Please explain Auden's poem "O Where Are You Going?"

Like one of his mentors, Thomas Hardy, w. H. Auden felt
that suffering was an integral part of life,

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"Suffering was integral to God's love and the
forgiveness of sins."

Like
the active person of his poem, Auden did not stop in his search for human and divine
love.  In his poem "O Where Are You Going?" there is a dialectic between the active and
the passive personalities.  These contrasts are felt by the sound of the poem which
has cosonant sounds working against vowel sounds:  "diligent/discover," "granite/grass,"
"skin/shocking," etc.

The contrast, too, is between the
active and the passive.  In the first stanza, for instance, the passive reader
asks the title question to the active rider; in the next
stanza, it is the passive fearer to the active
farer; and the passive horror to the active
hearer.

Auden's art has been described
as that of stripper of deception, a disenchanter who recognized the negative factors of
his times.  In this poem, the poet points to the pollution caused by furnaces, perhaps
steel mills since he grew up in Brimiingham, England, and metaphorically, the darkness
that resides in the hearts of men.  The third stanza points to the effect that this
pollution has upon animal and man alike:  the bird is twisted, the man's skin is a
"shocking disease." Nevertheless, the active participant in the dialectic leaves and the
horror is left alone. In his movement, the hearer may, in fact, escape while the passive
who fearfully remain may become the victims of what they have most
feared.