Epitaph on a Tyrant by W.H. Auden

Epitaph on a Tyrant

by W.H. Auden

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,

And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;

He knew human folly like the back of his hand,

And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;

When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,

And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

Lots of folks are turning to, and sharing, Shelley's "Ozymandias" these days--the famous poem of a king who has had built a colossal statue of himself, glorifying himself and his "achievements." The speaker in the poem comes across the statue in a desert; it is in pieces and decaying, a reminder that everyone and everything is temporary.

"Ozymandias" was written in 1817; over a hundred years later, in 1939, after spending time in Berlin, Auden wrote this poem. It was published in his book, Another Time, in 1940 by Random House, after he had moved to the United States.

It begins innocently enough and ends in horror. Reading it again, you understand that Auden was not praising in the first three lines--he was being sarcastic. Perfection and poetry are as snarky as one can get in this context. Even the knowledge the tyrant has, referred to in line 3, is not sincere praise on the part of the poet.

Line 4 starts us on the path to terror. That interest in the military is actually an interest in domination and war. The "respectable" senators laugh along with the tyrant's jokes out of fear. And when the tyrant gets upset, people die. Children die.

I believe Auden would be thrilled to have you make comparisons here between his poem's tyrant (in a poem written in 1939) and today's political situation in a handful of countries.

If only more people read poetry and listened to poets . . .

Another Time contains many of Auden's most famous poems and certainly my favorites: "Funeral Blues," "September 1, 1939," "Edward Lear," and "Musée des Beaux Arts." This book is widely available. Alexander McCall Smith, author of the delightful mystery series, No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, has a memoir entitled, What W.H. Auden Can Do for You. Auden had an incredible, politically active life, and you can read short biographies of him here at NEH, here at the Poetry Foundation, and here at Pulitzer.