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1st September 1939
Context
• Title refers to the outbreak of the second world war
• The jazz strip on 52nd street had a reputation for being rowdy and
promiscuous, with several gay bars
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Joseph Brodsky has suggested it should be read as meaning “We
must love one another or kill”
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Demonstrates historical discrimination against Jews which feeds the sense
of history being a cycle
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Freudian
psychology, suggesting that Hitler's motivations arose from his childhood
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Exiled due to military
failure, and wrote book suggesting that democracy as it was did not serve
the interest of the people, but the rulers
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Following a split
from him, Nijinsky became mentally ill (diagnosed with schizophrenia)
and spent the next 30 years in an asylum
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• Diaghilev – Russian art critic, known to be particularly demanding
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Voice
• 1st person voice – Personal response
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Opinions are not forceful, presented as a
suggestion, a personal belief (again, “All I have is a voice”)
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• Ideology – Opposition to capitalism, advocating a loving approach, which
is simultaneously presented as unrealistic
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Encourages idea that this is a personal
response
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Contrasts with other personal suggestions
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Theme of repetition and fate
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• Begins by largely focusing on the past, then moves to the present
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• Final two stanzas return to present, to himself
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• Rough transition of narrative of negative to positive
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g
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Continuously changing tone, abundance of
contrast and echoes
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Form
• Regular form and structure
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• Regularity should suggest organisation, but the poem is anything but, and
borders on the chaotic
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Theme of Time
• Humanity throughout eras and constant allusion to cycles
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Without sense of progression/change
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g
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“Those
to whom evil is done/ Do evil in return”
Setting
• New York, “dives”, seediness, but also hidden and tucked away
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Simultaneously a social
place, full of sulture
• Jazz centre, less conservative and therefore suggests that the poem is
more open, he is more free to express himself here than elsewhere
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Language analysis
• “Neutral air” - coolness of autumn, a liminal season between summer and
winter and reference to September
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Could
also imply the neutrality of nature and earth, placing polarised human
affairs into perspective
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Neutrality and absoluteness
of death
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• “Clever hopes expire/Of a low dishonest decade” Revolutionary ideals
(communism, rights, freedom and radical thought) placed in contrast with
terrible events (Spanish civil war, fascism, Mussolini, Nazis, depression
in America)
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What are the author's intentions?
Do they matter?
Is it appropriate to apply a poem written in 1939 to later events?



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