Poem Time: W.H. Auden's "Leap Before You Look"

It’s no secret that W.H. Auden is an important poet to me, both professionally (he stands in some ways at the center of my dissertation work on Kierkegaard and British literature) and personally (he’s a poet I return to again and again and always come away feeling like I’ve gained something). I suppose, then, that his poem “Leap Before You Look” [N.B. forgive the typos on this site; the real words should be clear] should be an especial favorite of mine, since it’s a poem explicitly about the Kierkegaardian concept of “the leap”. Wystan and Søren: two great tastes that taste great together.

Yet… the poem has always left me the teensiest bit cold, despite its embodiment of the wry, singsongy style typical of late Auden, and explores “the leap” in some interesting ways. Something about the poem has always felt distant, though, as if Auden were merely operating at the intellectual level, rather than the deeper level of true poetry. The poem’s meter is a bit [technical poetry term incoming] janky, and not in the fun way that Auden sometimes employs in his comic poems to create a feeling of overfulness; rather this is herky-jerky with little discernible purpose to the spasms. And there’s a vagueness, an abstractness, to the narration of the poem; perhaps it comes from the direct address of the voice to the reader, but the relationship between poet and reader feels underdeveloped. The second and third stanzas especially feel too unformed.

Coming back to the poem after a few years, though, and in the midst of some, shall we say, life fluctuation, when difficult decisions have been made first gradually, then all at once, I find myself appreciating Auden’s lines in a new way. Especially as the poem grinds toward the final two stanzas, there’s some payoff to his quasi-villanelle technique of alternating between the same two rhymes at the end of stanzas. This repetition creates a poetic claustrophobia for the reader, a sense of inescapability that Auden insists on: you will have to leap, no matter your will or disposition. To stay alive, some risk need be taken.

What I especially appreciate this time around is Auden’s creation of an inner space for the reader as you go along. It’s a neat trick to mimic Kierkegaard’s desire to speak to “that single individual,” his reader, and Auden creates this isolation through a gradual but relentless stripping away of the outer world. There’s a public expectation created in the first few stanza, but by stanza four we are moving inward as we examine clothes (those meeting points between the private and public selves), and then we go even more deeply inside: “to rejoice when no one else is there.” We’re digging beyond the mere performance of emotion to those private impulses we feel when alone.

Then, in the last stanza, Auden almost pulls back as he mentions the couple relationship: perhaps romantic love can create a bond strong enough to forestall the need for private choice. But, no: the lover’s bed is sustained by a solitude “ten thousand fathoms deep” - the poem’s other explicit nod to SK, who called the life of faith similar to “living out over 70,000 fathoms”. What Auden suggests, then, is that underneath the chumminess of romantic coupling lies an inner solitude. Not even your most intimate companion can make your choices for you: in the end, you have to leap. Auden believes this firmly (in 1940 at least), and he cannily crafts the effect into the form of the poem itself.