Auden Again: Baltering, Soodling, Sossing

Yet another sweltering day of our canicule anglaise, and I reach for Auden again. Surely nothing could be more appropriate for these dog days than this, one of the masterpieces of his postwar years:


Under Sirius

Yes, these are the dog days, Fortunatus:

The heather lies limp and dead

On the mountain, the baltering torrent

Shrunk to a soodling thread;

Rusty the spears of the legion, unshaven its captain,

Vacant the scholar’s brain

Under his great hat,

Drug though She may, the Sybil utters

A gush of table-chat.

And you yourself with a head-cold and upset stomach,

Lying in bed till noon,

Your bills unpaid, your much advertised

Epic not yet begun,

Are a sufferer too. All day, you tell us, you wish

Some earthquake would astonish,

Or the wind of the Comforter’s wing

Unlock the prisons and translate

The slipshod gathering.

And last night, you say, you dreamed of that bright blue morning,

The hawthorn hedges in bloom,

When, serene in their ivory vessels,

The three wise Maries come,

Sossing through seamless waters, piloted in

By sea-horse and fluent dolphin:

Ah! how the cannons roar,

How jocular the bells as They

Indulge the peccant shore.

It is natural to hope and pious, of course, to believe

That all in the end shall be well,

But first of all, remember,

So the Sacred Books foretell,

The rotten fruit shall be shaken. Would your hope make sense

If today were that moment of silence,

Before it break and drown,

When the insurrected eagre hangs

Over the sleeping town?

How will you look and what will you do when the basalt

Tombs of the sorcerers shatter

And their guardian megalopods

Come after you pitter-patter?

How will you answer when from their qualming spring

The immortal nymphs fly shrieking,

And out of the open sky

The pantocratic riddle breaks –

"Who are you and why?"

For when in a carol under the apple-trees

The reborn featly dance,

There will also, Fortunatus,

Be those who refused their chance,

Now pottering shades, querulous beside the salt-pits,

And mawkish in their wits,

To whom these dull dog-days

Between event seemed crowned with olive

And golden with self-praise. 

This is virtuoso stuff. Even Randall Jarrell, habitually snooty about Auden (as about so much else), was so bowled over by this one that he could only respond with 'Well, back to my greeting cards.' 

Fortunatus was a sixth-century poet of the Merovingian court, who wrote in Latin and became a Christian bishop (and was venerated after his death).
'Soodling' means dawdling, 'baltering' tumbling along.
The 'three wise Maries' are three variously identified Maries from the Gospels who, according to medieval legend, made landfall in Provence after travelling from the Holy Land. 'Sossing' is simply onomatopoeic.
An 'eagre' is a kind of tidal wave, commonly known as a 'bore' – which would not have sounded quite as good: 'the insurrected bore'!