A constituent of the sonnet sequence In Times of War, W. H. Auden’s “Here War is Simple” was originally published as part of the travel anthology Journey to a War in 1939. This travel book about the East saw Auden brave the adverse conditions of the Sino-Japanese War together with Christopher Isherwood, a contemporary of his, to document “for the benefit of the reader who ha[d] never been to China, some impression of what he would [have been] likely to see, and of what kind of stories he would [have been] likely to hear” (Journey 13). As a war poem, “Here War is Simple” elucidates the conditions and circumstances surrounding war from the opposing viewpoints of the military commander and the foot soldier through a bipartite opening octave that juxtaposes two distinct landscape sketches. In particular, the first quatrain of the poem gestures toward the military post of a commander, a space of ordered simplicity, in which war is contained within “monument[s]” and “map[s]” (ll. 1, 3). The second quatrain, on the other hand, illustrates a battlefield, mapped through the visceral corporeality of foot soldiers. These foot soldiers, in being represented synecdochically—“a thousand faces” (l. 10, emphasis added)—and vis-à-vis their emotional states—“for living men in terror of their lives, / [ . . . ] / and can be lost and are, and miss their wives” (ll. 5-7, emphases added)—are established as concretely human, corporeal, and entangled in action. The figure of the military commander, in distant relation to the foot soldiers, is only ever tacitly presented through the discourse of “ideas” and the paraphernalia of a command centre: “telephone” and “flags on a map” (ll. 2-3). This strategy of indirect evocation, further reinforced by the absence of personal pronouns and emotional/attitudinal lexis in the initial quatrain of the poem, compels one to perceive the figure of the commander as an abstract body of thoughts or “ideas,” of which the aforementioned figure of the foot soldier is a material imprint.

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Apart from the “ideas” of the military commander, the command-centre paraphernalia are also abstractions in the context of this poem because they are understood, herein, not as objects in and of themselves but as symbolic representations of military communication and deployment. In other words, the “telephone” and “flags on a map” figure as abstractions of war because they conceptualise the networks and processes associated with war instead of the actual setting and proceedings of the battlefield. In contrast to the abstracted nature of the command-centre paraphernalia, the emotional and physiological experiences of the warworn soldiers figure as artefacts of reality—which are material and palpable—as does the injured or exanimate body. In that way, the sonnet establishes, beyond the ideational backdrop of its war imagery, an elaborate system of juxtaposition between the themes of abstraction and reality.

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At the end of his essay “Psychology and Art Today” (1935), Auden theorised that “there must always be two kinds of art, escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love” (20). In tandem with this dyadic paradigm of art, “Here War is Simple” would constitute an instance of parable-art, given that a poem which accosts readers with the material and fatal concomitants of war—death, mass casualty, and human vulnerability—can hardly qualify as pleasing, reality-denying escape-art. The question, then, arises: what exactly is parable-art? As defined in the Oxford English Dictionary Online (OED), a “parable” refers to “a story or narrative told to convey a moral or spiritual lesson or insight.” This definition appears most closely aligned to Auden’s own elaboration that parable-art “shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love.” Accordingly, one could argue that “Here War is Simple” broaches didacticism in the proclamation that “ideas can be true although men die” (l. 9) and the accompanying discourse about the ways in which “ideas” are transacted and materialised in the context of war. More pertinent to the focus of this paper, however, is another of the OED’s definitions of “parable”: “an allegorical or metaphorical saying or narrative . . . a comparison, a similitude” (emphasis added). This latter definition would attest to the metaphoricity of imagery in “Here War is Simple,” which realises, beyond the immediate text of the poem, an additional dimension of reading—an implicit narrative about metapoetics. Specifically, the aforementioned interplay between the themes of abstraction and reality established in the poem conceptualises, as this paper argues, a metapoetics of reading and writing, whereby the documentation of war proceedings is reflexively recast by the parabolic potential of art. By examining the nexus between the literal text and this sublated narrative of “Here War is Simple,” through the polyvalent symbolism of the commander-soldier relationship, this paper will further discuss the ethical implications that subtend poetic engagements with war.

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On the level of its immediate text, the poem presents itself as a philosophical evaluation of thought and abstraction, explored within the specific context of war and suffering in the modern world. This discourse begins with an interrogation of the role played by the military commander “[h]ere [where] war is simple like a monument” (l. 1) to examine the intersections between the abstract domain of thought (and the role of the ideator) and the material domain of action/consequence (and the role of the actor). In particular, this simile that reduces “war” to a “monument”  might be read as ironic commentary, indicting military commanders for strategising whilst ensconced in the safety of their command centres. Considering that a “monument” is a construct that only ever comes into being post-factum as an abstract means of experiencing war through commemoration, this simile appears to articulate a chasm between the commander (the ideator), for whom war is oftentimes little more than a “plan” (l. 4)—an abstract event lacking in any real immediacy—and the soldier (the actor), for whom war entails the corporeal consequences of “living in terror” (l. 5). As a result, the commander is rendered thrice removed from war: on the geographical level, he is physically withdrawn from the battlefield; on the temporal level, he experiences war as a “monument,” as remembrance rather than active participation; and on the psychological level, he carelessly objectifies men as instruments of war, seeming never to empathise with the “terror” or vulnerability experienced in the battlefield. Accordingly, the opening claim “Here war is simple as a monument” (l. 1) outlines the ethical problematics surrounding the vocation of the commander, who transacts business only in the abstract realm of ideas.

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With further reference to the lines “A telephone is speaking to a man; / flags on a map assert that troops were sent” (ll. 2-3), wherein it is not the commander himself who is portrayed as entangled in the affairs of war but the personified “telephone” and “flags,” it becomes clear that the poem’s representation of military stewardship is contingent on a critique of the ethics of ideas themselves. “Here,” in the abstracted space of the command centre, the “flags” represent the process and eventual outcome of ideation, whereas the “telephone” represents the transmission of “ideas.” As cognate concepts of “ideas,” these personified articles generate the impression that “ideas” are active agents in themselves, capable of provoking war, whilst backgrounding the presence of the commander. As such, “ideas” are themselves strikingly purported to be problematic and dangerous in the modern world given their potential to propagate material violence and “terror.” Yet, what is more worrying is that “ideas” also appear to effect a careless (“simple”) abstraction of this said violence, in turn, both distancing and desensitising so-called commanders (or ideators) from the action of the battlefield, and, thence, from reality itself.

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However, as indicated by the seeming volta in what appears to be the sestet of a Petrarchan sonnet, this grim conception of “ideas” is ultimately revealed to be little more than a cursory premise that the poem soon proceeds to complicate. As it turns out, it is not “ideas” themselves that are blameworthy but the ways in which they are transacted that may prove to be problematic. This nuance is conveyed in the lines “ideas can be true although men die, and we can watch a thousand faces / made active by one lie” (ll. 9-10, emphasis added), in which the perfect rhyme between “die” and “lie”—correlating the respective concepts of fatality and misrepresentation—intimates that the insidious potentiality of “ideas” are only liable to actualisation if these “ideas” become perverted or, worse still, radicalised. It is further implied by the adversative connective “But” that the “ideas” of war can be meaningful (“true”) despite concurrently wielding the potential to prematurely terminate human life (“can die too soon”), and the concessive connective “although” that the validity of “ideas” is not discounted by their capacity to engender dire ramifications (“men die”), both of which mark a transition in the sonnet from an indictment of “ideas” to a defence thereof. Undeniably, in juxtaposing the quantifier “a thousand” with the quantifier “one” in the same lines, the poem accentuates that “ideas” can be powerful—and, for that matter, powerfully inimical to the maintenance of non-violence—and in juxtaposing the figure of the commander, who is served “milk in bowls” (l. 4) with the figure of the soldier “who thirst[s]” (l. 6) whilst enacting the ideas thereof, the poem acknowledges that “ideas” can tyrannise in very material ways. Nonetheless, as the poet puts it, these “ideas,” whilst potentially destructive, are not necessarily false.

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So, how might this discourse of “ideas” and the commander-soldier relationship sublate to a narrative of metapoetics? As a deictic marker, the locative adverb “here” is polyvalent; at the same time as it indexes the space of the command centre, and the corresponding position of the commander, it also self-reflexively marks the textual space of the poem itself. In line with the latter interpretation of “here,” the simile “Here war is simple as a monument” would read as a warning against the risk of oversimplification in  poeticisation. As a corollary, the figure of the commander could, then, be read as an allegory for the figure of the poet—a passive observer-chronicler of an event. The figure of the soldier would, in turn, be allegorical of the participants embroiled in that said event, who will ultimately be cast as “ideas” on a page. In other words, the commander-soldier relationship actuates an autoreferential critique of the poetic vocation, in which the poet is indicted for being a passive, abstraction-tending agent whose work, much like that of the commander, entails mystifying and/or simplifying real events to contain them within the limited space of textual media.

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As consumers of the poet’s art, the reader is also inevitably made complicit since he or she experiences actual events through the “simple” world of poetry, a world in which events are potentially reduced and stripped of their urgency and materiality. In the context of “Here War is Simple,” the reader ostensibly engages only with impalpable concepts, such as strategy and sacrifice, and generalised biographical accounts, such as “men in terror of their lives, who thirst at nine who were to thirst at noon” (ll. 5-6). Apropos of the latter, the reader interacts only with the idea of apprehension—and the abstract form of words as constructs in and of themselves—without experiencing, first-hand, the visceral apprehension of each foot soldier. Moreover, given that poetry narrativises the given events of reality, similar to the commemorative function of a “monument,” its text is also necessarily experienced vis-à-vis a condition of belatedness with reference to the actual event of which it makes mention. Hence, the commander-soldier relationship elicited in “Here War is Simple” might further allegorise a relationship between the reader, who is a passive observer-recipient of the narrative presented in a poem and the corresponding participants presented therein, in the light of which the reader can be said to be twice removed from reality, whereas the poet is once removed therefrom. In other words, whereas the poet experiences war by recasting the events of reality as words on a page, the reader experiences war by recasting these words as thoughts in his mind, therein making “monument[s]” of other “monument[s].”

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However, the poem does subsequently intimate, through its form, that the mechanisms surrounding the poetic process of abstraction are more complicated than they appear to the uncritical eye: in the same way that the volta of this seeming Petrarchan sonnet gestures to the cursoriness of a censorious reading of “ideas,” as aforementioned, it also gestures to the cursoriness of a censorious reading of poetic production and poetic consumption. As an extension of the premise, expressed in the volta, that “ideas” can be valid even as they may engender severe repercussions, poetry, whilst similarly problematic in its abstraction of reality, can also be meaningful. In the introduction to The Poet’s Tongue (1935), Auden himself expressed the opinion that “[p]oetry is . . . concerned . . . with extending our knowledge of good and evil, perhaps making the necessity for action more urgent and its nature more clear” (ix). As an artform, poetry affords the ability to “extend our knowledge of good and evil” because it is imbued with a capacity for referentiality. As illustrated by the extratextual allusions to wartime atrocities in the lines “maps can really point to places / where life is evil now: / Nanking. Dachau” (ll. 12-14), poetry (metaphorised as “maps”) can be integrated, or understood in tandem, with a specific spatial reality because a poem is not simply ​​a universal “flag on a map,” but an intentional signifier for a specific referent. In particular, the metaphor of the map reiterates the function of war poems as didactic objects with the potential to orient and direct its reader to urgent causes of concern in the modern world. Considering also the possibility of mobilising temporal markers like “now,” it becomes evident that despite the tendency of poetry to abstraction, there exist tools that poets can exploit to contextualise and specify their documentations. In other words, there are tools that can be utilised by a poet to ensure that a poem does not abstract insofar as its contents become completely dislodged from reality.

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The alternation between the macro-descriptions (of the “men”/“troops”) and the micro-descriptions (of the “faces” of those “men”/“troops”) in “Here War is Simple” further illustrates that poetry is not necessarily restricted to offering over-generalised, abstract perspectives of events. Rather, poetry affords an intricacy and versatility that enables it to rigorously examine the different aspects of a given problem. What more, the manipulation of formal-generic features in “Here War is Simple” exemplifies that poetry affords the wherewithal to convey the complexity of given problems as well. To illustrate the suggestion that abstract things like “ideas” are manipulable and can “lie,” as prior explicated, Auden constructed this poem as a confluence of the Shakespearean sonnet and the Petrarchan sonnet, beginning with two quatrains of alternate rhyme (as is characteristic of the former) and then, proceeding to actuate a volta with the adversative connective “but” in line nine of the sonnet (as is characteristic of the latter), thereby eluding readers as to the overarching classification of the poem until its final six lines. This deceitfulness of form epitomises how “ideas” can perpetuate false impressions (“lies”). At the same time, this deceitfulness reinforces the dissonance between assumption and truth, whether in regard to the preconceived notions about the “ideas” of war expressed in the octave of the sonnet, or those of poetry itself represented in the same eight lines, the equivocality of which demonstrates that poetry is not necessarily an exercise in simplification; it can also complexify and convey multitudes of meaning through its formal possibilities, amongst its other features.

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Given these observations, it stands to reason that although war poems might run the ethical risk of over-simplifying the proceedings it documents, there are ways in which a poet can mediate the extent of simplification enacted in a poem, not least through innovating with form and structure. The fact that even the canonical form of the sonnet can be re-invented to achieve the parabolic purposes of “Here War is Simple” elicits the possibility of moderating the ethical risks posed by poeticisation. I would go as far as to argue that Auden’s deliberate manipulation of the sonnet form in “Here War is Simple” exemplifies how poets bear the ethical responsibility to pursue creative liberties, where necessary, to counteract the effects of over-simplification in poetry, especially because Auden once propounded that “[i]t is only later, when [a poet] has wooed and won Dame Philology, that he can give his entire devotion to his Muse” (“Prologue: Writing” 22). To put this in prosaic terms, Auden argues that the contents of any poem can only be meaningfully conceptualised if a poet makes considered efforts to systemise the linguistic/literary elements of a poem into a coordinated apparatus of communication. More specifically, Auden suggests that “rhymes, meters, stanza forms, etc. are like servants,” whose calculated deployment would bolster the efficacy of any poem as a whole, or as he writes, make “an orderly happy household”; this belief of his, he exemplified, through the calculated ways in which he innovated with form, language and imagery to negotiate the potential reductiveness of poeticising war in “Here War is Simple.”

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Admittedly, however, owing to the nature of its telos, it would be, to all intents and purposes, impossible for a poem to be without any measure of simplification. Writing about the process of artistic creation, Auden also observed that “[t]he artistic medium, the new situation, which because it is not a personal, but a racial property (and psychological research into the universality of certain symbols confirm this), makes communication possible, and art more than an autobiographical record” (“Psychology” 11). In order to fulfil its telos as a “racial property”—an artform that is relevant and accessible not only to the poet and/or the participants presented in the poem, but to the human race in its entirety—poetry, as Auden argues, must leverage the “universality of certain symbols.” This universalisation makes simplification and abstraction unavoidable concomitants of poeticising. In its capacity as a “racial property,” poetry ought to achieve more than mere portraiture or story-telling (“more than an autobiographical record”): it ought to prompt readers to “see” with both the mind and the eye, and to “hear” with both the heart and the ear in order to “lead [them] to the point where it is possible to make a rational and moral choice” (Poet’s Tongue ix). As it were, then, poetry operates as a cognitive map, gesturing to the concepts that readers should reflect upon, in response to learning about a particular event, in order to enact cognitive shifts. This is to say that the efficacy of any parable-artform is contingent on its capacity to conceptualise and, thence, abstract. In any case, the very act of historical documentation that parable-artforms practise requires reality to be negotiated through the abstract medium of language and manifested in the abstract form of words, thus making abstraction an inevitable by-product of artistic conception.

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Be that as it may, to say that poetry is exclusively an abstract thing would be a gross generalisation of the processes involved in poeticisation. Poetry must abstract at the same time as it concretises in order to provoke reflection, whilst simultaneously clarifying the nature of the problem it expresses. This is especially so for socially-reformatory poems, including those about war. A case in point, “Here War is Simple” relies on both its geographical and temporal specificity—“where life is evil now: / Nanking. Dachau” (ll. 13-14, emphasis added)—and its keen conceptualisation of war proceedings to advance an argument about the pliability of “ideas,” which can easily engender catastrophic consequences if not managed with discretion. Without the former, the sonnet would most likely have been taken by the critical reader as indulgent, baseless theorising, and without the latter, the sonnet would imaginably be perceived as autotelic storytelling to all but the highly inquisitive, astute reader. More importantly, the fact that only a select group of readers might access the parabolic potential of art would mean that poetry has failed to serve as a “racial property” in being undemocratic. One thing, therefore, stands clear: neither of these alternative approaches can single-handedly elevate poetry beyond its most rudimentary function as an “autobiographical record.” More accurately speaking, then, instead of simply working to counteract the effects of abstraction in artistic conception, the work of the poet entails a coordinated effort to balance the competing forces of abstraction and specification.

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Incidentally, since readers have to reflect and take the initiative to “make a rational and moral choice” in the process of consuming art—given “[p]oetry is not concerned with telling people what to do” (Poet’s Tongue ix)—reading, as it turns out, is far from a passive exercise in observing and receiving. It is—as my attempt to unpack the allegorical framework of “Here War is Simple” should prove—an exercise in responding to textual prompts, interpreting patterns of signification, and synthesising key themes. In a similar vein, a poeticisation of war—the rendering of “autobiographical records” into parabolic objects— an hardly be considered a passive process, given the effort involved in “select[ing], stor[ing], enlarg[ing] upon” to “set value and significance” to a documentation of the real world (“Psychology” 11). Therefore, the poet is an active agent as well. In that way, the ethical risks of poetic production and consumption are mitigated.

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​​As an artist growing up in the 1930s, it is no wonder that Auden had to negotiate with his poetics against an apparently unceasing backdrop of war and chaos, especially considering that Auden had himself participated in several wars in various capacities. Prior to embarking on his commissioned Journey to a War with Christopher Isherwood, Auden served as a volunteer ambulance driver with the socialist Republic of Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Whereas he operated on the side-lines as a documentarian during the Sino-Japanese War, Auden’s participation in the Spanish Civil War saw him plunge straight into the action of battle and bloodshed itself. It is within the context of these disparate experiences of war, and a historical epoch generally shaped by immense social turbulence, that Auden contemplated the ontological functions of poetry in his verses, and that “Here War is Simple” articulates a tension between the ethics of a direct involvement in war and that of a more oblique involvement through art. Accordingly, the reflections in “Here War is Simple” present a reconciliation of Auden’s own conflicting impressions of art, respectively formulated as a consequence of his having acted both as the proverbial military commander and the literal volunteer soldier in war. In that, “Here War is Simple” achieves its function as parable-art “which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love,” not only in its “teach[ing] man to unlearn” the fascism as which the “evil” (radicalised “ideas”) of Nanking and Dachau had been politicised, but also in its “teach[ing] man to unlearn” the misconception that poetry can only exist in a state in which it is “simple as a monument.”