Summary
These first stanzas frame the plight of the speaker in the broadest terms, setting the stage for the rest of the poem. In the first stanza, the speaker explains that they are in a city with ten million people. They have different and unequal situations—some of those ten million live in mansions and some are homeless or live in makeshift housing. Either way, the city doesn't seem to have space for "us." We can assume that the "us" means the speaker and their family or friends, but also applies more broadly, to refugees as a whole. The speaker recalls that things haven't always been like this. They used to live in a different country, which felt like home and which they considered beautiful. The country isn't technically gone—it still shows up in the atlas. Yet it's no longer open to the speaker. The speaker then remembers a tree, growing in a village cemetery. Every spring it comes back to life and blooms. But this kind of rebirth won't help the speaker now, because, unlike that tree, the refugees' passports can't bloom again or become useful.
Analysis
One of the most immediately striking things about this poem is its form. In these first three stanzas, we can see a pattern emerge: every stanza is three lines (a three-line stanza is called a tercet). The first two lines rhyme, and they also form a kind of single phrase. They're usually separated by a comma, and the second line restates, emphasizes, or elaborates upon a point made in the first. The second line ends with a colon or a semicolon, and the third line, which doesn't rhyme with the first two, also contradicts them or expresses a counterpoint. We can take the first stanza as an example. The first line of the stanza tells us how many people are in the speaker's city, and the second line elaborates upon that point by telling us about the range and diversity within that population. These two lines end with the syllables "souls" and "holes," which rhyme. The third line starts with the word "yet," letting us know that it will somehow contradict the first two, and it tells us something we wouldn't expect based on those first two lines: that in spite of the city's size and diversity, it's somehow unable to fit the speaker and the other refugees. It ends with the syllable "us," which doesn't rhyme with the previous two, emphasizing the divergent meaning of this final line (the fact that the line's final word is "us" only stresses the fact that the refugees don't fit in with their new surroundings—just like the final line of the stanza doesn't fit in with the first two). "Refugee Blues," as the title hints, is a blues poem. Blues poetry, like blues music, comes from the African American oral and literary tradition. Usually, blues poems consist of a series of tercets, in which the first two lines are similar or repeating while the third is dissimilar. The form is often used to express lament, sadness, or despair. It makes sense why Auden picked this form to talk about the plight of refugees in 1930s Europe.
This brings us to the question of who exactly our speaker is. We know it's a refugee, but this is a broad category, not an individual character. There's a fascinating tension in this poem between the specific and the generic, and our speaker is a great example of that. We encounter the first-person plural "we" more often in this poem than the singular "I," and much of the time Auden seems to be aiming for the most general, broadly applicable descriptive language that he possibly can. For instance, he avoids naming specific locations, opting instead for the terms "this city," and "a country." Even the specificity of the number "ten million" is flattened, and not merely because Auden has picked a round number. The speaker merely says "Say this city has ten million souls," framing the number as a hypothetical. In this way, Auden keeps the poem from being about one individual refugee or even one individual family. It becomes about a "we," all of the refugees looking for a home. Moreover, this tendency to describe things in a general rather than a specific way is reminiscent of fairytales and oral storytelling (think about how fairytales tend to begin with phrases like "In a faraway kingdom long ago," rather than, say, "In Moscow in 1810"). This is a reflection of the blues poem's roots in the oral storytelling and song tradition. It also has the effect of universalizing the refugee experience. Auden is talking about Jews in the twentieth century—a stigmatized group whom his readers might hesitate to sympathize or identify with. But by divorcing his Jewish speaker from the specifics of nationality, ethnicity, and even historical era, making his speaker more like a fairytale protagonist, Auden removes some of those barriers to audience sympathy.
At the same time, these first few stanzas have moments of heartbreaking specificity. One of these is the phrase "my dear," which lets us know that the speaker is addressing a loved one—maybe a child or someone else who doesn't fully understand what's happening to them. The speaker, it seems, is trying to soothe someone, explaining upsetting facts not in order to urge them to act or become angry but instead so that they can become realistically resigned to the inevitable. In this sense, too, the blues form feels very suitable. Though the form doesn't follow a specific meter, or rhythmic pattern, it does tend to have a singsong, lulling rhythm. So here, even while describing a deplorable and unjust situation, the speaker's words come in a soothing, lullaby-like cadence. Much of the poem's emotional power comes from its speaker's evident feelings of resignation.
