Welcome to Season 3 of The Well Read Poem podcast. In this third season we will explore six lyric poems by the great English modernist W. H. Auden. The study of Auden’s poetry is in many respects a study of the 20th Century itself, and of its religious, philosophical, and political concerns.  Auden was one of the great chroniclers of the so-called “Age of Anxiety,” a term he coined, and a brilliant and sympathetic analyst of modern man’s fears and hopes, beliefs and unbeliefs. Poem begins at timestamp 3:15. The Shield of Achilles by W. H. Auden        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 like 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,        Hephaestos, 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. From The Shield of Achilles by W. H. Auden, published by Random House. Copyright © 1955 W. H. Auden, renewed by The Estate of W. H. Auden. Reproduced for educational purposes only.