Poetry - W. H. Auden and Analysis

W. H. Auden Poems

•Born in 1907. Educated at Oxford.

•Was in Berlin, Germany during the rise of the Nazis.

•Visited Spain during the Civil War, 1937.

•Travelled to China in 1938 and spent six months reporting on the Sino-Japanese War.

•Moved to New York in 1939. Died in 1973.

•Regarded as one of the greatest English poets of the 20th Century.

Read these two poems by Auden and make notes about their context, content and form. We will discuss them in class next week.

The More Loving One (1957)

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well

That, for all they care, I can go to hell,

But on earth indifference is the least

We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn

With a passion for us we could not return?

If equal affection cannot be,

Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am

Of stars that do not give a damn,

I cannot, now I see them, say

I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,

I should learn to look at an empty sky

And feel its total dark sublime,

Though this might take me a little time.

In Time of War (1938)

Sonnet from China, XVI

Here war is simple like a monument:

A telephone is speaking to a man;

Flags on a map assert that troops were sent;

A boy brings milk in bowls. There is a plan For living men in terror of their lives,

Who thirst at nine who were to thirst at noon, And can be lost and are, and miss their wives, And, unlike an idea, can die too soon.

But ideas can be true although men die,

And we can watch a thousand faces

Made active by one lie:

And maps can really point to places

Where life is evil now:

Nanking; Dachau.