Spain by Wystan Hugh Auden

Published january 16, 2015 17:28

Spain

And the poor in their fireless lodgings, dropping the sheets
Of the evening paper: "Our day is our loss, o show us
History the operator, the
Organiser, Time the refreshing river."
And the nations combine each cry, invoking the life
That shapes the individual belly and orders
The private nocturnal terror:
"Did you not found the city state of the sponge,

Raise the vast military empires of the shark
And the tiger, establish the robin' s plucky canton?
Intervene. Descend as a dove or
a furious papa or a mild engineer, but descend.