Refugee Blues A short Analysis

 

"Refugee Blues" by W.H. Auden is a poignant poem that reflects on the plight of refugees during the period leading up to World War II. Here's a short analysis:

1. Theme of Displacement: The poem explores the sense of displacement experienced by refugees who have been forced to flee their homes due to persecution or conflict. It vividly captures the feelings of loss, loneliness, and hopelessness that accompany such displacement.

2. Universal Suffering: While the poem is set against the backdrop of the Holocaust and the persecution of Jews, its themes resonate with the experiences of refugees and displaced people throughout history and in contemporary times. Auden's portrayal of the refugees as being "nobody's" and "with nowhere to go" emphasizes their state of marginalization and vulnerability.

3. Alienation and Despair: Through the repetition of the phrase "Nobody" throughout the poem, Auden emphasizes the refugees' sense of isolation and anonymity in their new surroundings. The bleak imagery and somber tone underscore the despair and hopelessness felt by the refugees as they confront the harsh realities of their situation.

4. Social Commentary: "Refugee Blues" can also be seen as a commentary on the failure of society to provide refuge and assistance to those in need. Auden criticizes the indifference and hostility of the world towards refugees, highlighting the moral imperative to extend compassion and support to those who have been displaced by violence and persecution.

5. Musical Influence: The poem's title and structure suggest a musical influence, with "blues" evoking a sense of melancholy and longing. The repetition of certain phrases and the rhythmic flow of the verse contribute to the poem's musicality, enhancing its emotional impact.

Overall, "Refugee Blues" is a powerful exploration of the human experience of displacement and the profound suffering endured by refugees. Through its evocative imagery and poignant language, the poem encourages empathy and reflection on the plight of those who have been forced to flee their homes in search of safety and sanctuary.

WE REFUGEES by Benjamin Zephaniah 

1)Why does he use WE in the title?

I come from a musical place
Where they shoot me for my song
And my brother has been tortured
By my brother in my land.

2)Why does the first stanza begin with I?

3)What’s the meaning of the expression brother’ torturing ‘brother’?

4)In the second stanza he uses ‘dont like, ban, hate’. Why?

I come from a beautiful place
Where they hate my shade of skin
They don't like the way I pray
And they ban free poetry.

5)What does he tell us about his country in stanza 3?

I come from a beautiful place
Where girls cannot go to school
There you are told what to believe
And even young boys must grow beards.

6)What problem does he deal with in stanza four?

I come from a great old forest
I think it is now a field
And the people I once knew
Are not there now.

7)What’s  strange with stanza five?

We can all be refugees
Nobody is safe,
All it takes is a mad leader
Or no rain to bring forth food,
We can all be refugees
We can all be told to go,
We can be hated by someone
For being someone.

8)What’s the meaning of stanza 5?

9)What does stanza 6 focus on?

I come from a beautiful place
Where the valley floods each year
And each year the hurricane tells us
That we must keep moving on.

10)What does he explore in stanza 7?

I come from an ancient place
All my family were born there
And I would like to go there
But I really want to live.

11)What does it seem disgusting in stanza 8?

I come from a sunny, sandy place
Where tourists go to darken skin
And dealers like to sell guns there
I just can't tell you what's the price.

12)Why does he use a passive form in stanza 9?

I am told I have no country now
I am told I am a lie
I am told that modern history books
May forget my name.

13)What’s the meaning of stanza 10?

We can all be refugees
Sometimes it only takes a day,
Sometimes it only takes a handshake
Or a paper that is signed.
We all came from refugees
Nobody simply just appeared,
Nobody's here without a struggle,
And why should we live in fear
Of the weather or the troubles?
We all came here from somewhere. 

• QUESTIONS ABOUT REFUGEE BLUES

• 1.   Why did he choose the two words Refugee and blues in the title?
• 2.   Which popular musical form did Auden adopt for this poem?
• 3.   Why did he choose the blues form for this poem?
• 4.   Focus on the first line of each stanza. Do you notice a device which is common to almost all of them?
• 5.   Point out images that can be defined as poetic and images belonging to everyday life. Which prevail?
• 6.   The poem is built up on a series of contrasting images. What are they? Explain their meaning.
• 7.   Though the speaker is a German Jew complaining about the situation of his people, his words hint at issues having a more general relevance What are those issues?
• 8.   What is meant by the impossibile blossoming of passports?
• 9.   What examples of bureaucratic indifference to their plight are given?
• 10.   Auden is a writer of great wit, a quality that never deserts him when writing about dark subjects, as in the present poem. Note his use of irony to increase pathos. 

A Refugee Blues Screencast

Sheila Hancock - 'Refugee Blues' by W H Auden for Holocaust Memorial Day...

W.H. Auden reads 'The Unknown Citizen'

https://youtu.be/nf1klIiCdwQ

The Unknown Citizen  
was written in 1939, when Europe was in flames.It looked like a totalitarian system could prevail in Europe and take the place of democracy.

The Unknown Citizen is both satirical and disturbing. It was  written by Auden to highlight the role of the individual and the increasingly faceless bureaucracy that can arise in any country, with any type of government.

The unknown citizen is reduced to a mere number, a series of letters; there is no name, no birthplace or mention of loved ones.

From the beginning it is clear that the state is in total control. It has created a complete conformist, an ordinary man having a clean identity.

The state even calls him a saint, not because he was holy or he was particularly religious in his acts.

He was a good role model and he did everything that was expected by the government. He worked hard all his life and never did anyone complain about him. He satisfied his employers.He paid his Union dues.

He was married with five children. He bought a paper every day. His reactions to advertisements were normal in any way.He had all the necessary material goods to a modern man-a radio, a car, a fridge…but he never rebelled against the system, he never broke the rules. He served his country when there was war he never questioned the proper opinions. He had some mates and he liked having a drink with them. He never interfered with his children’s education.

He is a perfect citizen, a perfect conformist. He is the flawless result of a perfect system of propaganda, which takes away the citizen’s real control of his life. He has lost his critical thinking, his freedom of speech, so that an effective social unrest and protest is cut off and made impossible.

He is just a number and his process of dehumanization is complete. He didn’t have any original thoughts in his life, he just did whatever the government wanted, he had no real identity

Auden reminds us about the potential dangers in any system of government, in any bureaucracy anywhere, anytime - the individual can lose their unique identity, become a non-person, without a voice, without a say in how things are run.

At the end we have two rethorical questions, which are two examples of dramatic irony, For the speaker the answer is Yes, but for the reader the answer is No, of course.

No data or statistics about the man could have truthfully determined if his friends really cared about him or if he was really happy and free. He will die unremembered

The poem rhymes, but in a strange way.

Difficult words

 EUGENIST he is a scientist who works to improve society by manipulating the population

TO FUDGE present or deal with something in a vague or inadequate way, especially so as to conceal the truth or mislead(= evade, avoid)ex “The authorities have fudged the issue”

To FUDGE manipulate facts or figures so as to present a desidered picture  “ The company has been fudging figures to make it look as though targets have been met” (= falsify, fake, manipulate).

Four Weddings and a Funeral: W.H. Auden (Subtitled)

FUNERAL BLUES (W.H. AUDEN)

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone.
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling in the sky the message He is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever, I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun.
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

AUDEN

While T. S. Eliot was the key-figure of the Twenties, AUDEN was the key figure of the thirties.

The thirties were a period of political and social UNREST- economic crisis, unemployment, the rise of Nazism and Fascism.

The poetry of the time was mostly COMMITTED.          

When Auden started writing his poems he seemed to be very pessimistic. He realized he was living in a time characterized by terrible events, but he also believed that something could be made to create a better world in the hope that a generation of society would be possible. His poetry may be divided in two periods.

In his early poems he sympathized with the Left-wing movements, considering the poet a public voice, giving voice to the oppressed, the weaker and the persecuted. Poetry was definitely seen as an instrument to spread political messages.

At the time he was the leader of the Oxford group, whose members were also Louis Mc Niece, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis.

He was influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxism.

He mainly dealt with the horrors of his time: dictatorship and the mad quest for world domination, citizenship and national identity, the fall of the masses under their leaders' spell, the terrible effects of the bureaucratic state (reducing people to statistics and figures), the Spanish Civil War, the bleakness and perhaps impossibility of the future, the martyrdom of heroes and the death of poets, the improper use of modern tools.

Later on, after his moving to the USA, in 1939, he moved away from Marxism to return to his childhood religion, Anglicanism.

He started thinking that improvement is connected with the self, not with society. Now he mainly dealt with themes like love, friendship, death, nature, religious beliefs.

Auden used different verse forms and poetic genres-sonnet, lyric, narrative poem, ballad , blues. He also tended to use irony and humour even when considering serious issues of modern life.

Two poems about refugees

https://vimeo.com/150889743

We Refugees by Benjamin Zephaniah 

Benjamin Zephaniah (born 15 April 1958) is a British writer, dub poet and Rastafarian. He was included in The Times list of Britain's top 50 post-war writers in 2008. His poems are often inspired by political causes. They often deal with global issues such as racism, animal cruelty and the need for greater social justice. (Dub poetry is a form of performance poetry of West Indian origin, which evolved out of dub music in Kingston, Jamaica, in the 1970s, as well as in London, England and Toronto, Canada, both, cities which have large populations of Caribbean immigrants. It consists of spoken word over reggae rhythms.)
This is a poem about the various reasons why people are compelled to become refugees.

I come from a musical place
Where they shoot me for my song
And my brother has been tortured
By my brother in my land.

I come from a beautiful place
Where they hate my shade of skin
They don't like the way I pray
And they ban free poetry.

I come from a beautiful place
Where girls cannot go to school
There you are told what to believe
And even young boys must grow beards.

I come from a great old forest
I think it is now a field
And the people I once knew
Are not there now.

We can all be refugees
Nobody is safe,
All it takes is a mad leader
Or no rain to bring forth food,
We can all be refugees
We can all be told to go,
We can be hated by someone
For being someone.

I come from a beautiful place
Where the valley floods each year
And each year the hurricane tells us
That we must keep moving on.

I come from an ancient place
All my family were born there
And I would like to go there
But I really want to live.

I come from a sunny, sandy place
Where tourists go to darken skin
And dealers like to sell guns there
I just can't tell you what's the price.

I am told I have no country now
I am told I am a lie
I am told that modern history books
May forget my name.

We can all be refugees
Sometimes it only takes a day,
Sometimes it only takes a handshake
Or a paper that is signed.
We all came from refugees
Nobody simply just appeared,
Nobody's here without a struggle,
And why should we live in fear
Of the weather or the troubles?
We all came here from somewhere. 

Questions

1. What adjectives are used to refer to the poet's country?
2. What's going on there?
3. Give some examples of discrimination endured by people living in the poet's country?
4. Who 's they in line 2 referred to?
5. What are the reasons that are listed as causes for becoming a refugee?
6. Why do tourists go to his country?
7. "We all came here from somewhere" What does it mean?

Refugee Blues by Auden

Wystan Hugh Auden(21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973) was an English-American poet. Auden's poems deal with politics, morals, love, and religion, and are characterized by a variety in tone, form and content. His main themes are the value of everyman, citizenship, national identity, materialism, communication-gap, alienation, death and especially the horrors in his time- bureaucracy, totalitarianism.

Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's no place for us.

Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you'll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.

In the village churchyard there grows an old yew,
Every spring it blossoms anew:
Old passports can't do that, my dear, old passports can't do that.

The consul banged the table and said,
"If you've got no passport you're officially dead":
But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.

Went to a committee; they offered me a chair;
Asked me politely to return next year:
But where shall we go to-day, my dear, but where shall we go to-day?

Came to a public meeting; the speaker got up and said;
"If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread":
He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me.

Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky;
It was Hitler over Europe, saying, "They must die":
O we were in his mind, my dear, O we were in his mind.

Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin,
Saw a door opened and a cat let in:
But they weren't German Jews, my dear, but they weren't German Jews.

Went down the harbour and stood upon the quay,
Saw the fish swimming as if they were free:
Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.

Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;
They had no politicians and sang at their ease:
They weren't the human race, my dear, they weren't the human race.

Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,
A thousand windows and a thousand doors:
Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.

Stood on a great plain in the falling snow;
Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro:
Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.





refugee blues presentation

comment refugee blues

1. Match each word in A to its meaning in B.

A		B
1. refugee		a. stately homes
2. souls		b. town
3. fair		c. formally
4. village		d. board
5. mansions		e. hovels
6. officially		f. person in exile
7. committee		g. courteously
8. holes		h. people
9. politely		i. come again
10. return		j. good

2. Replace each underlined word or phrase with the correct form of the word from the word bank below. Make any necessary changes.

Passports	Floors	Feet	Great plain
Public	fastened	Wood	marched
Speaker	pin	Politicians
Daily bread	harbour	the Human Race

1. Someone who doesn’t have the relevant travel documents is unable to enter or leave a country.

2. Elected leaders make decisions on behalf of mankind.

3. The apartment building had many storeys.

4. The jacket was secured shut with a brooch.

5. The fish swimming in the bay were only a short distance away from the refugees.

6. There were many trees in the forest.

7. The meeting was open to the community.

8. The spokesman objected to the idea that taking in many refugees would cause a shortage of necessities.

9. The soldiers walked over the large prairie. 

3. Answer the following questions. 

1. Name two places where people are living. 

2. Where are the narrator and his companion unable to go? 

3. What does the old yew do every spring?  

4. According to the consul, when are you officially dead?

5. What was the refugee offered by the committee and what did they ask him? 

6. What is the speaker at the public meeting concerned that the refugees will do if allowed in?

7. What did the refugee mistake for the sound of thunder rumbling in the sky? 

8. Which animal is let in an opened door?

9. What did the narrator see at the harbour?

10. What did the refugee see in the woods?

11. What did the refugee see in his dream? 

12. Who is looking for the refugees? 

13.“Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors, A thousand windows and a thousand doors; Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.”  In your opinion, what does this imagery represent? 

THE JEWISH PERSECUTION

In the 1920’s many Jews felt safe in Germany and considered Germany their home, but there was definitely anti-Semitism in Germany as well as in other countries in Europe and even in the USA.
The Catholic Church continued to consider Jews as responsible for the death of Christ.However, the Nazis used Jews as a convenient scapegoat: they were blamed for all of Germany’s problems. According to the Nazis, there was a Jewish conspiracy to destroy Germany and its culture.In addition, the Nazis believed that the Germans were “racially superior” and they  identified Jews as as an “inferior” race.
Therefore, this enemy of the "German Race"’ needed to be eliminated. The first major action against Jewish-German citizens was the boycott of German shops.On the 1^st April 1933 shops owned by Jews were boycotted. Soon after the boycott, Jewish workers were dismissed and Jewish businesses were confiscated.Gradually all the rights that the Jews had were taken away from them. The measures affected all areas of life.

In 1935 the Nuremberg laws established that Jews could not be citizens. They were not allowed to vote or to marry a German.
 In 1938 Jews could not be doctors and Jewish children were forbidden to go to school.On the night of 9^th November 1938 Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues, were attacked.
A lot of  Jewish people were arrested, beaten or killed. 20,000 Jews were rounded up and put into ghettos.That night was called Kristallnacht ( the Night of Broken Glass) and it was the start of more and more violence against Jews.Soon after almost 30,000 Jewish men were brought to concentration camps.Between 1933 and 1939, many  German-Jewish people emigrated mainly to the United States, Palestine,elsewhere in Europe.
Most foreign countries, including the United States,  Canada, Britain, and France, were unwilling to admit very large numbers of refugees.
The anti-Jewish measures continued and became worse. The start of the Second World War was the  darkest chapter in Jewish history.In 1941 all Jews were forced to wear a yellow star of David.The Nazis occupied 19 European countries during the Second World War. At the so-called Wannsee conference in January 1942, the Nazis decided that the only solution to the "problem with the Jews"’ was  the Final Solution. This meant the murder of every Jewish man, woman and child in Europe.The death camps were created, terrible places where Jews were killed with gassing or shooting.
The Nazis killed more than 6 million Jews between 1933 and 1945. This mass murder of the Jews is known as the Shoah or Holocaust. The main death camps were at Auschwitz and Treblinka.

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