In Time of War: XVI

For one reason or another, Auden has been in the air lately. A friend at school showed me this poem today and it clung on to me like a limpet, as so many of Auden's poems do. In English, I'm teaching on the film Omagh, which is about the 1998 bombing by the RIRA; I think I shall use this poem tomorrow.


Here war is simple like a monument:
A telephone is speaking to a man;
Flags on a map assert that troops were sent;
A boy brings milk in bowls. There is a plan

For living men in terror of their lives,
Who thirst at nine who were to thirst at noon,
And can be lost and are, and miss their wives,
And, unlike an idea, can die too soon.

But ideas can be true though men die,
And we can watch a thousand faces
Made active by one lie:

And maps can really point to places
Where life is evil now:
Nanking; Dachau.