Summary
The poem ends with two images of emptiness and exclusion. First, the speaker recalls a dream about a huge building with a thousand floors, a thousand windows, and a thousand doors. Despite this abundance, the speaker says regretfully. nothing in the building is "ours"—ours meaning the speaker's, the "dear" who the speaker addresses, and perhaps all refugees. Then the speaker recalls standing in the middle of a snowy field with ten thousand soldiers marching around, every one of them searching for the speaker and the "dear" they're addressing.
Analysis
Perhaps the most striking thing about this final section of "Refugee Blues" is the speaker's tone in the final line. They sound almost flattered or at least very surprised, while recounting the fact that thousands of soldiers have devoted themselves to nothing more than finding the speaker and their loved one. Of course, the attention paid to the speaker and other German Jews by Nazis isn't actually flattering—the harm these soldiers wished to do to the speaker is exactly what caused them to become a refugee. Rather, Auden is emphasizing and criticizing the sheer amount of attention given to the speaker by both Nazi soldiers and immigration bureaucrats. Again and again, especially with the phrase "you and me," Auden stresses the fundamental humanity, individuality, and representativeness of the speaker and other refugees. They're simply a group of individuals, he implies, made out to be more dangerous, interesting, and worthy of negative attention than they are by various powerful entities.
The penultimate stanza makes a similar point to the final one: it notes the simple statistical unlikelihood of the speaker becoming singled out. Just as it's odd and unexpected that an army of soldiers would care about the speaker, it's also odd and unexpected that, in a world full of resources, the speaker would be so systematically denied the things they need. Yet this stanza differs from the others because it's not about one of the speaker's real-life experiences. Rather, it's about a dream the speaker has had. This makes it a particularly dark moment in the poem, suggesting that the speaker has internalized social exclusion and discrimination to such a degree that it's now inescapable even in dreams or other imaginative settings. The dream motif also reflects the influence of Sigmund Freud, the inventor of psychoanalysis, who believed that the interpretation of dreams could be a tool for understanding individuals' repressed or unconscious feelings. Freud was important to Auden, who even commemorated him in the poem "In Memory of Sigmund Freud." Through a Freudian lens, dreams should be a territory where emotions that can't manifest during waking hours reign. But this speaker's dreams are really just a slightly exaggerated version of their most mundane everyday experiences, as if these experiences are so exhausting that they actually inhibit the development of unrelated feelings or thoughts, even on a subconscious level.
