Welcome back to The Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network.

I'm David Curran.

Today's poem is by W.H. Auden, an English poet who lived from 1907 to 1973.

You've heard him a few times on this podcast.

He is best known for poems like September 1st, 1939, and The Shield of Achilles.

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,

I thought, this is one I have to share in the show.

It is only six lines long, so this will not be a long episode,

but this is a very interesting poem.

And again, this is Epitaph on a Tyrant by W.H. Auden.

This is from a collection called Another Time, which was published in 1940. This is how it goes.

Perfection of a kind was what he was after. And the poetry he invented was easy to understand.

He knew human folly like the back of his hand

and was greatly interested in armies and fleets.

When he laughed,

respectable senators burst with laughter.

And when he cried,

the little children died in the streets. This is one of those poems that packs such a punch because of its turn.

But it's also one of those turns that it builds up to.

Reputedly, I have read in a very little bit of research on this poem for this episode

that Auden wrote

this in the late 30s when he was living in Germany during the, well, not the rise of Hitler,

...