LA MAISON MORALISÉE IN W. H. AUDEN'S ‘THANKSGIVING FOR A HABITAT’

Abstract

In an encomiac poetic sequence about his house in Austria entitled ‘Thanksgiving for a Habitat’, the Anglo-American poet W. H. Auden described it as a space that simultaneously fosters intimacy and secures a sacrosanct privacy. Auden shifts in ‘Thanksgiving for a Habitat’ from writing various forms of paysage moralisé – psychological, symbolic, or allegorical landscapes – to composing a maison moralisée. What the house symbolizes and allows is the civilizing act of creating a common world. This is the domestic ethos that the sequence presents as an over-determined alternative to several ‘problems’: the loneliness of the middle-aged Auden; the sentimentalized Freudian family romance; and the apocalyptic fears of the twentieth century.

Keywords:

• W. H. Auden
• house
• domestic poetry
• moralized space
• intimacy
• worldliness
• exile

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank Random House and Curtis Brown for granting permission to cite extracts of poetry in this article. All extracts are under copyright and reproduced with permission. “A Summer Night”, copyright 1937 by Random House, Inc. and renewed 1965 by W.H. Auden, “New Year Letter”, copyright 1941 and renewed 1969 by W.H. Auden, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”, copyright 1940 and renewed 1968 by W.H. Auden, “In Praise of Limestone”, copyright 1951 by W.H. Auden and renewed 1979 by The Estate of W.H. Auden, “Ischia”, copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears, Executors of the Estate of W.H. Auden, “Thanksgiving for a Habitat”, copyright © 1963 by W.H. Auden and renewed 1991 by The Estate of W.H. Auden, “Ode to Terminus”, copyright © 1968 by W.H. Auden, from COLLECTED POEMS OF W. H. AUDEN by W.H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House, Inc. Copyright © used by permission of Random House, Inc. and Curtis Brown, Ltd.

Notes

1 See ‘Good-Bye to the Mezzogiorno’ (Auden, 2007: 640–43).

2 I am indebted to Rainer Emig for making this point: ‘A habitat is indeed a further reduction in size of Auden's good place, its final destination after its metamorphosis into the “Authentic City” of Bucolics’ (2000: 196).

3 The similarity of this passage (taken together with the epigraph to the sequence, from the Vulgate, Psalms XVI, which proclaims ‘Yea, I have a goodly heritage’), to Horace's description of his Sabine estate in Satires 2.6 is remarkable: ‘This is what I prayed for ! – a piece of land not

	so very large, where there would be a garden, and
	near the house a spring of ever-flowing water, and
	up above these a bit of woodland. More and better
	than this have the gods done for me. I am content’ (Horace, 1978).

4 For thorough accounts of Auden's pervasive and self-defining sense of exile, see Murphy (2004), Taylor (2001) and Warren (1996).

5 See Auden's references to his ‘a lonely only/Boy’ in ‘Up There’, the ‘widows/orphans/exiles …/an only child’ of ‘Encomium Balnei’, and to ‘all unwilling celibates’ in ‘The Cave of Nakedness’ (2007: 697, 699 and 710).