Adam Roberts’s recent post on images of Saturn gave me a flashback — a sudden return to a moment fifteen years ago when I was working on a critical edition of Auden’s long poem The Age of Anxiety. One passage especially puzzled me:
For athwart our thinking the threat looms,
Huge and awful as the hump of Saturn
Over modest Mimas.
Well, take a look at this painting by Chelsey Bonestell, titled “Saturn as Seen from Mimas”:
I think I have found my solution. Bonestell’s painting appeared in the May 29, 1944 issue of Life magazine; Auden began writing The Age of Anxiety a month or so later. Surely Bonestell’s painting remained fixed in his mind. I can’t imagine what else could account for so strange a passage.
