Who threw his spectre in the lake

Broke off relations in a curse

With the Newtonian universe,

But even as a child would pet

The tigers Voltaire never met

It is sad to think that Auden was reduced to calling Hegel silly and could think of no better way to describe Mozart than "a genius." Sometimes, reading Thank You, Fog, you wonder if Auden isn't parodying himself and his early poetry, from which he grew to feel so remote that he revised many of the most successful passages and even excised some of his most famous poems from new editions. While he once kept light and serious verse considerably apart, in Thank You, Fog he mixes them with such a dead-pan expression that he is rarely very serious or very witty at all.

The poet has become an old-man at the fireside not a tortured and self-torturing ego but a satisfied, even smug, old man who can whisper the sentiments of others because he feels them himself:

No voice is raised in quarrel,

But quietly We converse,

By turns relate tall stories,

At times just sit in silence,

And on fit occasions I

Sing verses sottovoce

Made on behalf of us all.

Auden's personal voice seems to have vanished along with his sense of isolation and individuality. From out point, there is a false easiness to his happiness. What has Auden done that he has the right to be so reconciled? Why do the sixties and seventies seem so much less ominous to him than the twenties and thirties?