Today the chances of death are high, and it is necessary to accept guilt for murder. Tomorrow will have young poets, walks by the lake, bicycle races. There will be research into consciousness and fatigue and radiation, rediscovery of love and the arts, local politics, and quotidian life. This is where “our thoughts have bodies” and “Madrid is the heart.” Our fears and greed blossom into instruments of war, our friendships into an army. Spain is a dry square, snipped from Africa and welded to Europe. Hearing this they migrated like “gulls or the seeds of a flower.” They clung to the express trains and floated over the seas and walked the passes, all presenting their lives. Many people heard this throughout the peninsulas and plains, or in the islands or in the cities. In this, History is “your choice, your decision. If this spirit even answers, it has replied that it is not actually “the mover”-History is “whatever you do.” It will do what the nations and individuals choose. Since History or Time has intervened before, it should descend and intervene again, regardless of what form it takes. The nations combine the individual cries, calling to History. The poor live in their barren cottages and drop the paper to the floor, asking for “History the operator, the / Organiser” to be revealed. The poet whispers in the pines and the waterfall and the crags, calling for his vision and for the “luck of the sailor.” The investigator uses his instruments and analyzes bacteria or the planets he inquires and inquires. Yesterday was the belief in the perfection of the Greeks, the prayer to the sunset, and the “adoration of madmen.” Today the struggle.

Heretics were put on trial, and feuds over theology took place. Yesterday there was insurance and the divination of water and the creation of the clock and the taming of horses it was “the bustling world of the navigators.” Yesterday myths of fairies and giants were destroyed, and chapels were built in the forest.

The poem begins, “Yesterday the past.” It was yesterday that the trade routes sprang up and the counting-frame and the cromlech were used.

Auden selected poems