Auden, “Law, say the gardeners, is the sun”

This poem by WH Auden presents many of the con­cep­tions of law we en­coun­tered in our Jurisprudence course.

You can read the full poem here.That site, like many others, gives it the title, “Law, Like Love,” but it was published without a title and anthologized by its first line “Law, say the gardeners, is the sun.” Nasser Hussain, “Auden’s Law Like Love” (2019) Law, Culture and the Humanities.

It opens with ref­er­ences to law and obe­di­ence that are based in pre­dic­tion and per­haps nat­ur­al law.

Law, say the gar­den­ers, is the sun,
Law is the one
All gar­den­ers obey
To-mor­row, yes­ter­day, to-day.

The idea of law as pre­dic­tion is also found in the writ­ings of Kelsen and Holmes Jr.

The next stan­za presents a ten­sion be­tween tra­di­tion—couched in wis­dom—and sen­si­tiv­i­ty to new cir­cum­stances.

Law is the wis­dom of the old,
The im­po­tent grand­fa­thers fee­bly scold;
The grand­chil­dren put out a tre­ble tongue,
Law is the sens­es of the young.

This re­minds me of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr’s drag­on of tra­di­tion that we must de­cide to ei­ther “kill” or “tame” and make a “use­ful an­i­mal.”

Auden then presents HLA Hart’s sep­a­ra­tion of law and morals (Yet law-abid­ing schol­ars write: / Law is nei­ther wrong nor right) and no­tions of no­tice and prospec­tiv­i­ty (Law is as I’ve told you be­fore, Law is as you know I sup­pose).

Of the works we read in Jurisprudence, Robert Cover’s "Nomos and Narrative”Robert M Cover, “Forward: Nomos and Narrative” (1983–1984) 97:4 Harv L Rev 4. brought the most significant ad­di­tions to my per­spec­tives on law. Cover re­places the no­tion of a sin­gle “le­gal sys­tem” with a plu­ral­i­ty of “nor­ma­tive uni­vers­es” re­quir­ing “no state,” with le­gal mean­ing cre­at­ed in each through “com­mit­ment.” I couldn’t tell how lit­er­al­ly Cover was equat­ing this com­mit­ment with po­ten­tial vi­o­lence, but he wrote:

The state’s claims over le­gal mean­ing are, at bot­tom, so close­ly tied to the state’s im­per­fect mo­nop­oly over the do­main of vi­o­lence that the claim of a com­mu­ni­ty to an au­tonomous mean­ing must be linked to the com­mu­ni­ty’s will­ing­ness to live out its mean­ing in defiance.

Under this view, state law only has a priv­i­leged po­si­tion be­cause of the state’s “im­per­fect mo­nop­oly over vi­o­lence.”

I find this theme in the fol­low­ing stan­zas.

Others say, Law is our Fate;
Others say, Law is our State;
Others say, oth­ers say
Law is no more,
Law has gone away.

And al­ways the loud an­gry crowd,
Very an­gry and very loud,
Law is We,
And al­ways the soft id­iot soft­ly Me.

The “soft id­iot” could be one who de­clares some­thing to be law with­out the real com­mit­ment ei­ther per­son­al­ly or from a com­mu­ni­ty to “live out its mean­ing.”

There’s a lot more in this poem, and oth­er meanin­ings you might have tak­en from it. Please share your thoughts!