In Praise of Limestone

The "granite wastes" attracted the ascetic "saints-to-be", the "clays and gravels" tempted the would-be tyrants (who "left, slamming the door", an allusion to Goebbels' taunt that if the Nazis failed, they would "slam the door" with a bang that would shake the universe), and an "older colder voice, the oceanic whisper" beckoned the "really reckless" romantic solitaries who renounce or deny life: 'I am the solitude that asks and promises nothing; That is how I shall set you free.

'[8] The immoderate soils together represent the danger of humans "trying to be little gods on earth", while the limestone landscape promises that life's pleasures need not be incompatible with public responsibility and salvation.

In a world where "sins can be forgiven" and "bodies rise from the dead", the limestone landscape makes "a further point:/ The blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from/ Having nothing to hide."

The poem concludes by envisioning a realm like that of the Kingdom of God in physical, not idealistic terms: […] Dear, I know nothing of Either, but when I try to imagine a faultless love Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.

[8] Auden's literary executor and biographer Edward Mendelson and others interpret the poem as an allegory of the human body, whose characteristics correspond to those of the limestone landscape.

[4] The maternal theme in the poem— What could be more like Mother or a fitter background For her son, the flirtatious male who lounges Against a rock in the sunlight, never doubting[12] That for all his faults he is loved; whose works are but Extensions of his power to charm?

The poem's "band of rivals" cavorting about the "steep stone gennels" exists in an aesthetic and spiritual torpor—unable to "conceive a god whose temper-tantrums are moral/ And not to be pacified by a clever line/ Or a good lay…".

Compared to the trait's earlier literary treatments, "Limestone"'s narcissism "bodes not so much the promise of a powerful aesthetic, but an artistic culture which, while it seduces, is ultimately stultified by the gratification of its own desire".

[13] The narrator's tone is informal and conversational, attempting to conjure the picture of a dialogue between the reader and the speaker (who is evidently Auden himself, speaking directly in the first person as he does in a large proportion of his work).

Those who, without quite knowing why, felt grateful to it were perhaps responding to its secret, unexplicit defense of a part of themselves that almost everything else written in their century was teaching them to discredit or deny.

"[15] The English poet Stephen Spender (1909–1995) called "In Praise of Limestone" one of the century's greatest poems,[16] describing it as "the perfect fusion between Auden's personality and the power of acute moral observation of a more generalized psychological situation, which is his great gift".