Symbolisation of landscape is one of the major structural patterns in the poetry of W. H. Auden. Aware as he has ever been of the inadequacy of the direct statement for the purposes of poetic art, he has been in search of poetic devices that can fittingly incarnate the ideas about the major situations of the day as well as the universal truths of human psyche and life. Symbolisation of landscape is a method of turning the abstraction into a concrete form and thereby making them take on a new identity. The visual becomes conceptual in the sense that it involves thinking in physical terms of things that are psychic or spiritual…. In [Auden's] poetry, city, like island, mountain, valley, frontier and garden, is an important geographical image which he uses as embodiment of psychic and spiritual states.
Auden uses the city image both in terms of the actual and as symbol of some social, moral or spiritual state…. We notice in his early poetry that the city image is related, on the one hand, to Auden's symbol of the hero—both false and true—who assumes the role of a prospective saviour of the city, and, on the other, to the image of the island which is embodiment of selfish isolation and escape. Thus, this spatial image signifies the normal social and moral life of a community which, by exercise of human will, may either attain its ideal form—the just city, the good place or the city of God—or may degrade into a ruinous order of a moral and spiritual decadence. (p. 86)
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