Refugee Blues Essay Questions

Discuss Auden's decision to use the blues poem form in "Refugee Blues."

Historically, blues poetry has been used to communicate feelings of resignation, despair, and exclusion—the very emotions that the speaker of "Refugee Blues" is experiencing. Blues poetry emerges from various African American art forms, including not only written literature but blues music and oral narrative. By using it to describe the struggles of a Jewish refugee, Auden rhetorically links the hardships of these two disparate groups. Moreover, he subtly suggests that music and orality can serve as a protective force in a variety of situations. In this poem, writing and documentation, especially passports, are modes of creating and preserving inequality. Therefore, an orally-rooted form constitutes a resistance against that inequality. Thus, by using the blues form, Auden not only compares two types of historical oppression, but also implicitly endorses storytelling and oral culture as a tool for survival against these oppressions.

How do the symbolic images of cats and dogs in this poem differ from those of fish and birds?

The speaker of "Refugee Blues" uses animals symbolically to illuminate the indignities of life as a refugee, but while domesticated animals symbolize the dehumanization of refugees, wild animals symbolize the burden of living as a human. Observing a dog and a cat, the speaker points out that the dog has been dressed in a jacket and the cat has been allowed to enter a building: in other words, they are treated with care and even love, in contrast to the speaker, who is ignored and feared. This contrast is rooted in the dehumanization of refugees specifically, as the speaker observes with the phrase "but they weren't German Jews." However, the speaker envies the birds and fish, not because they are valued in human society, but because they are able to swim and sing free from any kind of human intervention. They are not beholden to laws, bureaucracy, or documentation, while the speaker is. In other words, the speaker envies these animals because they live without arbitrary human constructs, as expressed through the phrase "but they weren't human beings." Collectively, these symbols tell us that the speaker wishes to be socially valued, but legally liberated.