Keats's "La Belle Dame Sans Merci"

 In my previous post, I featured a poem by Yeats, The Song of Wandering Aengus. Yeats derived his idea for the poem from the eighth century Irish myth The Dream of Aengus. For easy reference, here is Yeats’s poem again:

 The Song of the Wandering Aengus

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

This phenomenal poem of magic, beauty, desire and visionary quest ends with Aengus not forlorn but determined to search on forever. His perseverance to find the “girl” and “pluck…The silver apples of the moon, / The golden apples of the sun” calls to mind a sentence Yeats later wrote: The “passionate feed their flame in wanderings and absences, when the whole being of the beloved, every little charm of body and soul, is always present in the mind, filling it with subtleties and desires.” Aengus’ physical “quest” for his “glimmering girl” who “called me by my name” will not succeed, but his memory of her voice and his desire of hearing it once more evoke a simple joy and hopefulness in him and the reader all the same. An obvious theme in this poem is Yeats’s love and hopeless pursuit of Maud Gonne.

Like Yeats, John Keats (1795-1820), found inspiration in the lore of medieval tales. He was fascinated with The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser’s (1551-1599), an epic poem of knights and damsels in distress. In Keats’s La Belle Dame sans Merci, A medieval knight believes he finds love, but instead becomes ensnared by a bewitching beauty:

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

I.

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has wither'd from the lake,
And no birds sing.

II.

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel's granary is full,
And the harvest's done.

III.

I see a lily on thy brow
With anguish moist and fever dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.

IV.

I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a faery's child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.

V.

I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She look'd at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.

VI.

I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery's song.

VII.

She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna dew,
And sure in language strange she said—
"I love thee true."

VIII.

She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept, and sigh'd full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.

IX.

And there she lulled me asleep.
And there I dream'd—Ah! woe betide
The latest dream I ever dream'd
On the cold hill's side.

X.

I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—"La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!"

XI.

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill's side.

XII.

And is this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is wither'd from the lake,
And no birds sing.
 

Keats wrote La Belle Dame San Merci on April 21, 1819. He wrote it in the style of a short, medieval ballad and tells the story of a knight beguiled and destroyed by a bewitching fairy lady. The opening two lines are famous and introduce the unnamed speaker who comes upon this knight and asks what is troubling him: “O what can ail thee, knight at arms, / Alone and palely loitering?” The next two lines end the stanza, and the reader should notice that Keats did not enclose the words in quotation marks, which leaves unclear who speaks these words. Is this still the unnamed speaker who initiates the poem or is it the response of the knight?

Most readers take the words as a continuation of the speaker’s question. It makes more sense to see them as the knight’s reply to the speaker’s question, since the imagery mirrors the knight’s wasting physical and spiritual condition: “the sedge has wither’d from the lake, / And no birds sing.” When the speaker repeats his question in stanza 2, his perception of the knight’s condition deepens as he notices the knight’s deathlike appearance and irreversible despair: “O what can ail thee, knight at arms, / So haggard and so woe begone?” The knight again directly replies, and his mysterious response affirms his condition: “The squirrel’s granary is full, / And the harvest’s done.” Though the harvest imagery can suggest abundance, with Keats it also presages death. (See Keats’s later poem, To Autumn, stanza 2)

The third stanza concludes the Questions and answers with the speaker enunciating without acknowledging the knight is dying:

I see a lily on thy brow
    With anguish moist and fever dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
        Fast withereth too.

After stanza 3, the knight reveals what has sickened him. Just as there is a back and forth between the speaker and the knight, the knight and the “lady in the meads” also engage in a form of communication in stanzas 4-8. The knight meets the lady, is immediately smitten with her and then makes her gifts, “garlands,” “bracelets,” “fragrant zone” (a girdle). She in turn, “look’d at me as she did love, / And made sweet moan.” The knight woos the lady with these gifts, but does he succeed in winning her love? The line, “She look’d at me as she did love,” seems to suggest he succeeds. But a closer reading of the line reveals its ambiguity. It could be read as either “she did love him,” or the line might mean she looked at him only “as if she did love” him.

Stanzas 7 complicates matters further. The knight swoops the lady onto his horse and rides “all day long,” which reads like an abduction and the lady’s response further obscures what is taking place. Is she mutually engaged with the knight or is she his captive victim? She sings “A fairy’s song,” feeds him “roots,” “honey,” and “manna,” then “sure in language strange she said— / I love thee true.” The knight is confident her words are a declaration of love for him, even though the language she speaks is beyond his understanding.

In stanzas 8, and 9 his [over]confidence leads him to be led into her “grot” where he kisses her “wild wild eyes,” and she lulls him “asleep.” While asleep he dreams of all the “pale kings,” “princes,” and “Pale warriors” who have been victims beguiled by the “lady in the meads.” He sees “their starv’d lips…/With horrid warning gaped wide…” When he awakes, he finds himself alone on “the cold hill’s side.”

The gothic imagery of love and death, of dreaming and waking, and the knight’s inescapable despondency are the effects of the knight’s being seduced by the lady “sans merci.” The final stanza circles the reader back to stanza 1 and encloses the loop which encircles the knight in an eternal psychological inferno.

Poems for St. Patrick's Day

In The Sewanee Review, Oct. 1920, Vol. 28, Norreys Jephson O’Connor wrote: “Ireland is the country of Fairies. The reason for this is not mere popular superstition, but because in the Gaelic literature which is the inheritance of the Irish race Fairies and Fairyland play an important part…In Ireland the Fairies have never been forgotten: Brian Merriman, the last Gaelic poet of prominence, speaks of them as the treasure of his country in time of trouble, and Patrick MacGill, the Donegal poet, expressed the same idea when, amid the terrors of the battlefield, he wrote

 'If we forget the Fairies,
 And tread upon their rings,
 God will perchance forget us,
 And think of other things.
 
When we forget you, Fairies,
 Who guard our spirits' light:
 God will forget the morrow,
 And Day forget the Night.'

The Irish imagination is indeed permeated with myths and folklore and reading these stories and poems about fairies, giants and heroes is no frivolous pastime. Becoming steeped in the legends and myths can forge a bulwark in the mind for preserving Irish culture, which is an essential intelligence for the growth of the Irish imagination in this contemporary world.

As a child growing up in the west of Ireland in Sligo, William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) listened to and read stories of Irish fairies. In 1886, he published a book, Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry. In this book, he wanted to showcase Irish Fairy stories that “live and rule in the imaginations of the innumerable Irish men and women, and not merely in remote places, but close even to big cities.” Yeats’s interest in Irish folklore appears in poems throughout his career but is particularly prominent in his earlier poetry. One of his most popular early poems that incorporates Irish Fairies is The Stolen Child.

       The Stolen Child

Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berries
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.

The Stolen Child, one of Yeats’s early poems written in 1886, highlights a tension between a romantic idealism and secular modernity, but with an interesting twist. The plot is straightforward. The faeries offer the child a chance in the poem’s refrain to “come away” with them:

For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.

And their “call” is quite alluring. The imagery of “Where” they will take the child depicts a setting that ripples with serenity and beauty. There are the “flapping herons” in stanza 1, “the wave of moonlight glosses,” in stanza 2 and “the wandering water gushes / from the hills above Glen-Car, / In pools among the rushes” in stanza 3. The faeries offer companionship, taking the child “hand in hand,” “Mingling Hands and mingling glances.” The kind of escape the faeries offer the child call to mind the escape Keats seeks in Ode to a Nightingale:

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
         What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
         Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
         Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
                Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

Such serenity and such an escape could lull the reader into desiring to join the child in escaping. But then, the reader would miss what ripples through Yeats’s verse. The land of the faeries may churn with “frothy bubbles” and may have “Wandering water [that] gushes…/ In pools,” but the poem also intimates something sinister. That sinister something arrives in the last stanza. The child is beguiled into joining the faeries and as he does. he moves with “solemn” eyes. He escapes the painful world of human existence but loses the sound of “calves on the warm hillside” and the domestic “peace” that “the kettle on the hob sing[s].” The poem’s final refrain shifts from enticement to triumphant.

Another poem based on Irish folklore is Yeats’s The Song of Wandering Aengus

The Song of Wandering Aengus

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun. 

In Irish myth, Aengus is the God of youth, beauty, love and poetry, and on the symbolic level, it could be said that his quest represents Yeats’s lifelong passion for Maude Gonne, who of course would be the “glimmering girl.” In his Autobiography, Yeats writes of her reaction to first meeting her: “Her complexion was luminous like that of the apple blossom through which the light falls, and I remember her standing that first day by a great heap of such blossoms in the window."

The Stolen Child and The Song of Wandering Aengus bring to our eyes the rich, evocative folklore of Ireland. Reading Yeats’s masterful poetic rendering of these “wee” stories and a pint or two of Guinness for those who are so inclined, will uplift our spirits this St. Patrick’s Day.

Spring Poems 2026

As winter retreats north, spring arrives to infuse trees again with leaves and entice flowers from quiescent buds. It awakens in us spiritual renewal and arouses romantic passions. From time immemorial, we have welcomed spring with religious rituals and resurrections of gods. Generations of poets have written about it, celebrating its beauty and power to breathe life into us after the barren months of winter.

Geoffrey Chaucer (1340/45-1400) understood the extraordinary life generating powers of spring. He was the greatest English poet of the late Middle Ages. His Canterbury Tales are serious, humorous, and sometimes bawdy tales told by pilgrims who are traveling from London to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket (1118-1170) at Canterbury Cathedral to seek forgiveness for their sins. Here is an excerpt from the General Prologue of the poem that illustrates Chaucer’s appreciation of the extraordinary life generating powers of spring: Here is a modern rendering of opening lines, followed by the original Middle English:

                       The Canterbury Tale: General Prologue

When April with its sweet-smelling showers
Has pierced the drought of March to the root,
And bathed every vein (of the plants) in such liquid
By which power the flower is created;
When the West Wind also with its sweet breath,
In every wood and field has breathed life into
The tender new leaves, and the young sun
Has run half its course in Aries,
And small fowls make melody,
Those that sleep all the night with open eyes
So Nature incites them in their hearts,
Then folk long to go on pilgrimages...

If you prefer, your English prior to the Great Vowel Shift, here is the original Middle English text:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licóur
Of which vertú engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye,
So priketh hem Natúre in hir corages,
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages...

Spring does not arouse those feelings only. It also can arouse religious or spiritual yearning. Centuries later,in his sonnet Spring, the Catholic priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), invokes the beauty of spring to denote the inherent presence of the divine within human beings.

                        Spring
Nothing is so beautiful as Spring—	
  When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;	
  Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush	
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring	
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;	
  The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush	
  The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush	
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.	 	

What is all this juice and all this joy?	
  A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning	
In Eden garden.—Have, get, before it cloy,	
  Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,	
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,	
  Most, O maid's child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

Hopkins’ poem is a Petrarchan sonnet, which means it is organized into two distinct parts, the eight line octave and the six line sestet (as shown by the space between each part). In the octave is the pure description of spring’s beauty, conveyed through imagery that “strikes” both the eyes and ears. Hopkins establishes through the opening superlative the general character of spring: “Nothing is so beautiful as “Spring.” He slides from this general assertion or “effect,” to what specifically “causes” this season’s beauty. Each item is overflowing with sensuous energy. There are “weeds, in wheels,” “Thrush’s eggs [that] look [like] little low heavens.” There is the “thrush” whose song “does so rinse and wring / The ear, it strikes like lightning to hear him sing.” There is the “glassy peartree leaves and blooms” that “brush / The descending blue.” Finally, there are “the racing lambs.”

If the poem were to end here, the reader would have a lovely description to read, but this poem has deeper resonances. With Hopkins, there are always more layers of meaning to uncover. In the sestet, he asks, “What is all this juice and all this joy?” Naturally, his question is rhetorical. After being immersed in the physical delights of “Spring,” Hopkins now reveals the force infusing nature with its life and beauty. The beauty he sees, hears and feels all around him is “A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning,” the paradise in the Garden of Eden Adam and Eve forfeited when they sinned and ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. For Hopkins, that “strain” is a manifestation of God’s presence in the world, in all of nature, animate or inanimate. Hopkins is “straining” too. Seeing and feeling God’s presence around him inspires him with hope of eternal bliss in the afterlife, but even with his faith in Christ’s death and resurrection, Hopkins can never be absolutely confident that he will be “worthy the winning” of that salvation.

Like Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) felt a presence in spring and from that presence formulated a verbal perspective of tentative gain and definitive “loss.” In her poem, a Light Exists in Spring, Dickinson watches the effect of the early March sunlight on the landscape, then turns inward to consider its effect on human perception.

A Light exists in Spring

A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period-
When March is scarcely here
A Color stands abroad
On Solitary Fields
That Science cannot overtake
But Human Nature feels.

It waits upon the Lawn,
It shows the furthest Tree
Upon the furthest Slope you know
It almost speaks to you

Then as Horizons step
Or Noons report away
Without the Formula of sound
It passes and we stay-

A quality of loss
Affecting our Content
As Trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a Sacrament-

In his poem, Hopkins asserts the potential for seeing and hearing manifestations of God’s presence through nature, Dickinson “feels” only an ephemeral presence of Divinity. The “Light” briefly appears in early “Spring,” and spreads “A Color” that “Science cannot overtake.” Science may calculate the changing angles of the earth to account for its particular slant, but only “Human Nature “feels,” though tenuously, the divine presence the “Light” creates through its “Color / On Solitary Fields.”

In the second stanza of Dickinson’s poem, the “Light” seems to illuminate nature beyond what eyes can see: “It waits upon the lawn, / It shows the furthest Tree / Upon the furthest Slope you know.” This “illumination” transcends the limits of science, and for a moment the speaker gazes that light Adam and Eve knew before they ate the fruit and brought the perilous “knowledge” of good and evil to earth. Then, at a moment of sudden intimacy with her, the “Light” “almost speaks to” her.

As she sees this “Light,” does the speaker hear the voice of the Divine? Perhaps briefly. The earth rotates and as always, the “Horizons Step / Or Noons report away / Without the Formula of sound.” As for the “Light,” “It passes and we stay-” leaving her with “A quality of loss / Affecting our Content.” The final two lines bring forth the daily conflict between spiritual “Content” and the mercenary habits of “Trade [that] had suddenly encroached / Upon a Sacrament.”

Through her poem, Dickinson traces a light of spring that moves backward and forward. Backward toward an Edenic paradise where the light of the divine shone timeless and immutable and forward encroached upon by a mercenary world that debases the human spirit.

The excerpt from Chaucer and the two poems that follow suggest different ways spring affects us with its beauty and animating power. Whether it awakens a desire to embark on a pilgrimage to cleanse our imperfections or to see through our clouded perceptions, spring will sadly arrive this year in the midst of yet another war, piling higher needless misery and needless mourning.

Thomas Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard

Time honored poetry (1500-1800) written in the established forms and structures are often considered too formal, too demanding or too obscure for today’s students to read and study. Much of this poetry employs allusions to Greek mythology and obliquely metaphorical language that confuse and frustrate them. Consequently, the classic poets from the 16th to 18th centuries such as Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Marvell and Pope are increasingly neglected in schools. Even the more accessible Romantic poets of the 19th century, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Keats, once very popular subjects in English classrooms, are also fading from the English curriculum. Finally, the modern masters Yeats, Eliot, Frost and Stevens, who require as much effort to understand as the classic poems do, make fewer appearances in the classrooms.

What has replaced the great poems of the past are contemporary poems, usually written in free verse that address themes depicting everyday experiences that students can identify with. As worthwhile as some of these poems might be, studying classic poems rewards both teachers and students with profound universal truths in language artistically eloquent.

The classic poem, Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, is one of the richest in the English language. Even though it was published against his wishes, it is a poem that should be read by all students. The poem has been admired for its reflections on the universal experiences of memory and mortality and praised by readers. It is a somber, evocative and powerful meditation on human experience:

If you would like to listen to the poem as you read, here is an audio of it.

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

                                   1
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
         The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
         And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
                                   2
Now fades the glimm'ring landscape on the sight,
         And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
         And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds;
                                   3
Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tow'r
         The moping owl does to the moon complain
Of such, as wand'ring near her secret bow'r,
         Molest her ancient solitary reign.
                                   4
Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,
         Where heaves the turf in many a mould'ring heap,
Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
         The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
                                    5
The breezy call of incense-breathing Morn,
         The swallow twitt'ring from the straw-built shed,
The cock's shrill clarion, or the echoing horn,
         No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.
                                     6
For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,
         Or busy housewife ply her evening care:
No children run to lisp their sire's return,
         Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.
                                      7
Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,
         Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke;
How jocund did they drive their team afield!
         How bow'd the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!
                                      8
Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
         Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
         The short and simple annals of the poor.
                                      9
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r,
         And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike th' inevitable hour.
         The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
                                      10
Nor you, ye proud, impute to these the fault,
         If Mem'ry o'er their tomb no trophies raise,
Where thro' the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault
         The pealing anthem swells the note of praise.
                                       11
Can storied urn or animated bust
         Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?
Can Honour's voice provoke the silent dust,
         Or Flatt'ry soothe the dull cold ear of Death?
                                       12
Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
         Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway'd,
         Or wak'd to ecstasy the living lyre.
                                       13
But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page
         Rich with the spoils of time did ne'er unroll;
Chill Penury repress'd their noble rage,
         And froze the genial current of the soul.
                                        14
Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
         The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flow'r is born to blush unseen,
         And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
                                        15
Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast
         The little tyrant of his fields withstood;
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
         Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.
                                        16
Th' applause of list'ning senates to command,
         The threats of pain and ruin to despise,
To scatter plenty o'er a smiling land,
         And read their hist'ry in a nation's eyes,
                                        17
Their lot forbade: nor circumscrib'd alone
         Their growing virtues, but their crimes confin'd;
Forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne,
         And shut the gates of mercy on mankind,
                                         18
The struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide,
         To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame,
Or heap the shrine of Luxury and Pride
         With incense kindled at the Muse's flame.
                                         19
Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife,
         Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray;
Along the cool sequester'd vale of life
         They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.
                                          20
Yet ev'n these bones from insult to protect,
         Some frail memorial still erected nigh,
With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck'd,
         Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.
                                          21
Their name, their years, spelt by th' unletter'd muse,
         The place of fame and elegy supply:
And many a holy text around she strews,
         That teach the rustic moralist to die.
                                          22
For who to dumb Forgetfulness a prey,
         This pleasing anxious being e'er resign'd,
Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
         Nor cast one longing, ling'ring look behind?
                                          23
On some fond breast the parting soul relies,
         Some pious drops the closing eye requires;
Ev'n from the tomb the voice of Nature cries,
         Ev'n in our ashes live their wonted fires.
                                          24
For thee, who mindful of th' unhonour'd Dead
         Dost in these lines their artless tale relate;
If chance, by lonely contemplation led,
         Some kindred spirit shall inquire thy fate,
                                          25
Haply some hoary-headed swain may say,
         "Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn
Brushing with hasty steps the dews away
         To meet the sun upon the upland lawn.
                                          26
"There at the foot of yonder nodding beech
         That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high,
His listless length at noontide would he stretch,
         And pore upon the brook that babbles by.
                                          27
"Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn,
         Mutt'ring his wayward fancies he would rove,
Now drooping, woeful wan, like one forlorn,
         Or craz'd with care, or cross'd in hopeless love.
                                           28
"One morn I miss'd him on the custom'd hill,
         Along the heath and near his fav'rite tree;
Another came; nor yet beside the rill,
         Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he;
                                           29
"The next with dirges due in sad array
         Slow thro' the church-way path we saw him borne.
Approach and read (for thou canst read) the lay,
         Grav'd on the stone beneath yon aged thorn."

THE EPITAPH
                                           30
Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth
       A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown.
Fair Science frown'd not on his humble birth,
       And Melancholy mark'd him for her own.
                                           31
Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere,
       Heav'n did a recompense as largely send:
He gave to Mis'ry all he had, a tear,
       He gain'd from Heav'n ('twas all he wish'd) a friend.
                                           32
No farther seek his merits to disclose,
       Or draw his frailties from their dread abode,
(There they alike in trembling hope repose)
       The bosom of his Father and his God.

  

The 32 stanzas that comprise the poem begins with Gray’s observation of the landscape, then proceeds through a meditation on the circumstances of life, on the inevitability of death, and on the necessity of religious faith.

In the first four stanzas Gray’s speaker listens to the tolling “curfew,” watches the “lowing herds,” sees the farmer head homeward and then finds himself isolated in the darkening evening. He is greeted by the “droning” sound of the “beetle,” and the bells “tinkling” in the “distant folds.” In the “ivy-mantle tower” the “owl” is disturbed by his presence and “does to the moon complain.” These first three stanzas evoke a charming quality to the scene that is countered by the speaker’s emotional response, which is voiced in the last line of the first stanza: “And leaves the world to darkness and me.” The speaker evokes more than a sense of solitude; thoughts echo a profound loneliness, an isolation from humanity. He then turns to the churchyard, surveys the grounds, which are punctuated by “many a mouldering heap” in which “The rude Forefathers of the hamlet sleep.” The sight of the graves initiates the speaker’s meditation on the simple dignity of villagers.

Through stanzas 5-7, the speaker visualizes the activities the “Forefathers” participated in. He sees the local resident farmers and inhabitants perform the work that give authentic meaning to their lives and that clothe these men and women in a simple and pure dignity.

Contrasting with the rustic elements in 5-8 are the “Proud” aristocratic class in stanzas 8-11. Gray warns the upper class, who when they die are memorialized ornately in grand mausoleums or entombed within “fretted vaults[s]” where the “pealing anthem swells the note of praise, that in the end death’s scythe harvests them the same as it does the anonymous poor. The question that ends stanza 11 resonates in its leveling, incontestable power over all humans regardless of their nobility, status or wealth:

Can storied urn or animated bust
Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?
Can Honour's voice provoke the silent dust,
Or Flattery soothe the dull cold ear of Death?

The “rude Forefathers,” who lived and died in obscurity, nevertheless might have been as great as the great men of the age. What limited their “achievements” in life were not their potential, but the circumstance into which they were born, lived and died. As Gray tells us in stanzas 12-15, like men who accomplished extraordinary deeds, the forgotten poor could have been “pregnant with celestial fire,” “sway’d” the “rod of empire,” or even “walked to ecstasy the lyre” as a poet. Like a “flower [that] is born to blush unseen,” they might have become renowned for their poetry, perhaps another Milton, but for their situation in life.

Though their poverty circumscribed the "growing virtues" of the rustics, it also lessened the likelihood of their "crimes," as Gray notes in stanzas 16-19. Their simple lives separated them “Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife” and preserved “the noiseless tenour” of their existence.

In stanzas 20-21, Gray turns back to the churchyard headstones and wonders about the “unlettered Muse,” who etched the headstones with “elegy,” “many a holy text,” to memorialize those “rude Forefathers” sleeping in their “narrow cell[s].” In Stanza 23, Gray becomes emotional himself as he thinks of the men and women who grieve their loved ones.

His response to the churchyard causes him to reflect on his own mortality, and Gray introduces in stanza 25 a new speaker, a “hoary-headed swain” who, in stanzas 25-29, will remember him as a “woeful-wan, like one forlorn, / Or crazed with care, or cross’d in hopeless love.” After the swain elegizes Gray, The Epitaph, stanzas 30-32, closes the poem portraying Gray as a humble “Youth to Fortune and Fame unknown,” who ultimately place his faith in “The bosom of his Father and his God.”

"Needless Death After All"

 After Alex Pretti was murdered by CBP agents, Kristy Noem and Stephen Miller immediately slandered him. Noem said Pretti was a “domestic terrorist,” and Miller labeled him a “would be assassin.” Video evidence refuted those lies and families and friends of Good and Pretti told the truth about who these two really were. According to those who knew Good best, she was “extremely compassionate,” “loving,” “forgiving,” and “affectionate.” Pretti’s coworkers, friends and family spoke of him as a “role model,” “diligent and respectful,” “kind,” and “a good man.” When the history of Trump’s administration is written, they should be acknowledged prominently along with a cadre of individuals who have lost jobs/professions (the list is far too extensive to itemize) as casualties of a malevolent presidency.

Trump himself fantasies about how history will remember him. He imagines being glorified as a great leader: a man whose effect on human events will astound future audiences; a man whom poets elegize for the wonders he has achieved. In truth, historians who chronicle his two terms will paint a grim and disturbing portrait of a man mastered by greed, envy, spite and narcissism. Poets will only write elegies that will drip with a caustic ridicule of his poisonous personality. Of course, Maga devotees such as Mark Levin will forever ooze with sycophantic adulation for him.

The elegy, a form of poetry that dates back to Greek and Roman poetry, and has been used to express love, loss or mourning, among other subjects. In 16th century English literature, the elegy became more strictly a poem of lament for the death of someone. The most famous elegy (or it used to be) is Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1750). Shortly after World War I, William Butler Yeats wrote his finest elegy, lamenting the death of Robert Gregory, who was killed while flying in Italy during the war:

In Memory of Major Robert Gregory

I

Now that we're almost settled in our house
I'll name the friends that cannot sup with us
Beside a fire of turf in th' ancient tower,
And having talked to some late hour
Climb up the narrow winding stair to bed:
Discoverers of forgotten truth
Or mere companions of my youth,
All, all are in my thoughts to-night being dead.

II

Always we'd have the new friend meet the old
And we are hurt if either friend seem cold,
And there is salt to lengthen out the smart
In the affections of our heart,
And quarrels are blown up upon that head;
But not a friend that I would bring
This night can set us quarrelling,
For all that come into my mind are dead.

III

Lionel Johnson comes the first to mind,
That loved his learning better than mankind.
Though courteous to the worst; much falling he
Brooded upon sanctity
Till all his Greek and Latin learning seemed
A long blast upon the horn that brought
A little nearer to his thought
A measureless consummation that he dreamed.

IV

And that enquiring man John Synge comes next,
That dying chose the living world for text
And never could have rested in the tomb
But that, long travelling, he had come
Towards nightfall upon certain set apart
In a most desolate stony place,
Towards nightfall upon a race
passionate and simple like his heart.

V

And then I think of old George Pollexfen,
In muscular youth well known to Mayo men
For horsemanship at meets or at racecourses,
That could have shown how pure-bred horses
And solid men, for all their passion, live
But as the outrageous stars incline
By opposition, square and trine;
Having grown sluggish and contemplative.

VI

They were my close companions many a year.
A portion of my mind and life, as it were,
And now their breathless faces seem to look
Out of some old picture-book;
I am accustomed to their lack of breath,
But not that my dear friend's dear son,
Our Sidney and our perfect man,
Could share in that discourtesy of death

VII

For all things the delighted eye now sees
Were loved by him: the old storm-broken trees
That cast their shadows upon road and bridge;
The tower set on the stream's edge;
The ford where drinking cattle make a stir
Nightly, and startled by that sound
The water-hen must change her ground;
He might have been your heartiest welcomer.

VIII

When with the Galway foxhounds he would ride
From Castle Taylor to the Roxborough side
Or Esserkelly plain, few kept his pace;
At Mooneen he had leaped a place
So perilous that half the astonished meet
Had shut their eyes; and where was it
He rode a race without a bit?
And yet his mind outran the horses' feet.

IX

We dreamed that a great painter had been born
To cold Clare rock and Galway rock and thorn,
To that stern colour and that delicate line
That are our secret discipline
Wherein the gazing heart doubles her might.
Soldier, scholar, horseman, he,
And yet he had the intensity
To have published all to be a world's delight.

X

What other could so well have counselled us
In all lovely intricacies of a house
As he that practised or that understood
All work in metal or in wood,
In moulded plaster or in carven stone?
Soldier, scholar, horseman, he,
And all he did done perfectly
As though he had but that one trade alone.

XI

Some burn dam faggots, others may consume
The entire combustible world in one small room
As though dried straw, and if we turn about
The bare chimney is gone black out
Because the work had finished in that flare.
Soldier, scholar, horseman, he,
As 'twere all life's epitome.
What made us dream that he could comb grey hair?

XII

I had thought, seeing how bitter is that wind
That shakes the shutter, to have brought to mind
All those that manhood tried, or childhood loved
Or boyish intellect approved,
With some appropriate commentary on each;
Until imagination brought
A fitter welcome; but a thought
Of that late death took all my heart for speech.  

The poem’s first two stanzas begin with Yeats in his summer home, an ancient tower in Galway he purchased in 1917. As he sits there with his wife, he speaks of the departed friends who “cannot sup with us.” He and his wife “talk to some late hour,” then climb the “narrow winding stair to bed,” those dead “friends” still occupying his “thoughts.” He recalls times when his new and old friends would meet and how it disconcerted him if either were “cold” or quarrelsome with one another. But a sadness colors his thoughts, since not a “friend that I would bring” is alive to join in conversation.

The three of the friends Yeats has in mind are Lionel Johnson, John Synge, George Pollexfen, who each possessed a singular quality Yeats valued. In stanzas III-V, Yeats catalogues these friends according to their respective merits. Lionel Johnson was a friend Yeats met around 1888 or 1889. Yeats admired him for classical scholarship. Yeats met John Singe in Paris in 1896. Synge possessed a simple, creative spirit. George Pollexfen, Yeats’s maternal uncle, was a gifted athlete and horseman.

These friends have been dead for some time, and he compares his memory of them to looking through “some old picture-book.” He has become “accustomed to their lack of breath.” But the recent death of Robert Gregory still affects him profoundly. Gregory was the son of Lady Gregory, a close friend of Yeats, with whom he co-founded the Abbey Theatre. Robert Gregory was also Yeats’s friend, and it was he who encouraged Yeats to purchase Thoor Ballylee. After Lady Gregory received the news of her son’s death, she asked Yeats to write a poem honoring her son.

Robert Gregeory enters the poem in stanza VI, where Yeats quickly raises Gregory with the highest praise he could conceive, “Our Sidney and our perfect man.” He identifies him with Sir Philip Sidney “Our Sidney” and nominates him “our perfect man.” Sir Philp Sidney (1554-1586) was a courtier, scholar, soldier and poet who died fighting the Spanish in 1586 was considered one of the most brilliant men of the Renaissance. To Yeats, Gregory is the modern epitome of this renaissance man.

In stanzas VII-X, Yeats recalls Robert Gregory’s specific qualities. Gregory was a remarkably sensitive young man. He “loved and took delight” in all he saw and heard. He was no less warm-hearted toward those he met. Had he lived, “He might have been your heartiest welcomer.” His speed and daring on horseback surpassed all other riders, though his agile riding could not “keep pace” with the dexterous celerity of his mind. As an exceptional artist, Gregory’s passion doubled the artistic “discipline” of craft needed to produce great art. Finally, Gregory understood the finer “intricacies of a house” and he even “counselled” Yeats and his wife on how to improve their “Tower.”

A “Soldier, scholar, horseman,” Gregory embodied all that is perfection, and “life’s epitome.” Yeats asks, “What made us dream that he could comb grey hair?” How could perfection last into old age? In the last stanza, Yeats brings together the three men whom he ruminated about, and then his elegy strikes the deepest note of mourning. As he has attempted “to have brought to mind” Johnson, Synge, and Pollexfen to illustrate all Gregory’s attributes, a “bitter…wind…shakes” his imagination, and “a thought / Of that late death took all my heart for speech.”

Like Robert Gregory, Renee Good and Alex Pretti have their eulogizers. Their deaths will forever cause anguish. The qualities for which they will be remembered will forever console and sadden their families and friends. They died trying to help the victims of Trump’s wanton cruelty.  

Yeats and Trump

Early Saturday morning (1/24/26) in Minneapolis, Border Patrol agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, another American citizen and innocent victim of Trump’s immigration crackdown. Trying to cover-up this murder, the administration immediately began lying about the victim. Greg Bovino lied, claiming Pretti was “an individual [who] wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” Trump’s henchman, Stephen Miller tweeted that “A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat[ic] account sides with the terrorist” and “have been fanning the flames of insurrection.” Trump blamed Gov. Tim Walz and Mayor Jacob Frey for Pretti’s death.

Hannah Arendt once wrote: “The liar is defeated by reality, for which there is no substitute; no matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large enough, even if he enlists the help of computers, to cover the immensity of factuality.” These days, “the immensity of factuality” arrives in the form of cell phone videos, which we all can view. Against the irrefutable visual evidence of Pretti’s killing, Trump and his fellow liars try to rewrite reality by flooding the media with a stream of lies and, no doubt, those falsehoods will be accepted by fanatical followers and those too lazy to watch the videos and be honest with themselves.

Some writers, lawyers, and American citizens are worried the U.S. is lurching toward civil war. At the University of Penn (ironically Trump’s alma mater) Clare Finkelstein, a professor at the law school, “warned that Minnesota is now uncomfortably close to that trajectory.” Before Trump unleashed ICE on American cities, the notion that civil war could erupt in America struck me as simply impossible. Now, unfortunately, Trump and his administration are fueling that possibility.

During the Irish Civil War (1922-1923), William Butler Yeats witnessed the violence and killing the Irish perpetrated against one another after together they had succeeded in fighting and fending off a superior foe, the British. Heartbroken by the destruction and death civil war ignited, Yeats wrote seven poems collected under the title, “Meditations in Time of Civil War.” One poem, “The Stare’s Nest by My Window” seems pertinent to the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti:

The Stare's Nest by My Window

The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening, honey-bees
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned,
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in the empty house of the stare

A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war;
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; oh, honey-bees
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

Yeats’s poem is a lament against the violence and death the fighting between the Pro-treaty forces and anti-treaty forces caused. He wrote the poem during the civil war. His call to the bees to build a hive in the “loosening masonry” of his home is a metaphor for both sides of the conflict to end their fighting and unite in a new harmony of peace, as the refrain of each stanza intimates. But as the fighting spread, Yeats and his family felt walled in by the uncertainty of violence: “We are closed in, and the key is turned / On our uncertainty.” They heard of “A man killed, or a house burned, / Yet no clear fact to be discerned.” In stanza 3, two particularly lines are startling:

Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:

Yeats’s final stanza articulates what drove the Irish to brutally turn on each other over political disagreement:

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; oh, honey-bees
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

Just as in Yeats’s Ireland at the time of its separation from Britain, America has two intensively polarized political parties. Tragically, both Irish parties resorted to horrific violence as they pursued their political aims. In America today, only one of the parties is directing a government agency to use violence against American citizens. It is doing so in its attempt to realize a fantasy about purifying America of “undesirable immigrants.” Killing Goode and Pretti should demonstrate to anyone how far Trump will go and how willingly he will use violence to achieve his (and Miller’s) objective.  

Achilles' Shield

Homer’s world of the Iliad glorifies war and heroism. In that world, Thetis, mother of Achilles, asks Hephaestus, Greek god of blacksmiths, artisans, and metallurgy to forge a shield for her son Achilles, the greatest Greek hero of the Trojan War. On this magnificent shield, Hephaestus emblazoned a microcosm of the Greek world using all the fine metals: gold, silver, copper, tin. The shield depicts a microcosm of the world, and life in ancient Greece and represents the grandeur of war and the serenity of peace.

Since Trump has entered the White House, he has emblazoned the residence with gold appliqués, gold inscriptions, and gold ornaments to transform the residence into his “gilded age of greatness.” What can all this gold signify? It is Trump’s shield, his projection and affirmation of his heroic grandeur. (Trump’s “gold shield” has been forged by his “gold guy” from Florida rather than a Greek god.) This gaudy gilt is a manifestation of Trump’s self-glorification. As Thomas B. Edsail documents in his New York Times essay, Trump is a “malignant” narcissist who possesses “little external capacity for self-soothing or self-valuation” and requires “continuous external affirmations to feel real and intact.”

That Trump needs to see gold everywhere to verify his worth is one symptom of his narcissism. His need to dominate universities, law firms, and other nations is another, much more disturbing manifestation of his narcissistic personality disorder. Recently he has threatened to take Greenland by force, and since Greenland has extensive self-rule over domestic matters and Denmark handles its defense and foreign policy, Trump has threatened to use tariffs as weapons against European countries if they do not accept his demands to buy that vast island. Greenland, where U.S. troops have always been welcome, definitively stated they do not want to be part of the United States. They clearly prefer Denmark to the U.S. Trump claims to be motivated by national security concerns, but it is his fantasy to see his name in future history books as the president who acquired the largest territory ever to become part of the U.S. For him, this is another attempt at self-aggrandizement and would elevate him in glory above all previous and future presidents. This move against Greenland threatens to undermine NATO, not only vexing, but also placing member nations in jeopardy after 76 years of cooperation.

With Greenland fearing an American invasion, with ICE troops terrorizing the people of Minneapolis, and with regular army troops mobilizing to deploy there, the predictions that Trump would become a tyrant if elected now seem disturbingly prescient.

The poet W. H. Auden (1907-1973) saw the effect 20th century tyrants and world wars had on humanity. In his poem, “The Shield of Achilles,” Auden’s reworks Homer’s idealized art into terrifying visions of political totalitarianism and social depravity:

    
The Shield of Achilles

    She looked over his shoulder
       For vines and olive trees,
    Marble well-governed cities
       And ships upon untamed seas,
    But there on the shining metal
       His hands had put instead
    An artificial wilderness
       And a sky like lead.

A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
   No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
   Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
   An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.

Out of the air a voice without a face
   Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
   No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
   Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

    She looked over his shoulder
       For ritual pieties,
    White flower-garlanded heifers,
       Libation and sacrifice,
    But there on the shining metal
       Where the altar should have been,
    She saw by his flickering forge-light
       Quite another scene.

Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
   Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
   A crowd of ordinary decent folk
   Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.

The mass and majesty of this world, all
   That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
   And could not hope for help and no help came:
   What their foes liked to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.

    She looked over his shoulder
       For athletes at their games,
    Men and women in a dance
       Moving their sweet limbs
    Quick, quick, to music,
       But there on the shining shield
    His hands had set no dancing-floor
       But a weed-choked field.

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
   Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
   That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
   Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.

    The thin-lipped armorer,
       Hephaestus, hobbled away,
    Thetis of the shining breasts
       Cried out in dismay
    At what the god had wrought
       To please her son, the strong
    Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
       Who would not live long.

Auden’s poem lays out a structure of apparent contrast between the ancient Greek and modern worlds. The contrast between these two worlds reflects what Thetis expects Hephaestus to create, and what actually appears on the shield. Looking over Hephaestus’ shoulder in stanza 1, Thetis anticipates bucolic images of life and orderly communities: “She looked over his shoulder / for vines and olive trees, / Marble well-governed cities” and instead sees “An artificial wilderness / And a sky like lead.” In stanza 2, this lifeless, colorless picture evolves further into “A plain without a feature, bare, and brown,” where “An unintelligible multitude” of “A million eyes, a million boots” (of soldiers) await their orders. Those orders come in stanza 3 when a faceless voice directs the soldiers to march mindlessly toward the suffering and death they are ordered to inflict. The “logic” legitimizing their orders is supported by “statistics” and therefore the soldiers obey their orders without questioning the rationale to attack others. (Reminds one of Mark Kelly, etc., reminding military men and women to be alert to illegal military orders in contrast to following orders blindly.)

In stanza 4, Thetis searches the emerging shield for images of religious ceremonies of “ritual pieties / White flower-garlanded heifers / Libations and sacrifice,” but Hephaestus has etched “Quite another scene.” That scene, depicted in stanza 5, is a prison camp enclosed with “Barbed wire” detaining three prisoners, while a “crowd of ordinary decent folk / Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke.” Auden’s irony is unmistakable and the religious images of “three posts driven upright in the ground,” followed by the details of stanza 6, tell the reader that an incredibly cruel execution about to take place is simply the murder of innocent men.

In stanza 7, Thetis looks one last time over Hephaestus’ shoulder, expecting to see scenes of great athletic competition and men and women sweetly dancing to music, only to view a “weed-choked field” in which a “ragged urchin” wanders without purpose and cruelly throws a stone at frightened bird. At this point in the poem, Hephaestus’ artistic impetus for crafting these scenes on Achilles’ shield becomes clear. Human cruelty and violence are endemic to human nature and are “axioms to him, (Hephaestus) who never heard / Of any world where promises were kept, / Or one could weep because another wept.”

Auden’s poem might seem an extreme exaggeration in comparison to America under Trump, but poetry can reveal painful truths more powerfully than prose. In the poem, poor Thetis looks “over [Hephaestus’] shoulder” as he constructs a new shield. She anticipates “ritual pieties,” but image after image display the brutal reality Auden’s witnessed in the modern world, during and after World War II. The last stanza contains words that could be uttered by many in Minneapolis:

Thetis of the shining breasts
       Cried out in dismay
    At what the god had wrought.