Robert Archambeau explores it:
When the wind, in an Auden poem, says “come,” we are not getting a representation of nature as something different from ourselves: we are getting a glimpse of human temptation and desire. When the water in “Streams” comes across as playful, we are not being told about the quality of nature so much as about certain human moods and capacities—Auden’s personification of water is much closer to a Greek naiad than to the streams above Wordsworth’s ruined abbey. When Auden gives us a landscape, he is less interested in it as a place or an ecosystem or as a physical reality—like Schiller’s Greeks, he rushes past its otherness and uses it as a way of describing human psychological states. …
The critic G.S. Fraser once remarked that Auden, unlike many of his contemporaries, was always interested in the moral rather than the sensuous element in his images, writing,
“Lay your sleeping head, my love, / Human on my faithless arm” where most poets would have written something more like, “Lay your golden head, my love / Heavy on my cradling arm.” There is truth in this—Auden’s is a world of psychology and morality rather than of creaturely sentimentality. And, despite his love of a particular kind of landscape, full of disused mines and scarred limestone cliffs, he is never a particularly visual poet, preferring to allegorize, personify, and psychologize where a more usual sort of modern poet would concentrate on physical detail and specificity. Even “In Praise of Limestone,” a poem whose title seems to promise an evocation of a specific natural landscape and its otherness, quickly turns back to the human: “examine this region / Of short distances and definite places,” he writes, “What could be more like Mother?” You see the pattern: Auden turns to nature to find something specific to the human psychological drama.
The Dish 