In Praise of Limestone - Themes

Themes

Auden summered on Ischia, an island in the Gulf of Naples, between 1948 and 1957; "In Praise of Limestone" was among the first poems he wrote there. The titular limestone is characteristic of the Mediterranean landscape and is considered an allegory of history in the poem; the properties of this sedimentary rock invoke the sedentary and domestic picture of Mediterranean culture. The calcium in limestone makes it water-soluble and easily eroded, yet limestone builds up over eons, a stratum at a time, out of organic matter, recalling the stratified history of Mediterranean civilization. Interpreting the metaphor of ground in poetry, the critic Rainer Emig writes, "The ground a perfect symbol of cultural, ethnic, and national identity, a significatory confluence of the historical and the mythical, individual and collective."

According to critic Alan W. France, the Mediterranean's religious tradition and culture are contrasted in "Limestone" with the Protestant and rationalistic "Gothic North". He views the poem as an attempt to "rediscover the sacramental quality of nature, a quality still animate in the 'under-developed' regions of the Mediterranean South—in particular Italy below Rome, the Mezzogiorno—but thoroughly extirpated in the Germanic North by Protestant asceticism and modern science." Auden, then, is looking on this landscape from the outside, as a member of the Northern community, yet includes himself as one of the "inconstant ones":

If it form the one landscape that we, the inconstant ones,
Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly
Because it dissolves in water … (ll. 1–3)

Other outsiders, however—the constant and more single-minded (the "best and worst")—do not share his appreciation for the landscape. Rather, they "never stayed here long but sought/ Immoderate soils where the beauty was not so external". The "granite wastes" attracted the ascetic "saints-to-be", the "clays and gravels" tempted the would-be tyrants (who "left, slamming the door", an allusion to Goebbels' taunt that if the Nazis failed, they would "slam the door" with a bang that would shake the universe), and an "older colder voice, the oceanic whisper" beckoned the "really reckless" romantic solitaries who renounce or deny life:

'I am the solitude that asks and promises nothing;
That is how I shall set you free. There is no love;
There are only the various envies, all of them sad.'

The immoderate soils together represent the danger of humans "trying to be little gods on earth", while the limestone landscape promises that life's pleasures need not be incompatible with public responsibility and salvation. After seeming to dismiss the landscape as historically insignificant in these middle sections of the poem, Auden justifies it in theological terms at the end. In a world where "sins can be forgiven" and "bodies rise from the dead", the limestone landscape makes "a further point:/ The blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from/ Having nothing to hide." The poem concludes by envisioning a realm like that of the Kingdom of God in physical, not idealistic terms:

… Dear, I know nothing of
Either, but when I try to imagine a faultless love
Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur
Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.

Auden's literary executor and biographer Edward Mendelson and others interpret the poem as an allegory of the human body, whose characteristics correspond to those of the limestone landscape. The poet recognizes that this landscape, like the body, is not witness to great historical events, but exists at a scale most suitable to humans. "Limestone" questions the valuation of that which exists on a scale different from the body—politics, the fascination with consciousness, and other abstractions. The poem's ending lines, which justify the landscape in theological terms, are also a theological statement of the body's sacred significance. The poem is thus an argument against Platonic and idealistic theologies in which the body is inherently fallen and inferior to the spirit. This interpretation is consistent with Auden's many prose statements about the theological importance of the body.

The Karst topography of Auden's birthplace, Yorkshire, also contains limestone. Some readings of the poem have thus taken Auden to be describing his own homeland. Auden makes a connection between the two locales in a letter written from Italy in 1948 to Elizabeth Mayer: "I hadn't realized how like Italy is to my 'Mutterland,' the Pennines". The maternal theme in the poem—

What could be more like Mother or a fitter background
For her son, the flirtatious male who lounges
Against a rock in the sunlight, never doubting
That for all his faults he is loved; whose works are but
Extensions of his power to charm? … (ll. 11–15)

—is a point of entry into the psychoanalytical interpretation of the poem, in which the limestone landscape is a suitable backdrop for narcissism. The poem's "band of rivals" cavorting about the "steep stone gennels" exists in an aesthetic and spiritual torpor—unable to "conceive a god whose temper-tantrums are moral/ And not to be pacified by a clever line/ Or a good lay…". Lacking inner conflict, these youth will never "separate" or produce a new kind of art. Compared to the trait's earlier literary treatments, "Limestone"'s narcissism "bodes not so much the promise of a powerful aesthetic, but an artistic culture which, while it seduces, is ultimately stultified by the gratification of its own desire".