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

I'm David Kern, and today is Tuesday, March 10th, 2020.

And the poem that I'm going to read to you is The Fall of Rome by W.H. Auden, an English poet who lived from 1907 to 1973.

Certainly one of the most important poets of the 20th century, one of the most celebrated and beloved poets

of the century. And this is how it goes, the fall of Rome by W. H. Auden.

The piers are pummeled by the waves. In a lonely field, the rain lashes an abandoned train.

Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns.

Agents of the Fisk pursue absconding tax defaulters through the sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send the temple prostitutes to sleep all the literati keep an imaginary friend cerebrotonic cato may extol the ancient disciplines but the muscle-bound marines mutiny for food and pay

caesar's double bed is warm as an unimportant clerk writes,

I do not like my work on a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity, little birds with scarlet legs sitting on their speckled eggs,

I each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast herds of reindeer move across miles and miles of golden moss,

silently and very fast.

As with a couple of Auden's more notable poems, The Fall of Rome has been written about extensively, constantly compared to other poems like The Wasteland and T.S. Eliot's work.

Many interpretations have been made of it. You can find dozens and dozens of blog posts online, let alone the

more academic writing that you can find in, you know, J-Store or books on Aden or his biography

or any number of places like that. And many of those blog posts and things like that are quite helpful.

It does have a sort of wasteland feel to it and that there is illusion after illusion,

suggestion after suggestion, and sometimes it's hard to know what each of those suggestions mean.

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