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

I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by W.H. Auden. It's called The Shield of Achilles. It was first published

in 195 and is a title work of a collection published in 1955.

This collection won the U.S. National Book Award for Poetry in 1956.

It is, of course, a reflection or a description of the shield that Achilles carried in the Iliad in Homer's epic.

It's a fairly long poem, so I'm going to dive right in,

and hopefully I'll have a moment to offer a quick, a couple quick observations about it before reading it again. So here it is, 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 and 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, in 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

board officials lounged, one cracked a joke,

and centuries sweated for the day was hot. A crowd of ordinary, decent folk watched from without,

...