A poem by W. H. Auden first published in 1952, and the title work of a collection of poems by Auden, published in 1955. It is Auden's response to the detailed description, or ekphrasis, of the shield borne by the hero Achilles in Homer's e…
A poem by W. H. Auden first published in 1952, and the title work of a collection of poems by Auden, published in 1955. It is Auden's response to the detailed description, or ekphrasis, of the shield borne by the hero Achilles in Homer's epic poem the Iliad.
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Anthology was broadcast from New York and presented "A selection of readings from poets, past and present and the music to accompany their poetry." Bing Crosby, Helen Hayes, Frank Lovejoy, Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt, Orson Welles, Agnes Moorehead, Walter Huston, and many more stars were recorded at the show as poetry readers.
Auden's poem is written in two different stanza forms, one form with shorter lines, the other with longer lines. The stanzas with shorter lines describe the making of the shield by the god Hephaestus, and report the scenes that Achilles' mother, the Nereid Thetis, expects to find on the shield and which Hephaestus, in Auden's version, does not make. Thetis expects to find scenes of happiness and peace like those described by Homer.
The stanzas with longer lines describe the scenes of a barren and impersonal modern world that Hephaestus creates in Auden's version. In the first scene described by these stanzas, an anonymous, dispassionate army listens. In the second scene, a crowd of ordinary people watch passively as three "pale figures" are dragged towards and tied to posts. In the third scene, a "ragged urchin" throws a stone at a bird; he takes it for granted "that girls are raped, that two boys knife a third," and "has never heard of any world where promises are kept / Or one could weep because another wept." In the closing stanza, composed of short line..
