WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The Poetry Fix: "On This Island"

Episode Date: April 23, 2024

In this episode of "The Poetry Fix," we pause from the rush of life and experience W. H. Auden's "On This Island."

Welcome to the Poetry Fix on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm your host, Erica Kaiba, bringing you your weekly fix of poetry from across time. Today we're reading On This Island by W.H. Auden. This is a poem about the arresting power of beauty. The narrator begins by addressing a stranger, that's us, the reader, and inviting him or her to look at an island. The beauty of the island makes the viewer pause and contemplate, still and silent. As you observe the island, Auden writes, the swaying sound of the sea wanders like a river through the channels of the ear.

In a way, you are receiving the sea and the island just by contemplating them. Just as the ocean flows out into rivers, the melody of the ocean flows into the mind through the ear. Later on in the poem, Odin describes ships floating on the ocean, which enter and move in memory as clouds do. We form an intimate connection with the things we perceive in the world, even the things we perceive distantly. We receive them into ourselves. Auden invites the stranger to pause at the end of a small field,

where a chalk wall falls to the seafoam. We get the image that the stranger was in motion and had some place to go, but that the image of the island arrested them in their steps. Now the stranger is in a kind of liminal space, right in front of a barrier that separates them from the objects they are perceiving. This barrier, a chalk wall, is very unstable. Shingles are falling off of it to the foam. Its side is described as sheer. There is very, very little between the stranger and the sights they are perceiving.

This is part of what allows the stranger to perceive these sites so completely. The stranger is also able to see ships sailing on urgent, voluntary errands. W.H. Auden uses a similar image in a different poem called Mouet de Bozach. In that poem, the ships are moving in such haste that they sail right by Icarus who has fallen from the sky. They see him, but they do not linger on the sight. There is no compassion, no wonder. In on this island, we get precisely the opposite image. The stranger doesn't just keep moving on to the next order of business when he sees something extraordinary. He pauses. What Auden calls the full view is able to enter into the stranger

because he or she stopped to perceive the world around them. And the beauty of it all is, we are the stranger that he is addressing. We may not have seen the literal island or the ships that Auden is relating to us, but we have heard the poem. We have had an aesthetic experience and encountered these sites through our imagination, and as a result, we are changed. With all that said, let's dive in. On this island by W.H. Auden.

Look, stranger, at this island now, the leaping light for your delight discovers. Stand stable here, and silent be, that through the channels of the ear may wander like a river, the swaying sound of the sea. Here at the small fields ending pause, where the chalk wall falls, where the chalk wall falls, to the foam, and its tall ledges oppose the pluck and knock of the tide, and the shingle scrambles after the sucking surf, and the gull lodges a moment on its sheer side. Far off like floating seeds, the ships diverge on urgent voluntary errands, and the full view indeed may enter and move in memory as now these clouds do that pass the harbor mirror, and all the summer through the water saunter.

You've been listening to The Poetry Fix with Erica Kaiba. Join me next week and we'll be reading Bavarian Gensions by D.H. Lawrence.