May this post age as badly as W.H. Auden’s poem has aged well

“September 1, 1939” begins …

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.

And it continues:

All I have is a voice

To undo the folded lie,

The romantic lie in the brain

Of the sensual man-in-the-street

And the lie of Authority

Whose buildings grope the sky:

There is no such thing as the State

And no one exists alone;

Hunger allows no choice

To the citizen or the police;

We must love one another or die.