Bruges En Hiver.(Translation) . Poem by Michael Walker

W.H. Auden was in Brussels in 1938, a city where he wrote some significant poems, including this one. Auden gives his impressions of Belgium in four quatrains.
He is wandering around the city on a winter's night, the fountain iced over. He thinks that the city is now different; it has lost its identity. He considers the homeless and the humiliated sympathetically. They alone in the city know where they are, and they are assembled together in the centre of town.
By contrast, he sees 'rich apartments' with a few lighted windows. The line of any conversation in the apartments is 'packed
with meaning like a van'. He implies, to me, that the rich do not communicate very well. He thinks he can see ' the history of man' in his look, and all done from the room of a cheap hotel-fifty francs a night. He hopes 'to warm the heartless city in his arms'.
There are many masterful touches in the short poem. It is winter and physically cold in Brussels, but the city's atmosphere is cold as well. This implies a cold-hearted people. A city that has lost his way. The plight of the homeless and humiliated contrasts with the easy life of the rich in apartments. There are some highly imaginative, ambitious lines like 'A look contains the history of man'. Auden was a supreme stylist.