Auden’s allusions and my errors

So I’ve done three Auden Critical Editions now, and each time I have experienced much joy in the labor … but also some frustration afterwards when discovering things I missed. It’s not surprising, of course! Auden was staggeringly widely-read and had an exceptionally adhesive mind: almost anything that entered into it was retained and later put to use. The sheer allusiveness is overwhelming. I can’t think of a better example than my recent post on Saturn and Mimas — only by pure accident did I discover the origin of a strange passage in The Age of Anxiety, one that could easily have remained inexplicable forever. And of course I didn’t discover it in time to put it in the book.

There are many ways to be wrong, some of them more excusable than others. I missed another reference in The Age of Anxiety simply because I am not British, which worries me, because there’s nothing I can do about being a non-Brit.

But I’m furious with myself that I missed the reference to Pausanias in “Winds” — the first of the “Bucolics,” the sequence with which The Shield of Achilles begins — that Adam Roberts caught. And I’m annoyed that there’s no way to go back and insert it!

And here’s another one from that same volume, just shared with me by my friend Tim Larsen. The long lyric “Ode to Gaea” concludes with this image: “That tideless bay where children / Play bishop on a golden shore.” As Tim reminded me — I perhaps should say told me, because the story is so vague in my mind that I barely remember the outlines — this is a reference to a famous event in the early life of St. Athanasius:

Once when Bishop Alexander was celebrating the day of Peter Martyr in Alexandria, he was waiting in a place by the sea after the ceremonies were over for his clergy to gather for a banquet.

There he saw from a distance some boys on the seashore playing a game in which, as they often do, they were mimicking a bishop and the things customarily done in church. Now when he had gazed intently for a while at the boys, he saw that they were performing some of the more secret and sacramental things. He was disturbed and immediately ordered the clergy to be called to him and showed them what he was watching from a distance. Then he commanded them to go and get all the boys and bring them to him.

When they arrived, he asked them what game they were playing and what they had done and how. At first they were afraid, as is usual at that age, and refused, but then they disclosed in due order what they had done, admitting that some catechumens had been baptized by them at the hand of Athanasius, who had played the part of bishop in their childish game. Then he carefully inquired of those who were said to have been baptized what they had been asked and what they had answered, and the same of him who had put the questions, and when he saw that everything was according to the manner of our religion, he conferred with a council of clerics and then ruled, so it is reported, that those on whom water had been poured after the questions had been asked and answered correctly need not repeat the baptism, but those things should be completed which are customarily done by priests.

As for Athanasius and those who had played the part of presbyters and ministers in the game, he called together their parents, and having put them under oath, handed them over to be reared for the church.

So Rufinus of Aquileia in his church history. As Fred Sanders explains in this post, drawing on the work of Marcia Colish, this story would in the Middle Ages become the key text for some intense debates about what makes for a valid baptism.

I just wish I had been able to put a note to this effect in my edition. Sigh.