SOURCE: "Auden's Cena: 'Tonight at Seven-Thirty,'" in Southern Humanities Review, Vol. 17, No. 2, Spring, 1983, pp. 139-47.

In the following essay, McFarland examines the significance of Roman satiric verse and the conventions of the cena, a Roman banquet, in "Tonight at Seven-Thirty."

Among W. H. Auden's many neo-classical poems, the dozen collected under the rubric, "Thanksgiving for a Habitat" (written between 1958 and July 1964), each poem dedicated to some personal friend or friends, constitutes perhaps the most outrageously (some might say self-indulgently) Augustan of his opus. "Every home should be a fortress," he writes in "The Common Life," "equipped with all the very latest engines / for keeping Nature at bay." The recognizably Roman sentiments vary in conceptual significance from such comments on the relationship between man and nature to that which opens the title poem of the series: "Nobody I know would like to be buried / with a silver cocktail...