and of course the two principles, each of which contains within itself a tension of two possible readings (“stand and go” as in flee, and “stand and go” to face the enemy; “heart of standing is you cannot fly” as in “must remain and not act” and “heart of standing is you cannot fly” as in “taking a stand as the right action”). The movement of these upon one another is destructive, but also, faced with the potential for destruction, the ground for action: action does not proceed a stable ground upon which to stand but begins the effort at establishing some stability.

This, at least, is Empson’s view, and coincides with his view of poetry, which he defends later in the interview with Ricks. Poetry, Empson feels, aims at achieving some sanity or equilibrium in the imagination of the poet or even society; it is a working out of perplexities. That is not, in itself, an argument for why poetry is political, but does suggest why and how poetry might have political consequence: poetry is setting right the thoughts so that one can be clear about what to do. The contemplative and imaginative function of poetry prepares the ground for action, so that what Coleridge called  “drama of reason” in a poem is in fact the first movement in an action that extends beyond the poem. A poem reaches closure, and leaves off, when something that is not poetry can happen because of the poem being completed. And, depending on the poem, this something that happens might be unqualifiedly political. The poem’s fiction, as Empson reads it, requires us to imagine this broader arc of action of which a poem is a part, and this is part of why Empson relies on biographical readings that often require Empson’s talents (otherwise unfulfilled) as a writer of fiction.

In one of the best such moments, Empson presents Andrew Marvell’s death. Ensnared in a political dilemma, he describes Marvell turning to sleep, trusting in his unconscious mind to find a solution to what by light of conscious reason seemed impossible:

Marvell was a stocky fighting type, though a deskworker of course, and had been threatened with trouble on the tour to Russia for hitting out; but he genuinely wanted peace, and would prefer to walk away from a duel if the rules permitted. I suggest that he walked out from an evening party at a house in Hull, and used his eminence to walk out through a gate of the city, and walked for what remained of the night, indifferent to the fatal marshes; and returned at dawn to take the first coach back to London. As the coach jolted slowly on, and he got more and more feverish, he would reflect on how thoroughly tricky his situation had become, on every side. When he at last got home, irritated all over, and his doctor suggested a risky medicine, as the ‘tertiary’ returned, warning that it would case a long deep sleep, he accepted that eagerly. Nobody expected to die from the familiar ague, tiresome though it was; that was no problem. But from a real deep sleep he would expect to wake up, as often before, suddenly seeing a way out, knowing what to do.[ii]

This is very much how Empson felt the conscious writing of poetry might work: the mind drawing on its latent powers to arrange in a navigable order its sources of conflict and perplexity, arriving at a solution that permits of his resolve to go on with life and action. “I slept, and as blank as that I would yet lie,” he writes in “Aubade.”  But the blankness gives way to seeing, and in turn, the poetry gives way to action, as the love affair gives way to political crisis.

“Aubade” alludes to Marvell’s poem “The Garden” in the second verse: “Then I said The Garden? Laughing she said No.” In Some Versions of Pastoral, written concurrently with “Aubade,” Empson says of Marvell’s poem: “The chief point of the poem is to contrast and reconcile conscious and unconscious states, intuitive and intellectual modes of apprehension; and yet that distinction is not made, perhaps could not have been made.”  “Aubade” is not to be that sort of poem, not least because Marvell’s “The Garden” celebrates a life of withdrawal from the arena of politics, a union with nature that supersedes human agency and action. His lover has risen; he looks and wonders if she is beckoning him to follow her to the garden outdoors. He also wonders whether she is beckoning him to a further withdrawal, from the erotic coupling to the platonic unity of ideal love perhaps. Or perhaps not. At any rate, the garden and “The Garden” are alike declined; for the speaker, and for “Aubade”, something else is due. Of Empson’s poem, we might say, modifying his comment on “The Garden” only slightly, the chief point of the poem is to contrast and reconcile romantic and political states, intuitive and intellectual modes of apprehension; and yet that distinction is not made, perhaps could not have been made.[iii] To say this is to resist the thought that everything is political. It is to say instead that in life much that is not political must be reconciled with it, and that this can happen when the principles of action from one realm are allowed to extend into another, without the recognition of a distinction that would forbid them from so growing and altering their sense for their new circumstances. It is a wise political poem because it does know the difference between that which is the political and that which is not, without insisting on a barrier between the two.