In the following essay I compare and contrast the poem Their Lonely Betters (1950) by W.H. Auden with an extract from Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688). This close-reading task was performed in preparation for the English Literature Admissions Test, and is a response to the 2010 past paper available on their website. This was written in timed conditions so is by no means perfect, but thought it might help someone else who is preparing for the exam to see my take on the two texts. While I am unable to print the texts on here due to copyright reasons, the poem can be found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Poetry/comments/c2uqtk/poem_their_lonely_betters_wh_auden/ and the extract can be found on page 9 of this PDF: https://www.admissionstesting.org/Images/47479-elat-past-paper-2010.pdf
The corrupting nature of language is explored in both ‘Their Lonely Betters’ and ‘Oroonoko’. While Auden depicts the innocence of the ignorance of animals, not burdened with the complications of language, Behn illustrates this same innocence of a people before their colonisation by the “white men” and their language. While the subjects of the texts differ, both address the nobility and peace of worlds untouched by man’s discourse of vice and sin.
Auden creates a sense of the innocence of the non-verbal communication of those animals in the “garden”, and their privilege of having an immunity to the language of man ; the “robin with no Christian name”, only communicating through “The Robin-Anthem”, or the “flowers” whose language is only a “rustling”, do not possess any language to embody feelings of sorrow, anguish or guilt, and so aren’t “capable of lying” or knowing they are “dying”. Auden puts expressive emphasis on these verbs through the syntactical choice of putting them at the end of a line to create a couplet; the poet is highlighting a contrast between the blissful ignorance of nature and man’s capability for vice and - through an awareness of mortality - sorrow. The poetic voice seems to yearn for this soothing unawareness of the modern pastoral idyll of the garden in which man cannot enjoy the luxury of “words [being] withheld” from them, like the “vegetables and birds”.
Behn creates a tone of yearning for the innocence of being exempt from language in the passage too, as the narrative voice immediately establishes himself as an outsider - using the pronoun “they” - admiring their “extreme modest[y]”. Like Auden’s poetic voice, there is a slight tone of envy in the narrative voice; the assertion that these people (natives of America, we could assume from the time period) “represented...an absolute idea of the first state of innocence” establishes this, as it implies that the narrative voice cannot claim to be innocent himself but instead is part of the postlapsarian society, when “Man [knows] how to sin”. Behn’s religious reference here is emphatic of the innocence of those people described, and their ignorance, but crucially their superiority, as they are unaware of any “indecent action or glance” and therefore represent man in his purest form: as connected to “simple Nature” and not the “wishes”, “curiosity”, or “novelty” of those people cut off from the “tranquillity” of the natural world, having to face the impurities of “religion” and “laws”. Auden conveys this superior tranquillity too, as the poetic voice can only hear the “noises” of non-verbal communication, the symbol of this innocence, as an outsider. The poem’s beginning, “As I listened” indicates this passive quality of man to the active beauty of a world uncorrupted by vice through its lack of a tool with which to name it: language. Language is burdensome, something the natural world ought to “leave” to already “Fall[en]” (Behn) mankind.
Thus, while Behn and Auden both convey a superiority of the innocence of an unawareness of language - particularly evident in ‘Oroonoko’ in the image of “courtship”, which would be a familiar image to mankind, but this interaction between lovers lacks the complications of speech as “sighs were all [the lover’s] language” - Behn presents us with an inevitability that the “native justice” of the foreign people will be ruined “when they are taught by their colonisers”. The idea that all is accepted, and not challenged by language - Behn and Auden do not even include any dialogue in the texts, stylistically reinforcing this idea - is therefore established by both writers as the ideal world. They suggest that language inherently corrupts, and encourage us to instead yearn for the bliss of ignorance.
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