W.H. Auden wrote often of the role and power of the arts or, more properly, of their limits. In works such as “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” “Musée des Beaux Arts,” and The Sea and the Mirror, Auden considered the place of art in human life and attempted to describe both what it could and could not do, what it would or would not represent, what it might or might not change. One thing he insisted dramatic art in particular could not do was show forgiveness. This argument emerged both in his unpublished correspondence and in his published essays. Auden was a great admirer of Hannah Arendt in general and of The Human Condition in particular, for example, but he disagreed with her characterization of forgiveness as an act of retaliatory restraint, taken in the public square, which could occasion a new beginning. This was mostly because Auden—like so many others—believed forgiveness to be largely an event of inward affective transformation. For Auden, forgiveness was a practice of charity, but charity was more an interior state than it was an outward act. He argued this directly in personal correspondence with Arendt and expanded upon this argument in his essay “The Prince’s Dog,” contending that dramatic forgiveness—in Shakespeare’s late comedies specifically—could not strictly be performed on the stage since forgiveness was a feeling, and it was impossible dramatically to represent a change of feeling. Forgiveness, because essentially interior, could not “be unambiguously made into a dramatic act.”

Pardon, Auden claimed, was the official and regulatory corollary of punishment; forgiveness, meanwhile, was the interior and affective opposite of spitefulness. This was why forgiveness had no place in Arendt’s public, since action must be public and forgiveness was necessarily private. On Auden’s terms, only official pardon—not forgiveness—could really qualify as an action. Forgiveness, though unconditional for Auden in its pure and charitable form, therefore could arrive at dramatic representation only by implication, in the repentance and apology of those forgiven. Since the affective experience of overcoming vengeance could publicly manifest itself only as restraint exercised against retribution—as doing nothing, in other words—it had no dramatic form unless requested and granted in the words of the play and its players.

One result of Auden’s argument was that it severely limited the genius of Arendt’s Jesus, whose teaching on forgiveness could be relevant only in personal, rather than in political, matters. And since Arendt was suspicious of love as a political action precisely because she (like Auden) regarded it primarily as an inward affective state rather than an outward relation to others, she granted Auden’s point to a significant degree and abandoned her language of forgiveness. I think this was a mistake for both Auden and Arendt, a mischaracterization of Jesus’s teachings on forgiveness that was hampered in the end by an inadequate notion of love. But there are hints in Auden’s essay and elsewhere in his poetic work that the grace of retributive restraint has more moral and dramatic significance than he allows in his anxiety to preserve the interiority of charity. Though he will not call it forgiveness (as I do), there is a discernible grace accompanying nonretaliation that remains uniquely available to poetic depiction. And whatever Auden’s concerns about dramatic representation, this really was Arendt’s point in her description of Jesus’s forgiving genius: it is when retaliation is already predetermined that restraint—doing nothing—gains moral significance. Indeed, when violent reprisal is assumed, the refusal of retaliation can be quite dramatic indeed. Forswearing vengeance appears as an action in human affairs when the revenge we anticipate is a foregone conclusion. Perhaps more than Auden would allow, forgiveness as a habit of loving restraint does have immense moral significance as well as political and dramatic potential. And so I briefly consider one of Auden’s most well-known and important poems of war as exemplary of how literature can stir forgiveness and forgiveness literature.

In the famous work “The Shield of Achilles,” Thetis looks over the shoulder of Hephaestos as he casts and decorates the renowned shield of her famed warrior son, that man of rage, Achilles. But instead of the heraldic scenes of martial valour she expects to see painted there, Hephaestos renders scenes of industrial blight and human abuse instead. This is a poem written—like The Human Condition—after two world wars and unspeakable genocide, and it exhibits the exhaustion of modern art before all the failed propagandas that have historically called art into service. There is no glory to be shown here. The only thing the creaky craftsman Hephaestos can depict is the reality of warfare and the horror that awaits Achilles in battle. When he is finished painting the scabbed and broken scenes on the warrior’s shield, Hephaestos “hobble[s] away” while Thetis “crie[s] out in dismay” at what he has wrought on the doomed Achilles’s shield. Instead of heraldic scenes of martial glory suitable for a hero’s shield, Hephaestos has hammered out images of desolation and loss. Thetis cries out because the violence of war is unrelenting. Act and retaliation will inevitably escalate until even her all-but-invincible son is destroyed. The final scene Hephaestos has painted upon the shield, the one that crowns his work and causes Thetis to exclaim in anguish, is of a child who would never know “Of any world where promises were kept, / Or one could weep because another wept.”

It is a grim conclusion to a poem that gives the lie to martial glory, a lie so often sung in lyrics like this. But the scene that causes Thetis at last to cry out and its line—“weep because another wept”—is not just a tender rhyme to complete the couplet it concludes. It refers, in fact, to a moment in the life of this Achilles, who would not live long. The Iliad begins by singing Achilles’s rage, and the poem is one that follows the increasingly brutal and reciprocal flow of gruesome retaliation. As Simone Weil observes, The Iliad is an epic almost entirely governed by exactly that “automatic, natural reaction to transgression” Arendt has named as vengeance, to the cycle of retributive violence that so often and so naturally governs human affairs. Elsewhere Weil refers to this inevitable violence, this nearly chemical certainty of action and reaction in human affairs, as gravity, or necessity, or force. But in The Iliad, briefly, miraculously, dramatically, this cycle is broken by what Weil refers to as a moment of grace, and what she describes as the most sublime expression of love in the epic. With Achilles’s lover Patroclus dead at Trojan hands, and Priam’s son Hector rotting on the field where Achilles has slain him, Priam comes to Achilles’s tent. Prostrate, the great king clutches “Achilles’ knees, kisse[s] his hands,” the “terrible, manslaughtering” hands that have lain waste to “so many of [Priam’s] sons.” But instead of kicking the old man away, Achilles trembles at the sight of “godlike Priam” and, recalling his own father in the figure of the enemy king, feels an urge to weep that overcomes his rage. Achilles takes Priam by the arm, and each man is consumed by memory, Priam for his son Hector while “huddled in tears at Achilles’ feet,” and Achilles for his own “father and then too for Patroclus.” One weeps because another wept. After this encounter in Achilles’s tent, a truce is briefly called and the dead on both sides are buried and duly mourned. This moment of peace and grace, quite dramatic indeed, “can cause to vanish the thirst to avenge a slain son or friend; by an even greater miracle, it can close the gap between benefactor and suppliant, victor and victim.” It is, for Weil, the “purest triumph of love.”

Weil is susceptible to hyperbole in her rhetoric, so I wouldn’t suggest that grief can anywhere stop a war or that weeping could so easily broker peace. And this may be Auden’s point in his poem: these noble moments of truce are no longer poetically or actually possible; world war and genocide have desiccated them entirely. But surely this is Weil’s and Arendt’s point also, the meaning of the miracle they describe: when vengeance seems inevitable, as necessary as gravity, human beings still really do retain the grace and freedom to risk a new beginning in spite of everything. Auden thought this grace unrepresentable because it was inward. But perhaps it is only that such graces are not representable anymore in the tidy resolutions of Shakespearean comedy. This is the hidden secret of Auden’s poem, the literary secret of forgiveness: Hephaestos’s shield is a lie, but not for the reasons Thetis wishes. There is no martial glory. War is still and always will be hell. The dead remain yet dead. But even in the midst of war, Achilles can still weep, the man of rage can still be moved to tears by his enemy Priam’s weeping. What retributive restraint, what loving one’s enemy, what forgiveness looks like in Achilles’s tent is grief. In The Iliad, the man of rage and the godlike king remember all they have lost and will never, ever recover. So the enemies pause, weep, eat, and keep their peace, and it couldn’t be more dramatically rendered.

It matters which stories we tell, and how we tell them. Like Hephaestos, we must speak the dreadful truth about our histories and what they have wrought. We must name with terrible candour the violence, brutality, racism, colonialism, and extermination that have been perpetrated upon us and perpetrated in our name. In their difficult meditations on forgiveness, Kazuo Ishiguro, Marilynne Robinson, Louise Erdrich, and Toni Morrison bravely name them. Whatever forms of confession or forgiveness we foster should help us raise our voices and raise them well. And we must speak knowing there can be no compensating erasure of our pains, whether through forgetting or through the glory we assign to martial vengeance. We must speak as if into an empty tomb, wary of hearing only the fading echoes of our anguish. But even once we have spoken these unspeakable things, we still have something more that we can say. Forgiveness raises its voice with the courage to speak but keeps on speaking, just as poetry claims no final word, only an ageless echo of imagination, even if from empty tombs. We are everywhere estranged, and yet always have more to say. Like Priam and Achilles weeping at the wastes of war or Mary weeping at Jesus’s tomb, when we attend with loving courage to all we have lost and cannot regain, we might manage to build a peace we can barely imagine upon the ruins we reveal.

Excerpted from the epilogue of Forgiveness: An Alternative Account by Matthew Ichihashi Potts, published in paperback by Yale University Press in February 2024. Permission given by Yale University Press.