Cake in the rain
February 21 was the centenary of W.H. Auden’s birth. Even if you’ve never read him, there is one poem of his you must be familiar with: Funeral Blues (“Stop all the clocks”) was recited in Four Weddings And A Funeral. I have one Auden seared into my cerebellum: Musee des Beaux Arts (“About suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters”), which I had to read over and over in class.
To mark the Auden centenary, taxi drivers in his birthplace of York have been trained to recite his poems to their passengers. A pop song from the 70s has a weird sort of hommage to Mr. Auden (I don’t know if it was intended). The song Macarthur Park, which we know from the Donna Summer version, contains the line “Someone left the cake out in the rain.” Auden said his face looked “like a wedding cake left out in the rain.”
Songs from the 70s that make food come out of my nose: the aforementioned; the one that starts “One less bell to answer, one less egg to fry…”; and A House Is Not A Home (“A chair is still a chair…but a room is not a house…”), which sounds like it was written by a desperate Philo 11 student.
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