Auden’s love of the Pennines has inspired a new song cycle by Bolivian composer Agustín Fernández. Its librettist, the poet and playwright O’Brien, reveals the origins of Notes from Underground
WH Auden concludes his great poem “In Praise of Limestone” (1948): “when I try to imagine a faultless love / Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur / Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.” This geological attachment had a long history. As a boy, Auden (1907-73) had acquired books about mining and engineering. As well as being absorbed by the technicalities of the subject, he also viewed mining machinery and mining landscapes as having a magical or religious significance, and this sense of things remained with him for the rest of his life. On the wall of his workroom at Fire Island near New York, he displayed a map of Alston Moor in the north Pennines, and he was later to revisit the region. Many poets have a founding myth of place to animate and sustain their writing. Dante in exile had the city of Florence, Wordsworth had the Cumbrian lakes and Seamus Heaney had the bogland of rural County Derry. Auden’s myth was located among the fells and lead-mines.
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