O What Is That Sound

Poetic Methods

Narrative Voice (Point of View):

Clearly, this poem has two narrators, one who desperately questions out of fear and a sense of
urgency, while the other reassuringly answers and gives hope to the reader – like a dialogue.
It could also be argued that the first speaker is a woman, while the second is a man; they
could also be married. This can be proved by the line, “I promised to love you”.

Structure and Form:

The most striking point of the poem is the repetition. Combined with the strong metre, the
slow and steady rhythm that conveys a sense of a funeral march picks up pace and reveals a
sense of urgency and desperation.

The poem follows an ABAB rhyme scheme, and the rhyming words at the end of every line
emphasise the rigid structure of the poem. The “question-and-answer” form of the poem
gives it an almost nursery rhyme effect.

The repetition in every stanza shows the repeated occurrence of fear and desperation, while
the last line always being short signifies how life too is short – this also adds to the tumbling
rhythm of the poem.

Genre and Style:

The poem is a ballad, and written in traditional ballad form with two narrators questioning
and answering each other. Written in the inter-bellum period, the poem talks about war and
the sacrifices and rationale changes a person undergoes. One could assume that the poem is
set in Europe while the persecution of Jews was taking place by the Nazi party.

Setting:

The setting in this poem is that of a hillside town, and we can be sure of this as we see the
phrase “down in the valley,” and “over the distance”. Also, this town seems to be pretty rural,
as described are a “farmyard”, “the road down there,” and “horses”. We know little of the
couple’s neighbours; just that nearby live a doctor, pastor and farmer, who apparently has
done something “cunning”.

Language:

Firstly, every stanza begins with an “O” – this shows desperation and a fear of the unknown.
The “thrills the ear” in the first stanza suggests something exciting; however, the “drumming,
drumming” emphasises a betrayal to come, and a false sense of security. Every alternate line
contradicts itself, and this furthers the image of confusion and panic throughout the poem.
The “scarlet” used to describe the soldiers has connotations of blood, a warning or even the
Nazis approaching their town.
The second stanza talks about the view from the couple’s window. The “flashing so clear”
could refer to gunfire; one could also argue that, depending on one’s outlook, the light
represented either Hope or Death. The Hope is being supported by the man while the woman
fears the possibility of Death.

The poem revolves highly around the oppression the civilians are undergoing – the “gear”
shows how well-armed the soldiers are, while the reference to “usual manoeuvres” makes the
reader wonder whether the narrators are used to such violence, and hence question whether it
is a “warning” they hear. The “wheeling, wheeling” could refer to the word “turning”, and
this is significant as this is a turning point in both the narrators’ lives. We see the first direct
inference at religious belief with the word “kneeling” – it is proved that even in times of
grave despair, people such as the woman turn to God for reassurance.

In the middle of the poem describes the various inhabitants of the town, and no matter
whether they are wealthy or not, the Nazis are after anyone who betrays or insults them. First,
we are introduced to the Doctor, and those in the profession are usually wealthy or well-
established. Moreover, the fact that the soldiers “stopped for the doctor’s care” show that he
doesn’t mind helping the soldiers, and is true to his profession. Second, we see the parson,
again reinforcing the theme of religious belief in the poem. When the woman says, “Or is it
the parson they want,” we are convinced that she is aware that someone needs to be taken
away. The prevalence of gossip in the community is also furthered when the woman says, “It
must be the farmer so cunning, so cunning”- apparently, he has done something despicable
and we are not allowed to sympathise with him on the account of being a working-class
individual.

Towards the end of the poem, we see how Auden is not very sympathetic with human
behavioural instincts. The woman exclaims, “Were the vows you swore deceiving,
deceiving?” We see the betrayal of the man here, who chooses to save himself and sacrifice
the other. It comes as an unprecedented shock to the reader, because the repeated usage of the
word “dear” by the man throughout the poem was reassuring and believable.

Finally, the last stanza is narrated solely by the woman, after the man abandons her. The use
of the word “it’s” symbolise the soldiers to be a huge monster, much like the unbeatable
fascist force. The imagery of “boots heavy on the floor” is crude, as we imagine a war-time
scenario, splashed with blood and bodies strewn around. The “burning eyes” also is
interesting as it could be argued that they symbolise hatred, anger, passion or rage, moreover,
it shows more violence to come – this is perhaps the most probable explanation as the poem
ends here.

http://genius.com/W-h-auden-o-what-is-that-sound-annotated

Analysis on “Spain” by W.H. Auden

We could write dozens of pages if we would want to analyze every detail

of this poem, as it talks about historical facts and expresses political ideals and
points of view of the author in verse. I will just get some points about some of
the parts that most caught my attention.
 For the analysis of this poem it’s important to know that from 1936 to
1939, Spain was at a civil war. We should know that the conflict was between
republicans against nationalists, that this was an extremely violent conflict in
which more than 300 thousand people were killed, more than 120 thousand
were civilians and that it generated tensions between neighbors, friends and
even families that sometimes ended in violent hatred. W.H. Auden had deep
and sophisticated political points of view. For him, the international media, and
most people out of Spain, the republicans were the good guys, and the
nationalists were the bad guys.

Author W.H. Auden actually visited Spain in 1937, getting some direct
inspiration for this, and other poems. “Spain” is a poem that, in general,
expresses how important, influential and powerful Spain was before the civil
war, and does some type deep complain about how it was breaking down as a
result of that war. The overall message in the beginning of the poem seems to
be: “Yesterday great beautiful things; But to-day disaster”.

I want to point out some interesting details. The eleventh stanza sounds
like a cry from the country itself. The shark and the tiger represent the fiercest
military forces on land and sea, while the robin’s plucky canton gives a feeling
of nobleness. Then he’s saying “descend as a dove… or a mild engineer, but
descend”, here, Spain is crying for anyone to save it from its misery in any way.
This stanza and the next three are my favorites. Stanza number 12 is an
emotional stanza that could be saying that the common people, civilians, are
the ones who will truly decide the outcome of the country’s future. Auden
seems to use the country itself, Spain, as the narrative (or in this case, poetic)
voice. The 13th stanza expresses that Spain is whatever its people (republicans)
make out of it. And in the next stanza, the “Just City” represents the victory of
the republicans, then the “suicide pact” or “romantic Death” means their
defeat. Here, we can connect that Spain is making its own republicans
responsible for the outcome of the war, and that it all depends on how much
art they put into this conflict. At the end of the poem, the message becomes:
“To-day disaster; To-morrow hope”.
An aspect about the structure that really caught my attention was that the
third verse on each stanza if much shorter, but seems to have the heaviest
words. Why does the author do this? Fewer but much heavier words deliver an
W. H. Auden: Poems
even stronger expression of a message.

Summary and Analysis of "Spain"

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The poem begins, “Yesterday the past.” It was yesterday that the trade routes sprang up and
the counting-frame and the cromlech were used. Yesterday there was insurance and the
divination of water and the creation of the clock and the taming of horses; it was “the bustling
world of the navigators.” Yesterday myths of fairies and giants were destroyed, and chapels
were built in the forest. Angels and gargoyles were carved. Heretics were put on trial, and
feuds over theology took place. Today, though: “the struggle.”

Yesterday was the belief in the perfection of the Greeks, the prayer to the sunset, and the
“adoration of madmen.” Today the struggle.

The poet whispers in the pines and the waterfall and the crags, calling for his vision and for
the “luck of the sailor.” The investigator uses his instruments and analyzes bacteria or the
planets; he inquires and inquires. The poor live in their barren cottages and drop the paper to
the floor, asking for “History the operator, the / Organiser” to be revealed.

The nations combine the individual cries, calling to History. Since History or Time has
intervened before, it should descend and intervene again, regardless of what form it takes. If
this spirit even answers, it has replied that it is not actually “the mover”—History is
“whatever you do.” It will do what the nations and individuals choose. In this, History is
“your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain.”

Many people heard this throughout the peninsulas and plains, or in the islands or in the cities.
Hearing this they migrated like “gulls or the seeds of a flower.” They clung to the express
trains and floated over the seas and walked the passes, all presenting their lives.

Spain is a dry square, snipped from Africa and welded to Europe. This is where “our thoughts
have bodies” and “Madrid is the heart.” Our fears and greed blossom into instruments of war,
our friendships into an army.

Tomorrow, there is, perhaps, the future. There will be research into consciousness and fatigue
and radiation, rediscovery of love and the arts, local politics, and quotidian life. Today,
though, is the struggle. Tomorrow will have young poets, walks by the lake, bicycle races.
Today is the struggle.

Today the chances of death are high, and it is necessary to accept guilt for murder. Powers
are expended over the map, and everything is full of “makeshift consolations” like jokes and
cigarettes and the “fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace before hurting.” The stars are dead,
the animals are gone, and we only have ourselves and our short day. Those who lose the
battle will receive nothing from History except an “Alas.”
Analysis

“Spain,” one of Auden’s longest and most complicated poems, is beautiful and compelling.
Written in 1937 after his visit to Spain, it addresses the Spanish Civil War. The first version
Auden wrote was published as a pamphlet in 1937 (its proceeds went to the war effort), and
the second version, revised slightly, was included in Another Time in 1940. Auden would
later repudiate this poem, as he did with “September 1, 1939,” as “dishonest.”

Auden had gone to Spain as a volunteer, where he served as an ambulance driver, wanting to
see the terrors and thrills of war firsthand. The civil war was split between the Republicans
and Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s Fascist forces. Franco was a tyrannical brute in the
same fashion as Hitler and Mussolini. Auden had written in 1936 to his close friend E.R.
Dodds, “I am not one of those who believe that poetry need or even should be directly
political. But in a critical period such as ours, I do believe that the poet must have direct
knowledge of the major political events.” As a leftist American intellectual, Auden supported
the Republicans, but he witnessed the brutality of both sides.

The poem speaks of three times: yesterday, today, and tomorrow. It begins with Spain’s past,
invoking the taming of the wilderness, the exploration and conquest, the various inventions,
the ridding of medieval myths in favor of Christianity, the Spanish Inquisition as “the trial of
heretics among the columns of stone,”, the growth of industry and modernity, the espousal of
Greek perfection, and the “death of the hero.” These lines mark the multifaceted growth of
Spanish civilization as intellectual, religious, and artistic values were constructed and
celebrated.

But yesterday is gone and, as the poem repeats several times without a verb, “To-day the
struggle.” There are several figures in the today of the poem: the poet, who wants vision to
contemplate and write of this terror; the scientist, who spends his time looking under a
microscope or into a telescope but thinks of the lives of his friends; the poor people in their
cold, cheerless homes thinking of how “Our day is our loss.” The people of Spain cry out.
The greatness of Spain’s early days, with its military and its city-state, are now in crisis. Life
can only claim that it cannot do anything to move events; life is the simple things, such as
marriage or funny stories or business voices. Spain was formed from people migrating to this
jagged peninsula “nipped off from hot / Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe,” a
mix of African and European influences. Now people are filled with fear, and moments of
tenderness and love and friendship are carried out during war.

The poem then turns to the future, presented as a hopeful time, filled with research, enlarging
of consciousness, romance and love, music and art and theater, poetry, bicycle races, peaceful
walks. Note the imagery of “poets exploding like bombs”—the poem imagines a future
without bombs but with poets.

The 26 four-line stanzas in the poem are not rhymed. The third line of most stanzas is
noticeably shorter than the other lines. Perhaps it is not too much of a stretch to imagine the
structure of each stanza as symbolizing past, present, and future, with the momentary present
symbolized by the third line sandwiched between, and not rhyming with, the other periods.

The image of a pleasant future is quickly swallowed back up into the fierce present of today.
Today death and murder are realities, and there are very few things that make life worth
living. Even an embrace has to be curtailed before it hurts the recipient. The poem ends on a
very bleak note; the glorious tomorrow has never seemed farther away. Indeed, “the stars are
dead. The animals will not look.” The people are “left alone with our day,” and “time is
short.” There is neither help nor hope from History, which depends on how the people who
are in it will direct it. As scholar SeomByeol Song writes, “the poem, instead of encouraging
‘today’ to switch over to [a] better state, or presenting a concrete breakthrough, stops on the
problematic situation...the future is not worth achieving: even the stars and animals will not
prove it.” Expectations for the future, in these conditions, are ambivalent. Spain is in crisis; it
had a pleasant past; it may or may not have a pleasant future.

W. H. Auden: Poems Summary and

Analysis of "September 1, 1939"
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The poet sits in a dive bar on 52nd Street, disappointed in the bad decade of the “low
dishonest” 1930s. The decade and recent events have consumed people’s private lives. The
odor of death “offends” the night of September 1, 1939.

Future scholars will describe how a cultural problem led from the time of Martin Luther to
the time of Hitler’s hometown of Linz, a pattern which has driven the German culture into
madness. Meanwhile, schoolchildren and the average person know well enough: “Those to
whom evil is done / Do evil in return.”

The ancient Greek historian Thucydides knew about dictators and so-called democracy, their
“elderly rubbish” of arguments that enable the dictator to cause pain, mismanagement, and
grief while an apathetic population permits it. It is happening again in 1939.

The “neutral” New York skyscrapers demonstrate the power of “Collective Man” to
accomplish great things, but America is in a “euphoric dream” of neutrality as war breaks out
in Europe. America looks “out of the mirror” and sees the face of imperialism and the
“international wrong.”

Normal people continue their average American days, keeping up the music and keeping on
the lights. Though we make ourselves seem comfortable and at home, we are actually “lost in
a haunted wood,” like children who are afraid of the dark and “have never been happy or
good.”

The most pompous pro-war speeches spouted by “Important Persons” are not as base as our
own jealous wish “to be loved alone.” This is a normal error and not just what “mad Nijinsky
wrote / About Diaghilev” (after Diaghilev left him for Diaghilev’s lover); each person
selfishly wants what she or he cannot have.

Commuters come from their “conservative dark” families into “the ethical life” of the public
sphere, vowing to improve their lives. Meanwhile, “helpless governors” make their
“compulsory” political moves now that war has broken out. Do they have any choice? They
seem deaf to advice and unable to speak for those who have no voice.

Yet, all the poet has is his voice, which can expose the lie of neutrality rhetoric and the
romanticism of the “man-in-the-street,” who goes along with the authorities and enjoys his
“sensual” pleasures. To the poet, there is no “State,” but we are all interconnected and rely on
each other. That is, “We must love one another or die.” (Auden’s later version reads: “We
must love one another and die.”)

While the world slumbers, flashes of hope come from “the Just,” exchanging their messages.
The poet seeks to be among them, human all the same, troubled by despair but still holding
up “an affirming flame.”

Analysis

“September 1, 1939,” one of Auden’s most famous and oft-quoted poems, gained new
prominence after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
Curiously, though, Auden came to dislike this work, finding it “dishonest” and a “forgery.”
He had his publisher include a note that the work was “trash he was ashamed to have
written”; he also tried to keep it out of later collections of his poems. It is unclear why he felt
so embarrassed by the poem. It has remained a staple of Auden’s work as well as an inspiring
call to speak out in hope for justice and brotherhood despite times of war or terror.

The poem was written in 1939, just as German troops invaded Poland and began the Second
World War. It was published in The New Republic that year and included in the collection
Another Time the following year. Hitler’s invasion of Poland declared his military strength
and flouted the agreement of the Munich Conference, shocking the entire world. The United
States did not enter the war until 1941.

Auden begins his poem with the speaker sitting in a dive bar in New York City. Hitler’s
actions have brought the “low dishonest decade” to a close, bringing “the unmentionable
odour of death” to the September evening. He contemplates Hitler’s psychology using a
Jungian concept—a “huge imago,” a psychological concept of the idealized self—and he
imagines that historians will explain how German culture, perhaps starting with Martin
Luther’s Protestant shakeup of Christianity hundreds of years earlier, led Germans to go
along with Hitler’s psychopathic evil.

Yet, even the average person perceives the basic human patterns in the story: doing evil to
someone leads that person to do evil in return. More than 2,000 years ago, Thucydides saw
how dictators abuse an apathetic population to accomplish their ends, even in a democracy
like Germany (or the United States). The same pattern keeps occurring. Perhaps this is a
reason why Auden’s nine stanzas all have the same pattern of eleven lines that, while they do
not rhyme, tend to repeat vowel and consonant sounds at the ends of lines (for example, the
last four lines of stanza 1: earth/lives/death/night; stanza 2: know/learn/done/return; stanza 3:
away/pain/grief/again). The story told here is not new.

In the fourth stanza the poet focuses on New York City, a paragon of modern capitalism,
which has yielded “blind skyscrapers” that “proclaim / the strength of Collective Man” via
competition and diversity rather than coordinated socialistic efforts. Yet, one cost of this
social blindness is isolationism. People cling to their average lives; they are content to pursue
their happy dreams, and they keep the music playing and the lights on so that they never see
how morally lost they are. They trust “Authority” (the government or the capitalist telling
them to remain neutral for their own good), which fits their selfish and sensual desires to
fulfill their goals regardless of what is happening in Europe.

What is missing is awareness of this basic human jealousy that privileges oneself over others,
leading not only to evil but also complacency and apathy when evil is happening elsewhere,
as in Europe. Meanwhile, politicians inevitably take advantage of these tendencies as the
geopolitical “game” plays out.

In the last two stanzas the poetic voice tries to overcome the problems identified in the
previous stanza: “Who can reach the deaf, / Who can speak for the dumb?” Auden scholar
James Persoon notes that the speaker only has one voice with which to “undo the folded lie”
that humans are too jealous to seek justice.

Yet, the speaker is one of many people who provide “points of light” like this poem. In
contrast to the points of light that come from a firing gun, the poem’s rhetorical points “flash
out” as a message exchanged with other members of “the Just,” those who seek justice.
Although each person writes selfishly and separately, “dotted everywhere,” poems about
solidarity and justice create a kind of solidarity. In this way, the network of poems
“ironically” emerges spontaneously, mirroring the network of New York skyscrapers which
emerge without coordination and make the city.

The poet knows he is just like everyone else, “composed like them / Of Eros [alluding to the
god of love, representing the passions] and dust [alluding to Biblical passages about human
mortality and returning to the natural dust of the earth upon death].” It is a time of “negation
and despair” for anyone who is paying attention to Europe. Nonetheless, the speaker hopes
his words can show “an affirming flame” of human connectedness and concern.

If Auden’s speaker is speaking against apathetic neutrality in the face of German aggression,
is he calling for the United States to go to war? Or is the role of such a poet to affirm
common humanity and justice along with the others who are “Just,” taking a prophetic route
while hoping that people will turn from their selfish ways? When Auden changed the key line
from the idealistic “We must love one another or die” to “We must love one another and die,”
the meaning seems to have changed to express that going to war in the name of love was, in
the case of the Second World War, perhaps in hindsight, justified.
W. H. Auden: Poems Summary and
Analysis of "The Unknown Citizen"
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The poem begins with an ironic epigraph, “To JS/07 M 378 / This Marble Monument / Is
Erected by the State.”

The Bureau of Statistics and all other reports show that he will complied with his duties to
“the Greater Community.” He worked in a factory and paid his union dues. He had no odd
views. The Social Psychology investigators found him to be normal, as did the Press: he was
popular, “liked a drink,” bought the daily paper, and had the “normal” reactions to
advertisements. He was fully insured. The Health-card report shows he was in the hospital
only once, and left cured.

The Producers Research and High-Grade Living investigators also showed he was normal
and “had everything necessary to the Modern Man”—radio, car, etcetera. The Public Opinion
researchers found “he held the proper opinions for the time of year,” supporting peace in
peacetime but serving when there was war. He was married and had the appropriate number
of five children, according to the Eugenicist. He never interfered with the public schools.

It is absurd to ask whether he was free or happy, for if anything had been wrong, “we should
certainly have heard.”

Analysis

“The Unknown Citizen” (1940) is one of Auden’s most famous poems. Often anthologized
and read by students in high school and college, it is renowned for its wit and irony in
complaining about the stultifying and anonymous qualities of bureaucratic, semi-socialist
Western societies. Its structure is that of a satiric elegy, as though the boring, unknown
citizen was so utterly unremarkable that the state honored him with a poetic monument about
how little trouble he caused for anyone. It resembles the “Unknown Soldier” memorials that
nations erect to honor the soldiers who fought and died for their countries and whose names
have been lost to posterity; Britain’s is located in Westminster Abbey and the United States’
is located in Arlington, Virginia. This one, in an unnamed location, lists the unknown man as
simply “JS/07 M 378.”

The rhyme scheme changes a few times throughout the poem. Most frequently the reader
notices rhyming couplets. These sometimes use the same number of syllables, but they are
not heroic couplets—no, they are not in iambic pentameter—they are often 11 or 13 syllables
long, or of differing lengths. These patterns increase the dry humor of the poem.

Auden’s “Unknown Citizen” is not anonymous like the Unknown Soldier, for the
bureaucracy knows a great deal about him. The named agencies give the sense, as early as
1940, that a powerful Big Brother kind of bureaucracy watches over its citizens and collects
data on them and keeps it throughout one’s life. This feeling makes the poem eerie and
prescient; one often thinks of the dystopian, totalitarian states found in the writings of George
Orwell and Aldous Huxley or the data-driven surveillance state of today. In Auden’s context,
one might think of the state-focused governments of Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini.

The Big Brother perspective begins from the very outset of the poem, with its evocation of a
Bureau of Statistics. The man has had every aspect of his life catalogued. He served his
community, he held a job, he paid union dues, he did not hold radical views, he reacted
normally to advertisements, he had insurance, he possessed the right material goods, he had
proper opinions about current events, and he married and had the right amount of children. It
does not appear on paper that he did anything wrong or out of place. In fact, “he was a saint”
from the state’s perspective, having “served the Greater Community.” The words used to
describe him—“normal,” “right,” “sensible,” “proper,” “popular”—indicate that he is
considered the ideal citizen. He is praised as “unknown” because there was nothing
interesting to know. Consider, in comparison, the completely normalized protagonist Emmet
in The Lego Movie.

At the end of the poem, the closing couplet asks, “Was he free? Was he happy? The question
is absurd: / Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.” With these last lines
comes the deeper meaning of the poem, the irony that despite all of the bureaucratic data
gathering, some aspect of the individual might not have been captured. It becomes clear that
the citizen is also “unknown” because in this statistical gathering of data, the man’s
individuality and identity are lost. This bureaucratic society, focused on its official view of
the common good, assesses a person using external, easily-catalogued characteristics rather
than respect for one’s uniqueness, one’s particular thoughts, feelings, hopes, fears, and goals.

Interestingly, and ironically, the speaker himself is also unknown. The professionals in the
poem— “his employers,” “our Social Psychology workers,” “our researchers into Public
Opinion,” “our Eugenicist”— are just as anonymous and devoid of personality. While a
person might be persuaded that he is free or happy, the evidence of his life shows that he is
just one more cog in the faceless, nameless bureaucratic machine.

W. H. Auden: Poems Summary and

Analysis of "The Shield of Achilles"
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Thetis looks at the images on the shield that Hephaestos has been making for Achilles during
the Trojan War. She expected to see olive trees and vines and marble cities and ships on
windy seas, but Hephaestos has forged “an artificial wilderness” under a leaden sky. The
plain is bare and brown, but a great multitude of boots stand ready for war. A faceless voice
dryly explains with statistics why war is required for justice, so they march forth.
Thetis also expected scenes of religious piety, but that is not what Hephaestos has been
making. Barbed wire encloses a military camp in “an arbitrary spot,” and civilians observe
from a distance while the camp punishes three pale prisoners by binding them to upright
posts. No hope comes from outside. The prisoners and the citizens are too “small,” and the
prisoners (perhaps also the other characters) “lost their pride / And died as men before their
bodies died.”

Thetis has looked a third time over the shoulder of Hephaestos while he works. She looks for
athletes and dancers enjoying games and music, but on the shield there was a “weed-choked
field” instead of a dancing floor. One poor child wanders about alone, throwing a stone at a
bird that flies away to escape. To him rape and murder seem normal. The child has never
heard of a place with kept promises or even human sympathy.

Hephaestos limps away, revealing the whole shield to Thetis, who cries out in horror at its
imagery. This is what the armorer decided to put on the shield of Achilles, son of Thetis,
Achilles the man-slayer doomed to soon die.

Analysis

“The Shield of Achilles” provides a chilling confrontation between love and war. Written in
1952, it was included in his volume of poetry of the same name, which was published in
1955. The volume won the National Book Award in 1956. It is written in alternating seven-
line stanzas of rime royal (ABABBCC) and eight-line stanzas in a ballad format
(ABCBDEFE).

The contents of the poem derive from Homer’s Iliad, an ancient epic poem concerning a key
part of the Trojan War. A lot has happened by this point. In book 18, the goddess Thetis, the
mother of Achilles, asks the god Hephaestos (Latinized as Hephaestus) to create a shield for
son so he can triumph in the war against Troy. Achilles’s earlier shield was taken by Hector
after he killed Achilles’ close friend Patroclus, who had taken the armor into battle thinking
that seeing this armor would scare the Trojans (Achilles had stayed out of the fight over a
dispute with Agamemnon about a woman). Homer goes into great detail describing the shield
that Hephaestos makes; it contains a veritable history of the world in its scenes of pastoral
calm, marriage, war, the cosmos, art, and nature.

The poem begins Thetis looking over the armorer’s shoulder with disappointment. In each of
her three stanzas, employing the repetition “She looked over his shoulder” in the first line,
she is hoping to see images of civilization, joy, piety, and peaceful employment of athletic
and musical arts. She loves her son and is thinking ahead to what he should be fighting for.
But instead she sees images of irrationality, war, wilderness, immorality, injustice, and
punishment. The contrast between what Thetis expects and what Hephaestos delivers, what
Thetis desires and what the armorer thinks appropriate for Achilles, is stark.

The pattern of hope and disappointment occurs all three times, followed by the concluding
stanza wrapping up the point: after all, Achilles is doomed to live a short but heroic warrior’s
life. Achilles, like people in general, can try to live average but boring lives instead, but
Achilles has chosen heroism, and his mother is dismayed.

Critic Scott Horton argues that the poem has contemporary resonance for Auden and his
audience, reflecting a warning about the Cold War and the authoritarian warmongering of the
1950s: “Auden is not portraying the tragedies of the last war as such. He is warning of a
world to come in which totalitarian societies dominate and the worth and dignity of the
individual human being are lost. He warns those who stand by, decent though they may
seemingly be, and say nothing.” This perspective is supported by anachronistic images on the
shield. Thetis sees a scene that seems more like one from the Second World War: barbed wire
around a military base. Modern war engages “millions” and spreads propaganda through
“statistics.”

Another allusion on the military base concerns the three people punished. A crowd watches
from a distance as three figures are brought forth and bound to three posts in the ground. This
scene alludes to the Crucifixion of Jesus between two others, as though the three posts are
crosses, and it makes the horrors of war seem more universal. Horton writes, “the anonymous
image also displaces the greater spiritual significance of the Christian sacrifice, suggesting
that in the modern world such sacrifice has lost its ultimate meaning and that the victims,
Christ in particular, have become nameless and insignificant.” Poet Anthony Hecht has noted
that the executed men were not martyrs, just victims. One also might see in this image an
allusion to the Jews and others killed in Nazi concentration camps.

When Hephaestos hobbles away (in myth he is lame) without comment, the shield is his only
statement. He put a mirror up to reality and reproduced it on the “shining metal.” In contrast,
Thetis’ “shining breasts” reflect her motherly love, less with reality than with hope. Auden
once said, “A society which was really like a good poem, embodying the virtues of beauty,
order, economy, and subordination of detail to the whole, would be a horror.” As much as we
might strive for the virtues, reality—whether presented by Hephaestos, Homer, or Auden—
shows us a different, more distressing world.

\
Context:

Auden: Poems The Spanish Civil War

The Spanish Civil War, in which Auden participated, began on July 18, 1936. The conflict
was between the leftist Republican government and the right-wing Spanish military (referred
to as the Nationalists) led by General Francisco Franco.

Elections held in 1931 brought the Republicans into office with a strong majority. The
Spanish King Alfonso XIII fled into exile when voters abolished the monarchy. Thus began
the Second Republic, in which liberals and moderate socialists ruled (the First Republic was
short-lived in the 1870s). Liberal reforms were widespread in the first two years, and
Catalonia and the Basque region received almost complete autonomy. The regime's enemies
were gathering after their defeat; they included the Church, the landed aristocracy, and the
military. In November 1933 conservative forces took back control of the government. The
socialists launched their own revolution in Asturias, and the Catalan nationalist rebelled in
Barcelona. In response, the powerful General Franco crushed this October Revolution, and
for his victory was appointed army chief of staff in 1935.

In February 1936 liberals returned to power in the Popular Front, a leftist coalition. Franco
was sent out of the country to a command in the Canary Islands, Africa. His absence did not
preclude conservatives in government from plotting to seize power. Franco agreed to their
conspiracy. The chosen date would give the Army of Africa time to secure Morocco before
being sent to the Andalusian coast by the navy. The plans were discovered on July 17,
however, and the rebels were pushed into action prematurely. The Nationalists took Melilla,
Ceuta, and Tetuan. Their efforts were aided by conservative Moroccan troops.

Republican government officials heard of the rebellion but were not effective in preventing
its spread to mainland Spain. The following day, July 18, garrisons rose in revolt throughout
Spain and were countered by laborers and peasants. The Republicans' refusal to grant the
lower classes weapons initially led to Nationalist victories. In conservative regions there was
little bloodshed when the Nationalists took over, but in other places like Bilbao they largely
failed to take over. The navy was mostly immune to the Nationalist efforts.

Franco succeeded in bringing his Army of Africa to Spain and took over large parts of
Republican-held areas in central and northern Spain, and Madrid was put under siege in
November 1936.

Franco unified the Nationalist forces under the Fascist Party, and the Republicans were
influenced by the communists. In terms of foreign support, Germany and Italy aided Franco,
while the Russians aided the Republicans. America and Britain did not get involved
officially. However, radicals and activists from those countries organized International
Brigades to aid the Republicans, which helped secure Madrid.

By 1938 the Nationalists had cut Republican territory into two areas. Franco attacked
Catalonia, and Barcelona fell in January 1939. The Republicans finally tried to sue for peace
but Franco refused, and they surrendered Madrid on March 28, 1939. Over one million
people lost their lives in the war, and Franco ruled as a dictator until his death in 1975.

Auden was not the only intellectual who volunteered for the Republican cause during the
war; Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell also participated.

Auden was in Spain for about seven weeks, from mid-January to early March 1937. For an
attempt to chronicle Auden’s time in Spain, see Nicholas Jenkins, “Auden and Spain,” in the
first Auden Studies volume (with Katherine Bucknell), W. H. Auden: "The Map of All My
Youth": Early Works, Friends and Influences (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990), 88-93,
available at http://www.stanford.edu/~njenkins/archives/jenkins-auden_and_spain.pdf.

This brilliant poem is a precise and universal portrait of a tyrant. Auden, who lived in Berlin
during Hitler’s rise to power, and who, like so many writers of his generation, joined the
International Brigade in ’37 to fight the Fascists in Spain, saw his fair share of tyrants. I find
it devastatingly powerful that this description can still be applied to tyrants of our own time.
Tragically, the subject of this piece is timeless.

Reading this poem also brought to my mind the idea of a tyrannical God (those who have
read the late Christopher Hitchens’ explosively erudite and enjoyableGod Is Not Great will
be familiar with the notion of God as a dictator. Hitchens memorably described a world in
which God exists as a ‘celestial North Korea’.) Although I am by no means an atheist, I find
this image fascinating, Hitchens’ argument compelling, and would like to stretch it further
while reflecting on this poem. I think that the tyrant in this poem can encompass the political
dictator, a tyrannical deity, but also the Artist (i.e. poet, writer, painter, composer etc.), and
even the scientist (whose intellectual quest to understand all can lead him at times to “play
God”).

So, whether your read this poem as about God, a scientist, artist, or a human dictator, it’s
clear that Auden really gets tyranny. Tyrants are after “Perfection, of a kind”, he writes. An
insane, inhuman, deluded idea of perfection, of course. I am interested that Auden talks about
“the poetry he invented”. All poetry is propaganda, in a sense; when we write a poem, we use
all sorts of ploys and techniques to amplify our ideas or the message or emotion we wish to
convey – to colour the reader’s mind. I find it fascinating that Auden seems to almost identify
with the tyrant in the poem, in the sense that – as a poet – he seeks a certain symmetry, a
certain perfection, through his art. Is that not why we create Art? To make sense of a
senseless world? To create order out of chaos? Is that not the motivation behind all scientific
inquiry? All of this paints the tyrant as a crazed sort of creator, prepared to do anything in
order to achieve his mad visions.

“When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter”. This line strongly evokes the
way in which a powerful tyrant can so poison and enslave the minds of even intelligent,
“respectable” people, that they will follow his lead. I am thinking here particularly of those
who – though ordinary, “respectable” people – went along with the atrocities of the Nazi
party as though possessed or sleepwalking. And how far will we go to create perfect Art?
And to make our scientific discoveries?

The final line of the poem is devastating: “And when he cried the little children died in the
streets.” This sentence reminds us that the subject of this poem is real and extremely serious.
Every move the tyrant makes affects the life of somebody, somewhere.

W. H. Auden: Poems Summary and

Analysis of "In Memory of W. B. Yeats"
William Butler Yeats died in winter: the brooks were frozen, airports were all but empty, and
statues were covered in snow. The thermometer and other instruments told us the day he died
“was a dark cold day.”

While nature followed its course elsewhere, mourners kept his poems alive without letting the
poet’s death interfere. Yet, for Yeats himself, mind and body failed, leaving no one to
appreciate his life but his admirers. He lives through his poetry, scattered among cities and
unfamiliar readers and critics, who modify his life and poetry through their own
understandings. While the rest of civilization moves on, “a few thousand” will remember the
day of his death as special.
In the second section of the poem, Yeats is called “silly like us.” It was “Mad Ireland” that
caused Yeats the suffering he turned into poetry. Poetry survives and gives voice to survival
in a space of isolation.

In the third, final section of the poem, the poet asks the Earth to receive Yeats as “an
honoured guest.” The body, “emptied of its poetry,” lies there. Meanwhile, “the dogs of
Europe bark” and humans continue their “intellectual disgrace.” But the poet is to “follow
right / To the bottom of the night,” despite the dark side of humanity somehow persuading
others to rejoice in existence. Despite “human unsuccess,” the poet can sing out through the
“curse” and “distress.” Thus one’s poetry is a “healing fountain” that, although life is a
“prison,” can “teach the free man how to praise” life anyway.

Analysis

Along with his piece on the death of Sigmund Freud, Auden's tribute to the poet William
Butler Yeats is a most memorable elegy on the death of a public figure. Written in 1940, it
commemorates the death of the poet in 1939, a critical year for Auden personally as well as
for the world at large. This was the year he moved to New York and the year the world
catapulted itself into the Second World War.

Yeats was born in Ireland 1856 and embraced poetry very early in his life. He never
abandoned the traditional verse format of English poetry but embraced some of the tenets of
modernism, especially the modernism practiced by Ezra Pound. He was politically active,
mystical, and often deeply pessimistic, but his work also evinces intense lyrical beauty and
fervent exaltation in Nature. He is easily considered one of the most important poets of the
20th century, and Auden recognized it at the time.

The poem is organized into three sections and is a commentary on the nature of a great poet’s
art and its role during a time of great calamity—as well as the ordinary time of life’s
struggles.

The first, mournful section describes the coldness of death, repeating that “The day of his
death was a dark cold day.” The environment reflects the coldness of death: rivers are too
frozen to run; hardly anyone travels by air; statues of public figures are desecrated by snow.
These conditions symbolize the loss of activity and energy in Yeats’ death.

At the same time, far away, wolves run and “the peasant river” flows outside of the rest of
civilization (“untempted by the fashionable quays”), keeping the poetry alive. The
implication is that the poems live even though the man may be dead. The difficulty with this
situation, however, is that the man can no longer speak for himself; “he became his
admirers.” His poems, like ashes, are “scattered” everywhere and are misinterpreted
(“unfamiliar affections” are brought into the poems). The ugly fact of bad digestion modifies
the poems as “The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living.”

Furthermore, as in “Funeral Blues” and “Musée des Beaux Arts,” the events of the average
day go on—a trader yells on the floor, the poor suffer—for most people, the day goes
unmarked. It takes a special soul to mark the importance of the day of the death of a great
poet, and only “a few thousand” have such a soul. As scholar James Persoon writes, “These
two elements—the poet's death as national and natural crisis and the poet’s death as almost
completely insignificant—describe a tension within which Auden explores the life of the
work after the death of the author.” Thus, in addition to the thermometer telling us so, the
speaker of the poem tells us that it is a “dark cold day” with respect to the popular reception
of Yeats’ poetry.

In the second section the speaker briefly reflects on the generative power behind Yeats’
poetry. It was “Mad Ireland” that “hurt” him and inspired his poetry as a form of survival.
For Yeats, “silly” like other poets or, more broadly, like other Irishmen or humans, poetry
was a “gift” that survived everything other than itself—even Yeats’ own physical
degeneration, the misinterpretations of “rich women,” and Yeats’ own failings. Poetry itself,
from this perspective, survives in the midst of everything, not causing anything, but flowing
out from isolated safety (perhaps the Freudian subconscious) and providing voice
(metaphorically a “mouth”) to that deep level of raw and unassailable humanity.

The third and final part brings the reader back into more familiar territory, with six stanzas of
AABB verse, every line in seven-syllable trochaic verse (three long-short feet followed by a
seventh stressed syllable).

The body of Yeats (“the Irish vessel”) rests in the ground, the warring nations fight
(metaphorically, the “dogs of Europe bark”), people misinterpret his work (“intellectual
disgraces”), yet somehow, his poetry retains a place somewhere. The true poet, like Yeats
himself, will “follow right / To the bottom of the night” (to the primordial humanity
expressed in Yeats’ poetry), to that fundamental human freedom where an “unconstraining
voice” can “persuade us to rejoice” in our existence.

True enough, the human “curse” (evoking the Fall of Man in Genesis) remains; death awaits.
This is all too true in a time of war. But the poet can turn the curse into a “vineyard” where
sweet poetic drink can form. On the one hand there are “deserts of the heart” and human
distress, yet on the other hand, with this wine a “healing fountain” can release a man from
“the prison of his [mortal] days.” A poet like Yeats, despite everything, can “teach the free
man how to praise” that fundamental spark of existence that survives in one’s poetry.

W. H. Auden: Poems Themes

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Love is Fleeting
While Auden is known for his poems about heady themes such as death, totalitarianism, and
the role of poetry, he is also renowned for his love poems. Many of them, such as “As I
Walked Out One Evening,” “Lullaby,” and “O Tell Me the Truth About Love,” feature
stirring passages about how beautiful and inspiring love can be, and “Funeral Blues” features
a man deeply in love with another. However, for Auden, that is not all he has to say about
love. Almost all of these poems have a sobering undercurrent of sorrow, or of the desire to
remind readers that life, and love, are short and are affected by the vicissitudes of existence
like sickness and time. Love is sweet, but it does not exist in a universe devoid of suffering,
waning of affection or, of course, death.

Poetry Reveals Reality

Auden’s poetry evokes the terror of living in the middle of the 20th century, when dictators in
Europe suppressed their people’s freedoms, led their countries into war, and resorted to
barbaric tactics of mass slaughter. In a few of his poems he wonders what the role of poetry
can be in the face of such nightmares, and why he should honor the death of one man when
so many were being killed on the battlefield, on the streets, and in gas chambers. Writing
about Freud, he asks, “of whom shall we speak” when “there are so many we shall have to
mourn.” In the elegy for Yeats, he asserts his belief that poetry can still lift the human spirit
and “persuade us to rejoice” and “teach the free man how to praise.” Auden is a realist in that
he understands poetry might not directly influence anything, but its habit of calling things by
their real names (the sun, the law, death, love) can bring us into a better relationship with
reality.

Modern Horrors
Auden's poetry is sometimes cerebral, sometimes brutally honest and evocative of the
historical context in which he is writing. He is renowned for addressing the issues of his day
in a moving and relevant manner. The horrors of the modern world do not escape his incisive
pen; he deals with the dictators and their mad quest for world domination, the fall of the
masses under their leaders' spell, the stultifying bureaucratic state, the Spanish Civil War, the
bleakness and perhaps impossibility of the future, the psychic side of warfare, the bleak
landscape, the martyrdom of heroes and the death of poets, the unthinking use of modern
tools, and the bludgeoning of the human spirit through the great weight of history. Through
all this, though, Auden retains some hope for the future, pointing out the freedom that comes
from recognizing our true condition whatever our circumstances are.

Death
Death is an ever-present reality in Auden’s poems, cutting life and love short. It affects every
man, even those of prominence and stature, like Yeats and Freud and Bonhoeffer. It can come
in the form of martyrdom, sickness, or old age, or through war. Death is a weapon used by
dictators as well as a natural part of the human cycle of life and death. Auden does not shy
away from this theme, nor the difficulties associated with it. He openly grieves for a deceased
lover, suggests the futility of the fight between soldiers and their enemies in “Ode V,” and
showcases how a great mind (Yeats) can be rendered useless with the onslaught of physical
erosion. Death cuts short careers (Freud) and poses difficult religious questions (Bonhoeffer),
but the living can carry their messages and restate their work, albeit at a remove from the
original. Overall, Auden’s poems celebrate life, while we have it, and they directly face the
fact that life is always cut short by death one way or another.

Bureaucracy and Totalitarianism

Auden lived during the age of the great totalitarian dictators Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and
Franco, and saw the rise of the bureaucratic state. His poems deal with both of these issues.
Poems including “The Shield of Achilles,” “Friday’s Child,” and “September 1, 1939”
address the hubris and greed that led dictators to amass armies, brainwash their citizens, and
unleash war upon the world. He catalogs the various ways the bureaucracy keeps tabs on its
citizens and tries to reduce them to statistics and figures. Governments do everything they
can to quench the human spirit, but Auden's belief in the value of poetry as well as the
enduring human spirit counteracts this malicious tendency.

The Value of the Everyman

Auden may occasionally write of great men, such as Freud, Yeats, and Bonhoeffer, but his
poetry is equally famed for its celebration of the common man. In poems like "Night Mail"
and "O Tell Me The Truth About Love," Auden's imagery and language are common, earthy.
He presents a panoply of people, rich and poor, silly and smart, busy and idle. His depiction
of love in the latter poem is not the swooning love of the Romantic poets, but love scribbled
in notes, arriving without warning while the poet is "picking my nose." Average people
populate his poems and, while he criticizes them for not paying attention to important things
("September 1, 1939" and "Musée des Beaux Arts"), he seems to sum up his views with the
last line of "Night Mail": "For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?" Auden remembers his
brethren and neighbors of all kinds and celebrates their freedom and individuality.

Suffering
Auden's poetry can be funny, light, and sweet, but many of his greatest works deal with the
suffering that comes from being human. He writes of the rise and rule of the dictators and the
deadening bureaucratic state; the extinguishing of the light of great men who have been
valuable to the world; the attrition of love through unfaithfulness, sickness, time, and death;
the crippling nature of pride and greed; religious doubt; warfare; and the complacency and
apathy evinced by others when we are undergoing this suffering. Sometimes we suffer at
others' hands, and sometimes we bring it upon ourselves.