Auden, Dunwood, and the Beach Chair

C. Langley Dunwood was not the first poet to sit in a beach chair, and she will almost certainly not be the last. The tradition has, moreover, an unexpectedly distinguished predecessor: W. H. Auden.

This week, as The Seasloth bids a grateful farewell to our summer interns and thank them for their incredible energy, one of our departing team members made a fascinating connection. Following our post featuring Dunwood’s new work, intern Penelope pointed out that both Auden and Dunwood used sitting in a beach chair as a vehicle to explore profound themes.

In her parting essay, “Auden and Dunwood: The Beach Chair and What It Cannot Hold,” Penelope offers a sharp side-by-side commentary. We are proud to publish her analysis below as a farewell gift. Thank you, Penelope, and please keep in touch!

Dunwood’s poem August: The Beach is here, and this is Auden:

Auden and Dunwood: The Beach Chair and What It Cannot Hold

by Penelope Purslane

Dunwood is not the first poet to sit in a beach chair. I am sure many have. W. H. Auden definitely sat in one and, like Dunwood, he wrote a poem about it.

Both poems plant an observer in a beach chair before a natural world that will not cooperate with language. Auden’s poem, published in his 1951 collection Nones, emerges from a mid-century, post-WWII landscape where establishing human ethical responsibility was paramount. Dunwood’s, by contrast, was written in 2026 on Cape Cod with the world in a post-modernist moral morass. One imagines Auden in a classic canvas folding deck chair, while Dunwood’s has the modern luxury of a cup holder.

Auden’s Their Lonely Betters and C. Langley Dunwood’s August: The Beach are both poems about the difference between human beings and the nonhuman world, but they approach that difference from opposite directions. The two poets diverge almost immediately in how much authority and confidence they allow themselves. Auden’s speaker is settled and certain; Dunwood’s is literally on yielding sand, and she is flailing

Auden is witty, controlled, and deliberately argumentative; Dunwood is meditative, sensory, and increasingly uncertain. Both poems arrive at the problem of language, naming, and mortality, but Auden makes language the thing that separates humanity from nature, while Dunwood makes the failure of language and art part of what humans must live with.

Auden begins from the comfortable position of an observer in a beach chair, listening to the garden. The birds and flowers are happily beyond the complications of human language: the robin knows only its “Robin-Anthem,” while the flowers wait to be paired off. Their innocence is enviable. They cannot lie, cannot understand death, and cannot “assume responsibility for time.” Human beings, by contrast, are burdened with consciousness. “Their Lonely Betters” operates like a sixteen-line epigram, collecting this evidence of nature’s ignorance toward a single verdict: “Words are for those with promises to keep.”

That line explicitly echoes Robert Frost’s choice in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” The snowy woods may be lovely, dark, and deep, but Frost travels on because he has “promises to keep.” Auden converts Frost’s personal, unspecified obligation into a claim about the entire basis of ethical humanness. Because we have language, we understand mortality, and mortality is what makes a promise meaningful. The title implies the same: the birds and flowers are “better” in their moral purity, but they are also “lonely,” locked out of the human world of relationships where promises are possible. Innocence comes at the expense of company. Auden’s speaker stays outside this dilemma, diagnosing it from his beach chair with amusement, given form and levity by confident rhymed couplets.

August: The Beach begins with a similarly detached observer, but the relationship with nature is much less secure. Here, a painter tries to impose a human purpose – “You say you are painting the bay” – upon something that continually escapes representation. The bay “will not stay.” Its waves repeatedly destroy and redraw themselves, and the artist’s lines behave similarly: one appears accidentally, while another disappears before its truth can be established. In Dunwood’s 2026 landscape, language and art do not confer mastery over experience; they are imperfect attempts to catch a shifting world.

Where Auden ends on a firm thesis, Dunwood ends on a return without resolution: “the bay’s refusal / to remain a bay— / though it keeps returning / under that name.” The name persists, but the thing named will not hold still long enough to deserve it. Wallace Stevens could be useful here. Dunwood treats this failure of representation not as a defeat, but as a kind of structural honesty. Paint mixed “with sand, / with the dampness on your thumb” is “not the sky’s blue,” yet it is “better / for having failed to be the sky.” Dunwood’s speaker is caught right inside the problem—drifting, stained with cobalt, wrist burning, shoulder aching and experiencing failure firsthand rather than narrating it from a safe distance.

Ultimately, Auden’s poem asks what consciousness obliges us to do, while Dunwood’s asks what it costs to keep trying once you have admitted that the world refuses to sit still. Auden wrote at a time when grand narratives still made sense; Dunwood writes in an era where those narratives have collapsed into postmodern fragments. Her poem remains tentative, allowing the sea to “decline / to clarify,” while Auden stakes his claim firmly in the ground.

Both poets shape ambiguity – Auden toward the pleasure of the closed epigram, and Dunwood toward the pleasure of the open, unresolved image. From their respective beach chairs, they offer different kinds of truth: one moral and confident, the other hesitant and fluid.

Featured image: Marie Krøyer seated in the deckchair in the garden by Mrs Bendsen’s house by Peder Severin Krøyer (1893)