Having been immersed in completing a challenging project, I’ve been unable to write blog posts recently. The daunting task I embarked upon was memorizing the W.H. Auden poem, “The More Loving One.”
I got caught up in this effort when I saw The Poetry Challenge that appeared in the New York Times on April 20. It’s hard to back down from a challenge that’s both literary and a brain tester.
W.H. Auden was a beloved twentieth-century British-American poet, and about as famous as a poet can be. “The More Loving One” is one of his better known poems, and most people are familiar with the lines “If equal affection cannot be/Let the more loving one be me.”
I find those words fascinating because it’s like saying you’d rather be the weaker or more vulnerable one in a relationship than to have the upper hand. You’d rather be the one dumped than the one doing the dumping.
How noble! How selfless! And in my case, how untrue. I can admit I’d rather have an advantage than a disadvantage, I’d rather be protected than exposed. But this love poem is framed by our relationship with the universe, as depicted by the stars above.
Is the universe indifferent to us, and if so, why should we care, and what should we do about it? There are no easy answers to those questions.
Here’s the poem in its brief entirety—four stanzas of four lines each:
THE MORE LOVING ONE
W.H. Auden
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Were all stars to disappear or die
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime
Though this might take me a little time.
I didn’t know what the memorization process would be like. As a child in school, I memorized the Pledge of Allegiance and the Ten Commandments. Until the day I die I expect I’ll be able to recite the Hail Mary or Our Father prayers.
But can I still memorize in my sixties, when brain processing power and memory skills begin to weaken? I’ve been doing some memorization over the past year. I finally, finally can recite the license plate tags of our two cars. I can input my credit card number without looking. I’ve started working on learning the social security numbers of my wife and kids.
Could I handle an entire poem? It wasn’t easy. The NYT gives you plenty of visual and audio study aids, but I got the job done by writing out the poem longhand and going at it one stanza at a time, out loud to myself, peeking for a prompt when needed, in a concentrated effort of many hours spread over some days. Poems typically don’t follow standard sentence construction or syntax, and word choices aren’t always as expected. I ran into a lot of it’s “should” in that line not “could,” it’s “might” not “may,” it’s just “stars” not “the stars.”
Finally, this morning, I recited the poem out loud several times without making any mistakes.
From the NYT: “In one of his notebooks Auden observes that “a poem or a novel is a gratuitous not a useful object, like a lathe or an automobile.” He wasn’t being modest or dismissive. The impracticality of poetry is a feature, not a bug. It doesn’t do anything, which may be why, as a species, we can’t seem to do without it.
I love that poems are not useful objects. I hope I remember this one for some time. I probably can, if I continue to recite it on a regular basis. While some people might find this type of endeavor a waste of time, for me it was anything but—memorizing “The More Loving One” and reading about the poem and its creator was vastly rewarding.
Why not try it yourself? NYT allows me to gift this The Poetry Challenge to anyone. Do it here.
