W. H. Auden and September 1, 1939

Today, it's been exactly 70 years since Germany invaded Poland, starting the unimaginable horror that history now calls World War Two. The talented, homosexual, socialist English poet Wystan Hugh Auden was 32 years old in 1939. He was in New York, but he had lived in the Berlin of the Weimar Republic, he had seen first-hand the Spanish Civil War, and he had been shocked by the news of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. As a result, he famously called the 1930s "a low dishonest decade".

That phrase can be found in Auden's response to the invasion of Poland, a poem called "September 1, 1939". It also contains the line "We must love one another or die". Like many of Auden's poems, it needs to be read a number of times to reveal its symbolism. Here's the first verse.

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

"September 1, 1939" by W. H. Auden (1907–1973).