"There Will Be No Peace"

W.H. Auden's least-liked poem, "There Will Be No Peace," is making a quiet comeback: Many of its new readers are finding an entirely unexpected meaning in the work in their reaction to terrorist mass murder.

Auden wrote the poem in 1956 as a personal work, indeed he called it "one of the most purely personal poems I have ever written." It was his emotional reaction to the intense animosity he encountered at Oxford when he returned to Britain late in his life.

But as James Fenton wrote in The New York Review of Books in April 2000, "there seems to me to be something universally appreciable" in the work. That universally appreciable something has since emerged. The poem has four stanzas; here are the first and fourth:

Though mild clear weather
Smile again on the shire of your esteem
And its colours come back, the storm has changed you:
You will not forget, ever,
The darkness blotting out hope, the gale
Prophesying your downfall.
[…]
There will be no peace.
Fight back, then, with such courage as you have
And every unchivalrous dodge you know of,
Clear in your conscience on this:
Their cause, if they had one, is nothing to them now;
They hate for hate's sake.