“A Bride in the 30’s” (1935, also known by its original opening line, “Easily, my dear, you move, easily your head”) is a poem by W. H. Auden, in loose terms a love-poem but more broadly concerned with the troublingly indiscriminate nature of erotic attachment, or its blindness to moral and political responsibilities. In that respect it takes up the theme of love’s insufficiency found in some other Auden poems of this period, the distinctive element of this poem being that political references to the accelerating European crisis are more direct. It brings the old adage “Love is blind” fully up-to-date, as its title promises, for the politically-aware reader of the mid-Thirties. The title’s “Bride” gives the poem an ostensibly heterosexual occasion and addressee, this…
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Citation: Baldick, Chris. "A Bride in the 30's". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 January 2017 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=35856, accessed 23 November 2024.]
