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Refugee Blues

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Submitted By harrysutherland
Words 1437
Pages 6
http://poetry.rapgenius.com/W-h-auden-refugee-blues-annotated#note-2273427
Text Analysis
As the title suggest, this is a poem about political refuges and is in the form of a blues song.
Its subject is the Jews who in 1939 had to flee from Germany to the U.S. and other European country, because of Nazi persecution.
Auden uses the blues tradition, which developed among the black people of the United States and has its origins in slave songs. Though composed under improvisation, the blues has a rigid pattern concerning the use of repetitions and a simple rhyme scheme.
The poem is divided into tercet whose first two lines rhyme while the third present a repetition.
Through the whole song there is a refrain as the author always repeat the words “My dear”.
Almost every stanza starts with a verb and this device helps to convey in the text the idea of improvisation and common speech.
The structure of the text is carried on through the use of contrasting images: the mansions and the holes, expressing the gap between normal rich people and Jews, the Jews' condition, hanging between legal death and biological death, the treatment of the Jews, who can't partecipate anymore to social life.
The language used is common, colloquial, informal, while the tone is sad, resigned and melanchonic.
.The hypotetical speaker, a German Jew, is concerned about Jews' conditions, reguarding in particular homeless people, burocracy, social differences and emargination.
There's an analogy of the Jews with all suffering and persecuted races in history, though here there are no cotton fields or whips, but rather passports, committees and public meetings
Those make the song no less ominous. Death is present throughout and the poem ends with the image of the soldiers looking for the Jews. At the moment when the poem was written, in 1939, this was becoming a common situation in Europe.

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