Mendelson draws a comparison between the ending stanza of "September1" and parts of another of Auden's poem "Lullaby". Mendelson says that the world in "September 1" is "defenseless under the night", as is the sleeping lover in "Lullaby". Here, the "ironic points of light" keep the watch over the world that the speaker of "Lullaby" wishes for - that the lover will be "watched by every human love" (329). Mendelson says that Auden's hope that the lover would be watched over is "implausible", and that the similarity between the concluding stanzas instills doubt in the ending of "September 1" and Auden's faith that people - the Just - will exchange their messages and that, as he is quoted as saying in Early Auden, "the world will be saved through...that historical development that...will compel a change of heart" (329). While "September 1" hopes that the poet will see these changes, but that "one's confidence in his foresight is lessened" by the parallel.
McCall Smith, in What WH Auden Can Do For You, draws a parallel between "Lullaby" and "Sepetember 1" in a different way. He says that in the final stanza of "Lullaby",
"the poet expresses his wishes for his lover in terms that are strikingly beautiful" and that Auden tells us "Love is generous...even sexual love. Eros and agape are two different things, but Venus enables us to feel what he describes as “supernatural sympathy.” She also gives us the power to glimpse universal love and hope— not insights that one might always associate with the ordinary human search for sexual gratification but which are there if we open our eyes to them. The mundane physical acts of eating, sleeping, washing one’s face, making love can all become something through which we affirm the value of what we find about ourselves in the world." (88).
This parallel connects the concept of universal love drawn from Nijinsky's diary to the sweetness of the love expressed in "Lullaby", which begins with the concept of forgivness and imperfection - "my faithless arm", the speaker says, before referring to his lover as "Mortal, guilty, but to me/The entirely beautiful".
Mendelson in "Revision and Power" comments that Auden almost abandoned this poem, like he abandoned "September 1", "because it gave a romanticizing gloss to brief, unfaithful sexual love; but he was persuaded by friends to let the poem remain."
McCall Smith, in What WH Auden Can Do For You, draws a parallel between "Lullaby" and "Sepetember 1" in a different way. He says that in the final stanza of "Lullaby",
"the poet expresses his wishes for his lover in terms that are strikingly beautiful" and that Auden tells us "Love is generous...even sexual love. Eros and agape are two different things, but Venus enables us to feel what he describes as “supernatural sympathy.” She also gives us the power to glimpse universal love and hope— not insights that one might always associate with the ordinary human search for sexual gratification but which are there if we open our eyes to them. The mundane physical acts of eating, sleeping, washing one’s face, making love can all become something through which we affirm the value of what we find about ourselves in the world." (88).
This parallel connects the concept of universal love drawn from Nijinsky's diary to the sweetness of the love expressed in "Lullaby", which begins with the concept of forgivness and imperfection - "my faithless arm", the speaker says, before referring to his lover as "Mortal, guilty, but to me/The entirely beautiful".
Mendelson in "Revision and Power" comments that Auden almost abandoned this poem, like he abandoned "September 1", "because it gave a romanticizing gloss to brief, unfaithful sexual love; but he was persuaded by friends to let the poem remain."