Hello and welcome back to the daily poem here in the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kerr.

Today's poem is by W.H. Auden, someone who I'm a little shocked that I haven't been reading on this show weekly.

He's certainly one of my very favorites, particularly as a stylist.

Auden's poems, though not simple, are not burdened by excess.

There's a precision to them that is freeing and really, really enjoyable as a reader,

and thus his poems are great to memorize, incidentally.

This poem is called The Unknown Citizen.

It was written in 1939 just after Aden had moved from England to the United States.

The poem was first published in January of 1940, actually, in The New Yorker,

and also appeared in his collection Another Time, which came out in 1940 as well.

This is how it goes.

The Unknown Citizen by W.H. Auden.

To J.S. 07.m. M. 378. This marble monument is erected by the state.

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be one against whom there was no official complaint,

and all the reports on his conduct agree that in the modern

sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint. For in everything he did, he served the greater

community. Except for the war till the day he retired, he worked in a factory and never got fired,

but satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors, Inc., yet he wasn't a scab

or odd in his views, for his union reports that he paid his dues, and our report on his union

shows it was sound, and our social psychology workers found that he was popular with his mates

and liked a drink. The press are convinced that he bought a paper every day and that his reactions to

advertisements were normal in every way. Policies taken out in his name prove that he was

...