Culture
What next for Paris Saint-Germain now Kylian Mbappe is leaving?
Maybe this was a glimpse of the future.
On Saturday night, Paris Saint-Germain took on Nantes without Kylian Mbappe in their starting XI. After playing 90 minutes against visitors Real Sociedad in the Champions League in midweek, and then privately revealing his intention to leave PSG at the end of the season, Mbappe was dropped by coach Luis Enrique.
The striker had sat on the bench against Lille the Saturday before that Champions League last-16 first leg — a precaution due to an ankle knock — but, other than that, the occasions he has been relegated among the replacements have been few and far between over the past seven years.
In the context of what has happened this past week, it felt symbolic of a power shift.
Had his confession over his impending exit ended his untouchable status and made rotation easier? Luis Enrique preferred a simpler reflection. “There was a Champions League match during the week and we needed energy to be competitive,” he said after his side’s 2-0 away win. “We had to give playing time to those who didn’t have it in Europe. Our goal is ambitious and I need all players involved to achieve it.”
But this picture in Nantes, of a PSG side without Mbappe, will be the norm soon enough. A team without a storied individual. The Ligue 1 champions and current leaders will be shedding the spotlight and the baggage that can come with that. But they will also be losing a game-changer who can — as he inevitably illustrated when he came on after an hour on Saturday — step off the bench, embarrass an opponent to win a penalty, score it, and kill off a match.
PSG have become accustomed to those moments of brilliance from Mbappe. But now, change is coming.
The impact will be huge.
Mbappe still made an impact as a substitute in Nantes (Jean Catuffe/Getty Images)
Preparing for life after Mbappe has not been an unforeseen eventuality for PSG. Speculation about his future has been a regular, and often tiresome, soap opera that has rumbled on through almost every transfer window over the past two years. Now, however, the conclusion feels more concrete. It may not have been publicly stated, nor his new club formally agreed. But this time it is for real.
Mbappe will leave PSG in the summer. And PSG must focus on life without him.
That is not going to be easy. Mbappe is not just any old player — and not only because of his talent. He is the most influential French player to have ever worn their shirt. He may have insisted that the club was not ‘Kylian Saint-Germain’ in a marketing dispute last year but, at least in recent times, it is hard to escape the veracity of that description.
Mbappe is arguably the best player in the world today, having established himself as PSG’s record goalscorer by the age of 25. He has claimed multiple records since he signed, at 18, from Ligue 1 rivals Monaco in summer 2017 on an initial loan that turned into a €180million (now £153.8m; $193.7m) permanent switch a year later.
He has scored the most goals for PSG both domestically and in Europe, as well as the most hat-tricks, the most ‘doubles’ and the most goals in a single game (five). He has helped France win the World Cup in that time, scored in successive World Cup finals, including one hat-trick, has won the tournament’s Golden Boot, and gone on to become France captain. He is the most prolific and consistent goalscorer the French league has seen since Jean-Pierre Papin was running riot for Marseille in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
If he wins the Ligue 1 Golden Boot again this season (a near-certainty: he is on 21 goals, second-placed Wissam Ben Yedder of Monaco has 11), he will have received that award six times in a row — no player has done that before.
How on earth do you fill that Grand Canyon of a void?
A disconsolate Mbappe departs the 2022 World Cup with the Golden Boot after France lost to Argentina in the final (Mohammad Karamali/Defodi Images via Getty Images)
On the field is one thing. Off it, his achievements place him not only among the greats, but above most of them.
Mbappe’s relationship with his hometown club has at times felt transactional; a pretense of an emotional link while ensuring international eyeballs, impressive brand embellishments and enormous financial recompenses. That may be why his relationship with the PSG supporters has not always appeared perfect — you could even argue he may not have achieved the levels of adoration his achievements deserve purely due to the repetitive nature of these transfer sagas.
But there is no doubting there is affection for him.
It was telling that at the start of this season, after Mbappe was cast aside as the club laid out their ultimatum of “extend or be sold”, that supporters near the Virage Auteuil — a stand at PSG’s Parc des Princes stadium frequented by the club’s ultras — were reticent to discuss the issue when approached by The Athletic. They acknowledged instead the delicate balance of that situation, respecting the club’s position but also pointing out the risk of losing a beloved player.
Again, on Saturday, the supporters held their fire. Mbappe has been whistled before over the intrigue and uncertainty around his future by the club’s fervent fans, but he was not whistled by those in the away end in Nantes.
Mbappe is a global but local star — born on the outskirts of Paris, and now a worldwide ambassador for his country and a player who has proudly worn PSG’s shirt. To lose him is a significant blow; and more so if it is confirmed he is to join a rival for the coveted Champions League in Real Madrid.
With fans also facing the uncomfortable prospect of PSG leaving Parc des Princes, their home since 1974 — just four years after the club was founded, it also adds to the uncertainty about the club’s future identity.
PSG will be viewed differently without Mbappe.
PSG fans unfurl a flag depicting Mbappe at Parc des Princes (Tim Clayton/Corbis via Getty Images)
The club have already begun the process of regeneration.
Last summer was the onset, when they parted company with both Lionel Messi and Neymar, under the declaration that their ‘superstar’ era was over and that, instead, PSG would pivot to a younger, more cohesive team built with a longer-term focus — and clear playing philosophy — in mind.
More than €300million was spent on talent with 13 new faces signed, plus the appointment of new head coach Luis Enrique. January saw the addition of two more youngsters in Lucas Beraldo and Gabriel Moscardo. The average age of the team has dropped dramatically.
PSG have also opened a new, €300million training ground, which brings together all aspects of the club — not just the men’s, women’s and academy football teams but also their judo and handball sides — on one site in Poissy, west of the city.
They have also found new financing via the American investment firm Arctos, which club sources, speaking on condition of anonymity to preserve their relationships, like all of those consulted for this piece, claim may dilute their sole ‘state-backed’ status. It is thought further investment will be pursued.
But it’s losing their last ‘galactico’ that truly closes the door on what has gone before.
That should at least mean a reduction in off-field dramas, which reached their height last summer when, after Messi’s unauthorised travels and subsequent suspension, Mbappe was left out of the club’s pre-season tour of Japan and South Korea and made to train with the club’s fringe players.
The notion of the “club above all else”, a point stressed in a pre-season speech to the players by the president Nasser Al-Khelaifi, may be easier to enforce. Mbappe’s influence always seemed above what most clubs would consider normal; his contract renewal was said to give him a say in recruitment and the appointment of some key staff, such as Luis Campos, PSG’s football advisor who works in recruitment on a consultancy basis.
On the other hand, though, this evolution means a loss of the spotlight and of course, the departure of a truly elite-level talent. This recent era may have failed to secure the longed-for Champions League, but has provided near-certainties of success. During his time at the club, Mbappe has won five titles and is well on his way to number six, and lifted the two domestic cups (before the League Cup was scrapped in 2020) a combined five times.
Mbappe and PSG celebrate winning Ligue 1 last season (Lionel Hahn/Getty Images)
PSG may have paraded him triumphantly holding a shirt emblazoned with “2025” when securing Mbappe to new terms only two years ago, but they say they have been preparing for his departure with a dual-track approach from the moment this saga exploded last summer.
On the sporting side, that represents a continuation of their “long-term” project under Luis Enrique, a part of which has seen public statements downplaying the “necessity” of winning the Champions League. That project will mean acting further in the market. On their list of summer targets, as The Athletic have reported, are Napoli’s Victor Osimhen and Barcelona midfielder Gavi. The expectation is there will be multiple reinforcements. PSG still want to be an elite club after Mbappe goes and they will attempt to fill the void if they can.
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On the field, there are quality players already in place. Take 21-year-old Bradley Barcola, who has hinted at his own exciting potential in a left-wing berth with his recent performances — and he will have competition from the exciting Xavi Simons, also 20, who is currently on a season’s loan at RB Leipzig in Germany. In the central attacking position, which Mbappe has often occupied, PSG have the options of Randal Kolo Muani, 25, and 22-year-old Goncalo Ramos, signed last summer in deals worth a combined €170million, before considering further action in the market.
There is more youth too — none more exciting than homegrown midfielder Warren Zaire-Emery, who is poised to sign a new long-term contract, probably after he turns 18 early next month.
Tactically, Mbappe’s exit will mean the final departure of a player who transcends tactical instruction.
“He plays where he decides; he has total freedom,” said Luis Enrique in December. “He has complete freedom to play inside, outside, wherever he wants, and we have to balance our positions in relation to him. The question is who will follow Kylian by attacking inside or outside; it will depend on the match.”
This year, Luis Enrique has fiddled with the position of Mbappe in his team, moving him from out wide to a central role. But his exit also means the loss of a match-winner — as was witnessed again on Saturday. Replacing his goals will be tough. His 21 league goals this season are 15 more than any of his team-mates.
Financially, the club also say they prepared for both eventualities. They point to how Mbappe has been costing them €200million per year in wages, and that investment will now be funnelled, in part, into their recruitment plans. There’s also the wiggle room created last summer by significant exits, including those of Neymar and Marco Verratti — players who commanded transfer fees in addition to the club getting their salaries off the books.
There are, though, commercial implications to all of this.
Club sources have tried to play down the impact Mbappe’s exit, certainly in the short-term, will have on commercial agreements where a majority have longer terms to run. PSG’s collaboration with the Jordan sportswear brand, for example, should continue for at least another two years with both parties already working through future designs, while their agreement with Nike, Jordan’s parent company, is in place until 2032.
They also point to broadening their horizons with multiple players who can now grow in stature out of Mbappe’s shadow, and those who can access new markets — such as South Korea international Lee Kang-in.
The club’s profile has grown significantly in recent years, and can now hold its own in spheres beyond football.
Lee Kang-in (Aurelien Meunier – PSG/PSG via Getty Images)
But there is no denying Mbappe is the closest thing PSG have to a Michael Jordan — a globally-recognised star whose impact off the field of play mirrors their achievements on it, boasting a legion of fans, independent of club loyalty, who will tune in and buy tickets to watch them play and take notice of which companies they work with. Some of that audience will go when Mbappe does.
PSG point to how the club have continued to grow despite the departures of Messi and Neymar last summer, but Mbappe’s will not be an easy one to overcome.
His exit will also have implications for Ligue 1, which is in the middle of trying to negotiate a new domestic television rights package after its broadcast auction was scrapped in October having received no offers.
Losing Mbappe, so quickly after Messi and Neymar moved on, is a big blow.
When it comes to new partners Arctos, PSG sources insist Mbappe leaving is not an issue, owing to the fact that placing so much investment in one individual, who could be injured at any time, would represent a significant liability.
There may be other consequences, too.
Campos, the club’s football advisor, joined PSG as part of the negotiations to persuade Mbappe to renew his contract in 2022. His own fate has been tied to that of Mbappe, so there has to be a chance this transfer marks the end of his tenure, too. Campos did, of course, play an integral role in the club’s summer overhaul last year, and is now preparing for the next phase of the project, suggesting they still value his input. He is understood to be keen to stay; what he puts in place over the next few months may be key to whether he does.
Luis Campos (Franco Arland/Getty Images)
In the short term, it remains to be seen how all this will affect the rest of PSG’s 2023-24 season. The players are still adapting to Luis Enrique’s philosophy and remain a team in transition. This was always going to be a major sticking point when it came to Mbappe’s future — reconciling a player determined to achieve everything in the here and now with a project that is being built for the long term.
The reality now is that, for Mbappe to achieve his ultimate goal and bring the European Cup to Paris, the clock is ticking. It has to happen this season. That adds extra pressure, even if it has outwardly been stated, by Al-Khelaifi to Luis Enrique, that the competition is not the club’s be-all and end-all any more.
“We want to win it, like all teams, but we don’t feel any particular pressure or obligation,” said midfielder Fabian Ruiz last week.
The certainty of Mbappe’s departure does take one aspect of speculation away, even if it has not yet been officially confirmed. It introduces a long goodbye that could galvanise the team. For once, there won’t be distracting talk about what he will or will not do in the summer.
PSG can now look to the future and enact those plans they have long had prepared.
But no matter how much work has been put in to get ready for it, losing a player of Mbappe’s calibre is going to have a huge impact. Both and off the field.
(Top photo: Jean Catuffe/Getty Images)
Now that we’ve memorized the first half of our poem, let’s learn a little more about the man who wrote it. (Haven’t memorized anything yet? Click here to start at the beginning.)
For most of his life, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was a star. He was widely read, quoted, argued over and gossiped about, achieving a level of fame that few writers now — and not many then — could contemplate. His New York Times obituary did not hesitate to call him “the foremost poet of his generation.”
Celebrity of that kind is ephemeral, but Auden’s words have continued to circulate in the half century since his death. Maybe you’ve heard some of them before. In the 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” his poem “Funeral Blues” is recited by Matthew (John Hannah) over the casket of his lover, Gareth (Simon Callow).
In the Gen-X touchstone “Before Sunrise” (1995), Jesse (Ethan Hawke) regales Celine (Julie Delpy) with an impression of Dylan Thomas reading Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.”
In both these scenes, the characters use Auden’s poetry to give voice to a longing for which they otherwise might not have words. Auden’s poetry is often useful in that way. It speaks to recognizable human occasions, and it isn’t always all about him.
“The More Loving One” might not be something you’d quote at a funeral or on a date, but it is almost effortlessly quotable — the perfect expression of a thought you never knew you had:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Ken Burns, filmmaker
The word “I” occurs five times in this stanza, but we don’t know much about the person speaking. His personality is camouflaged and revealed by craft.
Auden, born in the northern English cathedral city of York, began practicing that craft as a schoolboy, and honed it at Oxford. Not long after graduating in 1928, he was anointed by critics and readers as the great hope of modern English poetry. A charismatic, divisive figure, he gathered acolytes, imitators and haters.
He swam in the intellectual and ideological crosscurrents of the 1930s, drawing Marxism, psychoanalysis and mystical nationalism into his writing. Assimilating a daunting array of literary influences — Old English and Ancient Greek, French chansons and Icelandic sagas — he forged a poetic personality that was bold, confiding and seductive.
His love poems of that era were candid, discreet dispatches from a calendar of feverish entanglements, wrenching breakups and one-night stands, usually with other men. He also wrote about the feverish politics of the time — class conflict; the rise of fascism; the Spanish Civil War — in ringing rhetoric he later disavowed.
In 1939 Auden moved to America, acquiring U.S. citizenship after World War II. In New York he fell in love with Chester Kallman, a young American writer who became his life partner.
It was a complicated relationship, starting as a passionate affair and enduring through decades of domestic companionship and creative collaboration. Kallman’s refusal to be sexually exclusive wounded Auden, a dynamic that poignantly shades this poem’s most memorable couplet:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Yiyun Li, writer
In America, Auden distanced himself from the radical politics of his earlier career and embraced Anglican Christianity. His intellectual preoccupations shifted toward religion and existentialism — to the kinds of big questions we think about late at night, or when we look to the sky.
Making the leap from wunderkind to grand old man without seeming to stop in middle age, he became a mentor for several generations of younger poets. He was a prolific and punctual contributor of reviews and essays to various publications, including this one, for which he wrote a rave of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” in 1954.
Through it all, Auden devoted fanatical attention to the finer points of poetic technique. His notebooks are full of numbers, word lists and markings that show just how deep this commitment went. He counted every syllable, measured every stress.
He gathered rhymes and other words with a lexicographer’s zeal and a crossword puzzler’s precision.
The third stanza of “The More Loving One” is a miniature showcase of Auden’s skill. Of the four epigrams arrayed before us, it may be the most technically perfect.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
W.H. Auden, poet
The rhythm is flawless, without an extra syllable or an accent out of place. The grammar is also fastidious. Here is a single sentence, springloaded with equivocation, beginning with one idea and sliding toward its opposite.
This quatrain is the poem’s ideal formal representation of itself, a kind of proof of concept: four lines of impeccable iambic tetrameter in an AABB rhyme scheme. The by-the-book regularity of this stanza should give you a leg up in memorizing it, and you can test yourself below!
But the rest of the poem is an argument against perfection, just as it is a celebration of uncertainty and humility — as we’ll see tomorrow.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Your first task: Learn the first two lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).
This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Ada Limón, poet
Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
David Sedaris, writer
The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Josh Radnor, actor
And it features strong end rhymes:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Samantha Harvey, writer
These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.
This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.
But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.
What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.
This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”
The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Mary Roach, writer
The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tim Egan, writer
Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the second stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
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