Refugee Blues

Refugee Blues ~ W.H Auden


Summary - A poem about the oppression of the Jews in Nazi Germany

Struggles for identity

• National
• Political

'Blues' - suggests a sad song, gives the reader an idea of the type (form?) of poem

National

• 'Once we had a country' - a country is relating to Germany, which the Jews could once consider their home, but Hitler and the Nazi regime has changed everything.
• 'If you've got no passport you're officially dead' - The context of the poem is the Nazi's taken away Jewish Germans passports, so officially they do not have a national identity. The next line however, 'but we are still alive, my dear' shows that just because they do not have an official identity linking them to a country does not mean they no longer exist.

'They weren't German Jews my dear,' shows the reader that in the Nazi's opinion, the Jews were lower than animals in this society, and that there is no place for them in society, leaving the Jews with nothing but their personal identity.

Structure

• 12 stanzas set in lines of three
• First two lines - a statement describing the oppression of the Jews in Nazi Germany ie: 

'Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees,

They had no politicians and sang at their ease;'

• The final line of each stanza ends with a repeated phrase with 'my dear' between:

'They weren't the human race my dear, they weren't the human race'

The short but many stanza's could relate to the fragmented broken lives the Jews are now leading, as they are stripped of their identities.

'my dear' - suggests the poem is a letter to a loved one describing the consequences of the injustice

               - 'he was talking of you and me' on the other hand suggests that the speaker of the poem could be talking to a child or similar (affectionate tone of 'my dear') and the speaker is trying to explain what and why this is happening to them.