History Matters to Me

Sonnets from China XV

by W.H. Auden

As evening fell the day’s oppression lifted;
Tall peaks came into focus; it had rained:
Across wide lawns and cultured flowers drifted
The conversation of the highly trained.

Thin gardeners watched them pass and priced their shoes;
A chauffeur waited, reading in the drive,
For them to finish their exchange of views:
It looked a picture of the way to live.

Far off, no matter what good they intended,
Two armies waited for a verbal error
With well-made implements for causing pain,

And on the issue of their charm depended
A land laid waste with all its young men slain,
Its women weeping and its towns in terror.

Auden wrote this sonnet in 1938. When I first read it, in 1973, it was the time of the Vietnam War, and it seemed perfectly fitting to that conflict. Now that I have spent months teaching World War I and II, and while we remain embroiled in far-away wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this poem seems more powerful than ever. 

You who wronged a simple man
Bursting into laughter at the crime,
And kept a pack of fools around you
To mix good and evil, to blur the line,

Though everyone bowed down before you,
Saying virtue and wisdom lit your way,
Striking gold medals in your honor,
Glad to have survived another day,

Do not feel safe. The poet remembers.
You can kill one, but another is born.
The words are written down, the deed, the date.

And you’d have done better with a winter dawn,
A rope, and a branch bowed beneath your weight.

Washington, D.C., 1950

thanks to Andrew Sullivan of The Dish/The Atlantic

who paired it with a photograph of Mahmoud Ahmadinijad

This powerful article describes some of the circumstances for the almost 16 million people who live as refugees, according to the United Nations High Commission on Refugees. A further 26 million are internally displaced.

‘Overall, nations with a per capita GDP of less than 2,000 dollars hosted almost two-thirds of all refugees. According to the UNCHR report, “among the 25 countries with the highest number of refugees per 1 USD GDP per capita, all are developing countries, including 15 Least Developed Countries.” ‘

And, something not to be proud of:

‘The report gave Europe a grade of “D” and the U.S. a grade of “F” for “refoulement,” or returning refugees to places where their lives or freedoms could be threatened. It also gave Europe and the U.S. grades of “D” for “detention/access to courts.” ’