For the Time Being was published by Random House in September 1944 and contains two long works that represent Auden’s most ambitious intellectual achievements: “The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare’s The Tempest” and the title piece, “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio.” Together they constitute Auden’s definitive statement on the relationship between art and faith — the problem that obsessed him from his return to Christianity in 1940 until his death in 1973.
”The Sea and the Mirror”
“The Sea and the Mirror” is a work unlike anything else in English poetry. Cast as a series of speeches by the characters of The Tempest after the play has ended — Prospero addressing Ariel, each character delivering a verse letter or monologue, and finally Caliban delivering a twenty-page prose meditation in the style of Henry James — it is simultaneously a work of literary criticism, a philosophical dialogue, and a poem about the limits of art.
Caliban’s speech to the audience is perhaps the most extraordinary single passage in Auden’s work — a sustained feat of Jamesian syntax in which the “ugly, inarticulate” slave becomes the most articulate voice in the poem, arguing that art can neither redeem reality nor escape it. The speech enacts its own argument: language at its most elaborate still cannot close the gap between the aesthetic and the real.
”For the Time Being”
The Christmas Oratorio was originally written for Benjamin Britten to set to music (Britten never did). It retells the Nativity through a modernized, psychologically complex lens: Herod’s monologue is a liberal intellectual’s entirely reasonable argument for killing the Christ child; the Wise Men represent three forms of human knowledge (science, philosophy, mysticism) that have each exhausted themselves; the Narrator’s final speech — “Well, so that is that… / The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory” — captures the deflation of returning to ordinary life after transcendent experience.
The oratorio is dedicated to the memory of Auden’s mother, who died in 1941. Its meditation on Incarnation — God entering time, the eternal becoming temporal — is both theological and personal: it is about loss, about continuing, about the “Time Being” that must be redeemed precisely because it is ordinary.
Context
The volume was written between 1942 and 1944, during the darkest years of the war. Auden was living in New York, teaching at various colleges, sharing an apartment with Chester Kallman. His return to Christianity (specifically Anglicanism) had transformed his intellectual concerns: where the 1930s poems were political and psychological, the 1940s works are theological and aesthetic.
Collecting For the Time Being
First edition (Random House, New York, 1944): Blue cloth binding with gold lettering. Dust jacket designed by George Salter in blue and gold.
Identification points:
- “FIRST PRINTING” stated on copyright page
- Random House colophon
- 124 pages (the book is a wartime production, relatively slim given the length of its contents)
Market values: Fine copies in dust jacket bring $400–$800. Wartime paper quality means truly fine copies are uncommon.
Signed copies: Scarce from this period — $1,500–$3,000.
First UK edition (Faber and Faber, London, 1945): Published one year later. Contents identical.
The intellectual ambition of “The Sea and the Mirror” — which some critics rate above any of Auden’s lyrics — gives this volume a special status among Auden collectors who value the long works.