"Nones" cannot forget the knowledge that "wherever / The sun shines, brooks run, books are written, /There will also be this death" (481). "Prime" prepares for "the dying / Which the coming day will ask" (476) "Terce" ironically assures us that "by sundown / We shall have had a Good Friday" (477) while "Sext" struggles to make sense of "this death," "this dying" (478, 480).
In Horae Canonicae Auden follows the liturgical drama of salvation, beginning with the awakening of humanity represented by Adam in "Prime" and concluding with the blessing and thanksgiving of "Lauds." The sequence as a whole is haunted by the crucifixion recalled in the epigraph, "immolatus vicerit," from the hymn "Pange lingua" sung during the solemn procession of the Blessed Sacrament on Good Friday. Each of the Canonical Hours re-enacts an aspect of the Christian conception of salvation history. The sequence of the poems is guided by the Canonical Hours beginning with prime (6:00 a.m.), which prepares us for the coming day, and ending with lauds the next day (3:00 a.m.), a jubilant resurrection prayer which celebrates redemption and the wonders of creation. The setting of Horae Canonicae is Good Friday, the day of the crucifixion in the liturgical year.
Auden horae canonicae free#
Auden's adaptation of the Divine Office dramatizes his Christian understanding of our nature and destiny as free but finite men and women "mocked by unmeaning" and driven to redeem the "Time Being" from insignificance. The liturgy, however, is not enclosed by its own necessity but open to the ultimate freedom manifested in the historical event of the Cross of Good Friday. The cyclic pattern of the liturgical calendar mirrors the limitations of finite creatures bound by necessity.
The pattern of the day's work and activity is affirmed in terms of the events of salvation history.(2) In this affirmation of history as a dimension of God's presence, the Divine Office dramatizes the paradoxical nature of our existence as simultaneously finite and free.
In The Shape of the Liturgy, which Auden read and admired, Dom Gregory Dix shows that the Divine Office developed from a desire to sanctify time by integrating work and worship. The order of specific prayers in the perpetual round of the Hours follows the pattern of our daily activities from sunrise to sunset and integrates the recurring cycle of birth, disintegration, and death which characterizes temporal existence. Horae Canonicae derives its shape and rhythm from the temporal divisions of the Canonical Hours that for centuries have been chanted and spoken both communally and privately. Auden's poetic hermeneutic of the Divine Office which was published as a sequence of seven poems in The Shield of Achilles in 1955.(1) As the official prayer of the Roman Catholic Church, the Office strikes its roots deeply down into the Judeo-Christian tradition of prayer and worship. Auden, "Postscript: The Frivolous & the Earnest" The past is not to be taken seriously (let the dead bury their dead) nor the future (take no thought for the morrow), only the present instant and that, not for its aesthetic emotional content but for its historic decisiveness. AUDEN'S 'VESPERS': A CHRISTIAN REFUTATION OF UTOPIAN DREAMS OF ULTIMATE FULFILLMENT.
AUDEN'S 'VESPERS': A CHRISTIAN REFUTATION OF UTOPIAN DREAMS OF ULTIMATE FULFILLMENT." Retrieved from AUDEN'S 'VESPERS': A CHRISTIAN REFUTATION OF UTOPIAN DREAMS OF ULTIMATE FULFILLMENT." The Free Library.
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