The Time Being: W.H. Auden on Joy, Suffering, and the Space After Christmas
This year, more than any other year, my social media feed has been flooded with jokes about the limitless, uncountable, unmeasurable stretch of time between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Like many others, I have a vivid sense of nostalgia for this strange period of time where I float from day to day without a familiar schedule, never quite sure what time it is, and eating far too much chocolate—but before this Christmas, I almost never saw or heard others calling attention to this unique liminal space. It is as if this year for the first time, the entire world collectively rose up and began to name a universal first-world human experience that has until now remained silent.
But humans are always good at reinventing the wheel, and there is no truth expressed by online muses and memes that the poets have not expressed first (and probably better). So as I scrolled and laughed at all these jokes about the foggy-brained days after Christmas, I should have remembered that W.H. Auden tackled this very subject in the conclusion of his masterful Christmas oratorio, “For the Time Being.”
Born in York, Auden grew up in an Anglo-Catholic family, worshipping in a high church Anglican parish. His poetic mind and his love for the musical rhythms of language were both developed through the liturgical services of his church. As he first began writing poetry as a teenager, he also gradually realized that he had lost his faith and was no longer interested in religion. An enthusiastic, outgoing, funny young man in groups and an introspective thinker in private, Auden began publishing his earliest poetry at the age of 23. That same year, he began his short career as a teacher at boys’ schools.
Three years later, at the Downs School, Auden had the experience that would eventually bring him back to the church, an event that he would later call a “Vision of Agape.” As he sat with three of his colleagues from the Downs School, he realized all at once that these friends sitting by him had an infinite, intrinsic value. He found that he loved them not because of anything that they had done, but for their existence—for what they were. He credited this revelation, in large part, for drawing him back to God some years later.
But Auden was a complicated man. He was gay, and maintained several homosexual relationships even after he rejoined the church. He drank too much, despite his strong personal moral sentiments. Writing in 1981, Paul Fussell of the New York Times described him as “a subversive who chose to write in pedantically traditional verse forms, an eccentric opposed to the romantic theory of personality, a man obsessively punctual, sartorially sloppy.”
Although this paradoxical nature is apparent in much of his poetry, it is perhaps most obvious in “For the Time Being,” a long poem that he wrote in 1941 and 1942—only a year or two after his return to the church. The poem consists of a series of dramatic monologues and dialogues that tell the Christmas story from the perspective of its primary players: Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, the Wise Men, and even some unexpected voices such as the Star of the Nativity and King Herod himself. Perhaps more unusual is Auden’s choice to set the Christmas story in contemporary language. Joseph sits in a bar as he agonizes over the question of Mary’s purity. The narrator declares that “these are stirring times for the editors of newspapers.” Herod mulls over idealism, materialism, and the great questions of modern philosophy in his prose monologue.
The action of the poem ends with the flight of the holy family into Egypt, but in the poem’s final fifty lines, the narrator steps back to consider not the immediate consequences of this first Christmas, but rather the strange, even dull aftermath of our Christmas. “Now we must dismantle the tree,” he says, “putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes.” He describes how “the holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt, / and the children got ready for school,” how “there are enough / left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week.” As Auden draws toward his conclusion, he tears us out of the magic of the Christmas story and back into our own real, boring, messy lives: our living rooms, scattered with wrapping paper; our kitchens, full of discarded wrappers and empty bottles; our cars, ready to carry us back to work or school. The rush of Christmas joy is beginning to fade, and reality is sinking in.
After he describes this material vision of our post-Christmas malaise, the narrator contextualizes the reason behind the post-holiday doldrums: “Once again / as in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed / to do more than entertain it as an agreeable / possibility.” This is a striking, unusual proposition. There have been many works of Christmas art—from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which is good, to the entire gamut of Hallmark movies, which are not good—that paint a vision of Christmas as instilling joy which lasts. In the best film adaptation of A Christmas Carol (which is The Muppet Christmas Carol, in case you were wondering), the Ghost of Christmas Past expresses this exact sentiment: “It is the season of the spirit. / The message, if we hear it, / is make it last all year.” Indeed, Scrooge himself promises that he “will honour Christmas in [his] heart, and try to keep it all the year.” The promise is that Christmas is not merely a day, or even a feast of twelve days, but a life-changing event that transforms everything about the way we live the rest of the year.
But there is something untrue about this promise in the here and now, in the everyday drudgery of the post-Christmas slump. In the words of Auden, “once again we have sent Him away, / begging though to remain His disobedient servant.” Auden’s Scrooge does not keep his promise; he does not keep Christmas all the year; he does not entertain the Vision as more than an agreeable possibility. For Auden, there is a more realistic version of the story—that we are not sufficiently moved by the birth of the God-child into the world. He writes that:
The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,
And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now
Be very far off.
In other words, we have a sense that there is suffering still to come. Lent will be here soon, and we will fast and mourn and long for Easter. This sense is, perhaps, even appropriate. Christ is born into an all-too-human world not just to drink and laugh and celebrate, but to weep and suffer and die. We know intuitively that the joy of Christmas is a precursor to the sorrow still to come.
But there is the space in-between, and it is difficult to know what to do during that time. That space—the time between Christmas and Lent, between Christ’s birth and His passion—is the space that Auden is most interested in. He calls it the Time Being, what he considers “the most trying time of all.” When we were innocent children, Auden points out, we were enthralled by the thought of the presents that waited inside the locked door, but we “grew up when [the door] opened.” We can remember that feeling, but we cannot quite recapture it. Auden says that “craving the sensation, but ignoring the cause,” we search everywhere and nowhere for a solution to the empty space left behind in our hearts. What do we find? Auden’s answer is shocking: “The obvious thing for that purpose,” he offers nonchalantly, “would be some great suffering.”
According to Auden, when we search around blindly in the dark for the joy of Christmas as it fades in the days after December 25th, the best solution we can come up with is suffering. Maybe that is why we pledge to eat less and run more in the new year. Maybe that is why we follow up our Christmas feasting with January fasting. There is something uncomfortable about the space after Christmas joy, and perhaps Auden is right—perhaps this discomfort comes from the fact that “once we have met the Son, / we are tempted ever after to pray to the Father: / ‘Lead us into temptation and evil for our sake.’” Christ is born, but that event marks not the end of some journey, but the beginning of a new year, and so we begin to search for the suffering that will cleanse us, purify us, and prepare us for Easter. Christmas morning is over, and “the night of agony” when Christ will kneel in Gethsemane and pray for His cup to be taken from Him is “still to come.” But for right now, “the time is noon.” This is the Time Being, the time in between Christmas morning and the evening of Good Friday.
Although it can be misleading to read a poet’s life into his poetry, you will forgive me for speculating that for Auden, man of contradictions and paradoxes as he was, the Time Being may have had some special significance. After all, this is a man who left the church as a teenager and then returned in the wake of a single mysterious, even supernatural vision of unconditional love. When Auden writes so poignantly about “remembering the stable where for once in our lives / everything became a You and nothing was an It,” about “craving the sensation but ignoring the cause,” I can’t help but wonder whether he is remembering the experience of love that launched his own faith or thinking about the sins that would plague him for his entire life.
But despite his somber perspective on the Time Being, the poem’s conclusion is not devoid of hope. Auden leaves us with a vision of the future beyond the suffering of Christ, beyond even our own suffering, when Easter comes and the Christmas joy returns:
The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,
And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now
Be very far off.
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