Wystan Hugh, Auden - Refugee Blues, analysis

Refugee Blues (1939), Wystan Hugh Auden

The poem Refugee Blues evokes the period leading up to the Second World War when thousands of refugees fled to neutral countries such as the US and Switzerland. Many of them were Jews who were suffering persecution. In particular, many fled after the Kristallnacht, or “the Night of Broken Glass”, in which a coordinated action caused the destruction of Jewish businesses and homes, and in which 400 Jews were killed and more than 30000 taken to concentration camps. In the poem, a Jewish couple have arrived in the US in search of asylum but meet with prejudice and discrimination. They see how they are treated as less than animals and denied basic human rights, such as the right to a passport and free movement, clothing, accommodation, the right to work. The poem is populated with a number of frightening protagonists who range from the indifferent consul and committee members, the obsessed and determined Hitler and his terrifying armed soldiers. The poem is written in the form of a blues song – it is in 3-line stanzas with 4 beats to each line; it takes a single, said main theme and makes variations on it, and leads to a powerful finale.

Detailed summary

1st stanza. The poem starts with a narrator, who is later revealed to be a German Jew, describing a large city which is home to ten million people some of whom reside in luxurious large houses while others live in shabby houses. Yet, the narrator tells the person with him, presumably a woman, that there is no place for them there.

2nd stanza. He remembers that they once had a country long ago, speaking of Palestine, and they thought the world of it. But now their own country is so distant to them that to see it they have to browse through an atlas and he knows that they can’t go there either.

3rd stanza- 4th stanza. The narrator then remarks on how every spring the flowers grow anew on the old tree that grows in the village churchyard and mourns to his companion that old passports can’t renew themselves, remembering how the country where they wanted to go had rejected them saying that they were as good as dead if they didn’t have updated passports.

5th stanza. He remembers how when he had gone to the people who provided the war refugees homes: they had been polite to him, yet hadn’t been able to help him and had told him to return next year.

6th stanza. Recalling a public meeting that he had attended, he remembers that a person had accused them of trying to steal away the livelihood of the occupants of the city by barging in.

7th stanza. He thinks that he heard the rumbling (=rimbombo) of an imminent storm, but it turned out to be Hitler sentencing (=condannando) them all to death.

8th stanza. He sees a dog securely wrapped in a warm jacket, and a cat get inside a car and thinks that those animals are lucky not to be German Jews.

9th stanza – 10th stanza. He notices the fish swimming freely in the water at the harbour and the birds flying wherever they want in the sky when he goes to the woods and envies them for their sense of freedom.

11th stanza. He then tells his companion that he had had a dream in which he saw a magnificent building which could accommodate a thousand people. Yet, there was no place for them in it anywhere.

12th stanza. He remembers how when he stood on the plains and looked through the falling snow, he could see a thousand soldiers marching towards them, looking for them, to put them away, to kill them.