A Choice Between Light and Darkness

The poem is inundated with appeals to illumination: "bright / And darkened lands of the earth," "Children afraid of the night," and "Ironic points of light" appear frequently in the speaker's argument (7-8, 54, 92). While Auden occasionally employs the traditional juxtaposition of open-minded, elucidating light and threatening, unseeing darkness, he also draws out a more surprising association between bright lights and superficiality. Men of the mid twentieth century are, the speaker argues, simultaneously well-educated and weak-minded; they have access to a world of information and innovation that could hardly have been imagined two decades earlier. Yet, the poem suggests that all of these flashy products of industrialization do as much to blind as to enlighten. The first stanza provides a useful example of this ambiguous life the speaker critiques: "Waves of anger and fear / Circle over the bright / And darkened lands of the...