Summary
The speaker now begins to compare the exclusion of refugees to the generosity afforded others. Each of these three similar tercets starts with a two-line description of a safe or happy animal, followed by a one-line description explaining how these animals differ from the displaced, alienated person observing them. The first comparison is a poodle, dressed up by caring humans in a jacket. The speaker then mentions seeing a cat, welcomed through a building's doorway. Yet these creatures, the speaker carefully reminds their listener, weren't Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. The speaker then remembers going to the harbor, looking into the water, and seeing fish swim as freely as they wished, in contrast to the tightly controlled human watching from just ten feet away. Similarly, the speaker went to the woods and watched birds living freely and singing—yet the birds were able to do so, unlike refugees, because they were animals in nature and not people.
Analysis
There are four types of animals brought up in these three stanzas—the cat and dog in the eighth stanza, the fish in the ninth, and the birds in the tenth. Though at first glance these comparisons all seem similar, they can really be divided into two related but subtly different pairs, each providing a different symbolic lens on the status of refugees. Simply put, the dog and the cat are tools for discussing the dehumanization of the refugees, while the birds and the fish are tools for critiquing the man-made structures that create displacement in the first place. One way to think about it is that these first two creatures symbolize the speaker's longing for safety and containment, but the second two symbolize the speaker's longing for freedom and independence. Though these conditions are opposites, they're nonetheless both denied to the speaker (and to the refugees described in the poem as a whole), who is instead simultaneously constrained and exposed.
Both dogs and cats, the first two animals to have symbolic roles in this poem, are domesticated pets. Both of these animals are clearly loved and cared for, clothed by humans and allowed into their homes. The speaker clearly envies this—after all, the speaker has been systematically shut out of both their native and adopted homes—not to mention, the poem implies, deprived of material necessities and comforts. The inhabitants of the refugee's adopted city seem to see dogs' and cats' needs as more important than those of certain humans, largely because those humans have been dehumanized through policy and propaganda. Though additional context isn't necessary for understanding this stanza, it does deepen the stanza's resonance. Nazi officials often compared Jews to animals such as rats in order to demonize them. Therefore, the fact that dogs and cats are treated more kindly than humans in this context brings to mind a history of exclusion and dehumanization, adding insult to injury for the speaker. Though Auden isn't entirely explicit about this broader history of dehumanization, he does actually use the phrase "German Jews" in this stanza. In doing so, he makes it impossible for readers to separate the themes in the poem from the political conflict playing out in the outside world.
Not only does Auden use the phrase "German Jews," but he does so at the end of the eighth stanza. In a poem, the words at the end of a line are the ones that readers tend to pay the most attention to—they're followed by nothing but space, which means we readers get to spend more time dwelling on them than we would if they were immediately followed by new words. The words at the end of a stanza, rather than just a line, get even more attention. Auden forces readers to pay attention to the emergency faced by Europe's Jews in this period by naming it in the most explicit way possible, in the position where readers will pay the most attention to it. Meanwhile, he buries the phrase "my dear" in the middle of the line, both here and elsewhere. Readers, therefore, don't get to dwell on this comforting phrase—they're forced to move right on ahead to upsetting information. This, of course, echoes the situation of the speaker, who is forced to bracket affectionate words in alarming truths.
If the dog and cat of the poem's eighth stanza symbolize the comforts of domestic safety, the fish and birds of the next two stanzas symbolize a natural state of freedom unimpeded by bureaucracy, borders, or other arbitrary human constructs. Thus, while the eighth stanza discusses the unofficial social exclusion that causes people to treat pets with more humanity than people, the ninth and tenth focus on governmental and political modes of exclusion. For instance, of the birds, the speaker says that they "had no politicians." In fact, this hearkens back to the poem's third stanza, which notes that passports, unlike trees, don't bloom anew in the spring. With these symbols and metaphors Auden stresses the irrationality of human bureaucracy and its strangeness when compared to nature as a whole. Therefore stanza eight ends with the lament, "they weren't German Jews," emphasizing the particularly cruel treatment of this group, but stanza ten ends with the phrase "they weren't human beings," emphasizing the burdens faced by and created by humans in general.
