Oxford Journals
Oxford University Press
Brothers, who when the sirens roar
From office, shop and factory pour
Neath evening sky;
By cops directed to the fug
Of talkie-houses for a drug,
Or down canals to find a hug
Until you die:
We know, remember, what it is
That keeps you celebrating this
Sad ceremonial;
We know the terrifying brink
From which in dreams you nightly shrink.
I shall be sacked without, you think,
A testimonial.
We cannot put on airs with you
The fears that hurt you hurt us too
Only we say
That like all nightmares these are fake
If you would help us we could make
Our eyes to open, and awake
Shall find night day.
On you our interests are set
Your sorrow we shall not forget
While we consider
Those who in every county town
For centuries have done you brown,
But you shall see them tumble down
Both horse and rider.
O splendid person, you who stand
In spotless flannels or with hand
Expert on trigger;
Whose lovely hair and shapely limb
Year after year are kept in trim
Till buffers envy as you swim
Your Grecian figure:
You are not jealous yet, we know,
But we must warn you, even so
So pray be seated:
It isnt cricket, but its true
The lady who admires us, you
Have thought youre getting off with too,
For youre conceited.
Your beautys a completed thing.
The future kissed you, called you king,
Did she? Deceiver!
Shes not in love with you at all
No feat of yours can make her fall,
She will not answer to your call
Like your retriever.
Dare-devil mystic who bear the scars
Of many spiritual wars
And smoothly tell
The starving that their one salvation
Is personal regeneration
By fasting, prayer and contemplation;
Is it? Well,
Others have tried it, all delight
Sustained in that ecstatic flight
Could not console
When through exhausting hours theyd flown
From the alone to the Alone,
Nothing remained but the dry-as-bone
Night of the soul.
Coward; for all your goodness game
Your dream of Heaven is the same
As any bounders;
You hope to corner as reward
All that the rich can here afford:
Love and music and bed and board
While the world flounders.
And you, the wise man, full of humour
To whom our miserys a rumour
And slightly funny;
Proud of your nicely balanced view
You say as if it were something new
The fuss we make is mostly due
To lack of money.
Ah, what a little squirt is there
When of your arent-I-charming air
You stand denuded.
Behind your subtle sense of humour
You hide the bosss simple stuma,
Among the foes which we enumer
You are included.
Because you saw but were not indignant
The invasion of the great malignant
Cambridge ulcer
That army intellectual
Of every kind of liberal
Smarmy with friendship but of all
There are none falser.
A host of columbines and pathics
Who show the poor by mathematics
In their defence
That wealth and poverty are merely
Mental pictures, so that clearly
Every tramps a landlord really
In mind-events.
Let fever sweat them till they tremble
Cramp rack their limbs till they resemble
Cartoons by Goya:
Their daughters sterile be in rut,
May cancer rot their herring gut,
The circular madness on them shut,
Or paranoia.
Their splendid people, their wiseacres,
Professors, agents, magic-makers,
Their poets and apostles,
Their bankers and their brokers too,
And ironmasters shall turn blue
Shall fade away like morning dew
With club-room fossils.
August 1932
Notes
Brothers who when the sirens roar ... from The English Auden by WH Auden. Reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.