The Shield of Achilles by W. H. Auden
Tags:
Poetry
,
W. H. Auden
The Shield of
Achilles
W. H. Auden, 1907 – 1973
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. Used by permission of
Curtis Brown, Ltd.
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