"We Must Love One Another or Die"

In between moments of feverishly checking the news last week, I came across a quote that stunned me in a book I was reading.

It’s from the poet W. H. Auden:

“We must love another or we die.”

In what poem did these words find their home?

“September 1, 1939.” Written just after the Nazi invasion of Poland that started World War II, it’s a long and magnificent poem about the horrors of war and the forces that lead us into it.

The final stanza offers a breathlessly hopeful gasp of air:

“Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.”

I can’t help but think that we find ourselves in a new context of violence that calls for its brutal honesty, its flickering glimmer of bright hope.

But it turns out that that’s not at all what Auden would have wanted. In the years after he wrote the poem, he began to disavow it, to cut away at its hopeful parts. He declined to include it in collections, and he wrote to the critic Laurence Lerner, “Between you and me, I loathe that poem.”

On the one occasion in which Auden allowed it to be reprinted, along with four other early poems, he insisted it be accompanied by the following note: "Mr. W. H. Auden considers these five poems to be trash which he is ashamed to have written." (Apparently there has been an entire book written about this poem and its afterlife, and you had better believe I’ll be reading it as soon I finish editing my book.)

What drove Auden’s antipathy? He found the poem dishonest. That line I loved so much and found so fitting for this moment, “We must love another or die,” Auden called “a damned lie.” He thought his poem was too prescriptive, and too flattering to those who considered themselves among “the Just.” A poem wasn’t going to stop a war.

Mr. Auden, dear Wystan Hugh, I confess that I understand your feelings. Who could have foreseen, in 1939, the scope of the horrors the war would set into motion?

As I’ve read the news this week (this year, this decade), watching violence endlessly spiral in word and in deed, I have wondered too: what good is hope?

But there is another quote I keep returning to in the wake of last week’s news.

“We have never preached violence, except the violence of love, which left Christ nailed to a cross, the violence that we must each do to ourselves to overcome our selfishness and such cruel inequalities among us. The violence we preach is not the violence of the sword, the violence of hatred. It is the violence of love, of brotherhood, the violence that wills to beat weapons into sickles for work.”

St. Óscar Romero spoke these words nearly fifty years ago into a country marred by brutal and senselessly cruel violence. Threatened, smeared in the press, and criticized by his own Church, Romero still dared to insist that another way was possible. A way of hope, and above all, a way of love.

I’ve thought a lot in these intervening days about what love is, and what it is not.

Love is not assassinations.
But love is also not racism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia.
Love never builds its nest amidst dehumanization.
Love is not war, not genocide, not bombs.
Love does not accept children being killed in schools as an unfortunate necessity.
Love does not drag Christianity into a blacksmith’s fire and forge it into a weapon.
Love never, ever, ever issues from the end of a gun.

These lists are not at all exhaustive. But they are a start. Still, like Auden, I’ve wondered many times: what the point is in saying things like this, things that seem so blatantly obvious? But Romero kept on saying them. He knew that his people needed to hear them. We need to hear them still.

Romero understood that it is vitally important to tell the truth about what love is and what it is not. If we’re ever to build a world on the foundation of love, we must first understand what love is and what it requires of us.

We need a love that draws us to empty ourselves out at night and examine closely what we find. A love that scans and searches for the slightest inclination toward violence and hatred within us, and excises it. Gently, but with a firm hand and decisive strokes.

This is a love, this is a hope, that I believe in.

“We must love another or we die.”

Mr. Auden, dear Wystan Hugh, I confess that I do not believe that this line is a damned lie. It is maybe the truest statement I have ever heard.

Perhaps a poem can’t stop a war. But it can be a warm meal to we who endure a war. It can save our lives, not in a literal sense, but in a spiritual one.

Auden is correct that we shouldn’t flatter ourselves as “the Just,” but neither should we give up hope for a better world, one forged not by violence but by love. Addressing the devastating tangle of politics and human failings that led to the outbreak of war, the speaker of Auden’s poem states,

“All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie.”

You have a voice, too. Beleaguered as you may be, by negation and despair, let it ring out with love. And if any note of violence creeps into your speech, let it always and only be the violence of love, the love that gazes clear-eyed into the destruction we humans have wrought and whispers, yet, “There is another way.”