W. H. Auden is considered by most to be one of the 20th Century’s finest English and American poets.
Younger than T.S. Eliot, and greatly influenced by him, Auden fits squarely in the camp of the modernists poets exemplified by Eliot and Ezra Pound.
In his poem, We’re Late, he highlights the hurry, scurry, fret, and worry that depicts the modern world we’re all so familiar with, a world which we created for ourselves at the expense of choosing to live “an examined life,” the only life Socrates suggested was worth living.
We’re Late
Clocks cannot tell our time of day
For what event to pray
Because we have no time, because
We have no time until
We know what time we fill,
Why time is other than time was.
Nor can our question satisfy
The answer in the statue’s eye:
Only the living ask whose brow
May wear the Roman laurel now;
The Dead say only how.
What happens to the living when we die?
Death is not understood by death, nor you, nor I.
One of the most striking aspects of the poem is the opening reference to the historical development of the clock. Recall the Benedictine mantra of Ora et Labora.
Monks in the 13th Century invented the cloche (French for Bell), a mechanical instrument mathematically timed to move with the rotation of the planets that would chime loudly enough to remind those working in the fields or to rouse the monks during sleep so as not to miss any of the eight hours of prayer: Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline.
Clocks then, are simply artificial mathematical representations of the earth’s movement.
And what else is time but movement from one period of the earth’s rotation to another period–from one event we’ve created for ourselves to another.
But if there is nothing scheduled for which we need to tell time, then we simply exist as human beings always in the present and without any reference to the artificial measurements we have created for ourselves when time was other than time is now.
And speaking of being a human being, how does time serve us when we are dead? The “now” of the world and the “how” of the dead represent two very different sets of priorities.
And, now that we are speaking of being dead—of having run out of time—perhaps we’ve spent too much of our life trying to fill the time instead of trying to satisfy those perennial human questions we should have been asking before we learned too late to make time to ask them.
If poetry is the dense and superlative excessiveness of language, and brevity is the soul of wit, then we might sum up some of what Auden was hinting at in reference to time and the “unexamined life” in the modern world with Ben Franklin’s maxim that “Life’s tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.”