ABSTRACT
Auden's Trinculo is a poet whose imagination has lifted him into the clouds out of the world in which once he felt secure and at home. Self-consciousness, with its feeling, partly complacent, partly self-pitying, of difference from others, is strongest in adolescence, and Auden, though now in the late thirties, is still adolescent. He uses his imagination not to unite him to life, but to isolate him from it, dramatizing himself, according to his mood, as a lost and lonely figure, like Trinculo, or a forlornly knowing and devil-may-care one, like Caliban, or even as a—what? Auden’s Antonio dismisses Prospero as ‘our melancholy mentor, the grown-up man, the adult in his pride’ who, unlike Antonio, can ‘never enter the green occluded pasture as a child’, and then proceeds to distinguish between himself and the rest of the cast in a series of stanzas, one of which terminates each of the monologues spoken by the other characters.
