Davenport-Hines thought Auden's poem "The Shield of Achilles" great. It
is quoted below. I read it again and liked it a little better --
anachronistic of course, but in being so Auden is able to criticize
modern wars and the motives behind them. He wrote this in 1952, the
year I entered the Marine Corps. The Korean War had been going on since
1950. Did he have that war in mind? We didn't have overwhelming
power back then. The North Koreans broke the treaty, invaded the south
and pushed them down to the tip of South Korea before MacArthur was able
to send reserves. Even his cutting them off from behind was not a
result of overwhelming force but of his cleverness. Overwhelming force
wasn't in evidence until the Chinese felt threatened and pushed down in
support of North Korea. In short I hope Auden didn't have that war in
mind, else I was one of those "million boots in line / without
expression, waiting for a sign."
We did wait in a lot of lines in the Corps and grab-ass was strictly
forbidden; hence we were (if someone senior was likely to be watching)
"without expression." As to "waiting for a sign" I don't think so. We
did a lot of waiting, but it was for mail, chow, things like that. And
when I was in Korea, the biggest thing we waited for was for our time to
be up so we could be rotated home.
I looked in Davenport-Hines index but could find nothing about what
Auden had in mind when he wrote this. Europe had not recovered from WW
II in 1952; perhaps he had something in Europe in mind.
Not a bad poem, but not great IMO.
Lawrence
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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