4.6 • 729 Ratings
🗓️ 9 July 2019
⏱️ 7 minutes
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0:00.0 | Welcome back to The Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. |
0:07.6 | I'm David Curran. |
0:09.0 | Today's poem is by W.H. Auden, an English poet who lived from 1907 to 1973. |
0:17.1 | You've heard him a few times on this podcast. |
0:19.2 | He is best known for poems like September 1st, 1939, and The Shield of Achilles. |
0:25.5 | The poem that I'm going to read today is a short poem called Epitaph on a tyrant. It was recommended to me by Am Juster, who is the poetry editor of First Things magazine. I'd read it before, but when he mentioned it again, |
0:40.4 | I thought, this is one I have to share in the show. |
0:42.4 | It is only six lines long, so this will not be a long episode, |
0:46.5 | but this is a very interesting poem. |
0:49.8 | And again, this is Epitaph on a Tyrant by W.H. Auden. |
0:56.7 | This is from a collection called Another Time, which was published in 1940. This is how it goes. |
1:04.2 | Perfection of a kind was what he was after. And the poetry he invented was easy to understand. |
1:15.0 | He knew human folly like the back of his hand |
1:20.2 | and was greatly interested in armies and fleets. |
1:26.0 | When he laughed, |
1:31.2 | respectable senators burst with laughter. |
1:33.7 | And when he cried, |
1:37.2 | the little children died in the streets. This is one of those poems that packs such a punch because of its turn. |
1:51.4 | But it's also one of those turns that it builds up to. |
1:55.0 | Reputedly, I have read in a very little bit of research on this poem for this episode |
2:00.1 | that Auden wrote |
2:02.3 | this in the late 30s when he was living in Germany during the, well, not the rise of Hitler, |
... |
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