Never has a poem felt more poignant, more appropriate, than does Auden’s poem today. That’s the brilliance of literature - seventy-one years have gone, but still the words carry such weight:
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.
