W. H. Auden’s “The Secret Agent,” the Old English “Wulf and Eadwacer,” and Ockham’s Razor

Abstract

Written in 1928, the year W. H. Auden graduated from the University of Oxford at age 21 and considered an example of his juvenilia, "Control of the Passes" or "The Secret Agent" as it was eventually titled has defied interpretation ever since. It has been read, for instance, as an allegory of unconsummated love (Fuller 34); as an allegory of the conscious mind striving to control the unconscious (Callan 51); as a biographical expression of Auden's homosexual encounters and yearnings at that time (e.g., Bozorth); as a reflection of history and the role of the spy and espionage in early 20th-century Europe (Carlson); and as an exercise in translation theory and radical poetics (Remein). All of these readings of the stubbornly perplexing poem have broadened our perspective on it and enriched our understanding of its possible contexts, possible implications, possible contingencies, and possible meaning. Two questions concerning the first impression the poem makes, however, have not yet been fully explored. The first is why does "The Secret Agent" consist of 14 lines, which inevitably calls to mind the sonnet form? Monroe K. Spears maintains that, although the poem is unrhymed, its being divided into two quatrains and a sestet makes its form unmistakably the sonnet (Spears 26). John Fuller concurs and observes simply that the poem "is an unrhymed sonnet" (Fuller 33); others, such as Edward Mendelson, follow suit (Mendelson 35). Michael O'Neill and Gareth Reeves, however, point out that Auden's poem is a pale reflection of a traditional sonnet and that the form he imposes on it "has a familiar air without being quite what it seems" (O'Neill and Reeves 9). They do not elaborate this insight, but a closer exploration of it may help us better comprehend the poem. How does Auden use the sonnet tradition in the poem, and how does he deviate from or validate that tradition? How does the poem's structure function in the context of the sonnet tradition? And what is the relationship of the poem's quatrains to each other or its octave to its sestet? The second question arising from an initial reading of "The Secret Agent" is what does it have to do with the enigmatic Old English poem "Wulf and Eadwacer" beyond its ending with the penultimate line of that poem translated into modern English, the one undisputed fact about Auden's creation? Other scholars have addressed this question before but not in the context of the first question about the sonnet form. As for that initial question, Auden conflates the Petrarchan or Italian and Shakespearean or English sonnet traditions in dividing the poem into two quatrains and a sestet then using the final line much like a practitioner of the English sonnet would use a couplet. The Petrarchan sonnet consists of an octave and a sestet with the volta or turn occurring at the end of line eight or beginning of line nine. Its rhyme scheme is typically ABBA ABBA CDE CDE, with variations possible in the sestet. The English sonnet consists of three quatrains and a couplet with the turn typically occ...

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“…The Exeter Book is most recently dated between 950 and 975: Muir (2000: I, 2 and n. 1);Conner (1993: 76-77). 2 SeeBjork (2020). Noting Thorpe's perplexity, he says: "No other scholar has made convincing sense of it, either.…”