Culture
Vaseline, hairspray, shaving foam… What's the best substance to put on goalkeeper gloves?
Andre Onana returned to competitive football this weekend in the Community Shield against Manchester City, with his side losing on penalties at Wembley.
Last season it emerged the Manchester United goalkeeper uses Vaseline on his gloves, which raised several other questions for me. What other substances do we ’keepers put on our gloves to try to gain an advantage? Is there anything in doing so that violates the laws of the game?
I knew I needed help from someone with better knowledge of the laws of the game than me. Thankfully, over my playing career I was fortunate to build up enough goodwill with a few professional referees that I was able to enlist one of them — Fredrik Klitte, who has been a ref for close to 25 years in Sweden, including the last decade at the top level.
“It’s legal for a goalkeeper to use Vaseline from a referee’s point of view, as long as the rule book doesn’t say otherwise, which it doesn’t today,” Klitte said.
When I asked him if he had ever encountered a goalkeeper trying to use any substances on their gloves before, his answer was a firm “no.” He did admit, however, that it could have happened without him knowing. “The referee isn’t required to check a goalkeeper’s gloves in the same way they are supposed to check a player’s studs or shin guards before a match, so it’s possible,” he said.
Onana turns to the Vaseline (Robin Jones – AFC Bournemouth/AFC Bournemouth via Getty Images)
Klitte went on to explain there is a line in the rule book that states the referee does have the option to show a yellow card for unsportsmanlike behaviour if they discover a goalkeeper has handball players’ resin (which affords greater grip) on their gloves, for example. But that is rarely, if ever, enforced. “Then you can interpret it as a goalkeeper using incorrect equipment that must then be corrected,” he said. “However, you probably still don’t have support for that, due to the way the rule is currently written.”
Before I let him go, I asked Klitte one more time just to confirm, “So, technically speaking, a goalkeeper could use whatever they wanted on their gloves to try to improve their grip?”.
“Yes,” he said confidently. “There is nothing in the laws today that say otherwise.”
Vaseline sighted at a Premier League game (Michael Regan/Getty Images)
So with that established, it was time to experiment.
I wanted to test things that would be practical and we could realistically see a goalkeeper use. That means substances that wouldn’t totally destroy the gloves after one use. Therefore, even though I could fathom that handball resin, pine tar, or Stickum (a substance that was used for years in the NFL to assist players in hanging onto or catching the ball before being banned in 1981) would improve a goalkeeper’s grip, at least temporarily, they would almost certainly destroy the pair of gloves involved in the process and not be worth testing.
While I was able to find several different recommendations from fellow goalkeepers who swear by little tricks of the trade to improve their grip, including honey, maple syrup, sugary sports drinks and even homemade pastes, three products were mentioned more often than any others: GloveGlu — a product specifically created for goalkeeper gloves to help improve grip — shaving cream and hair spray. These were the three I knew I needed to try.
The next day, before training with the club where I’m goalkeepers coach, Angelholms FF in the Swedish third division, I ran a few errands around town and picked up a bottle of GloveGlu from the sporting-goods store and a bottle of shaving cream and hair spray from the supermarket. In theory, I could understand why each of these products would work and was excited to try them out for myself to see if there might be something out there better suited for a goalkeeper’s gloves than Vaseline.
When our ’keepers Robin Streifert and Lukas Bornandersson arrived at the training facility, I informed them we had an assignment in training that day: to test a few products and see if any of them would improve our grip on the ball, however, I waited to inform them exactly what it was that we would be testing. The only information I gave them was to bring an extra pair of gloves out to the pitch with them.
There was a consensus the GloveGlu would work, since it was made specifically for goalkeeper gloves, but they were highly doubtful about the shaving cream and hair spray.
Since Robin already had a lot of experience with using Vaseline on his gloves, consistently employing it in both training and matches, I thought he would be the perfect candidate to compare it with the effects of GloveGlu. Lukas on the other hand was still relatively new to the Vaseline idea and was a bit sceptical. Therefore, I wanted him to test it for the first time and see if his experience was anything like Robin’s.
I, on the other hand, would first try out the shaving cream and the hair spray. Then, if I thought it either worth introducing to the training session with Robin and Lukas, we would do so.
When the goalkeepers were done with their warm-up, Robin came up to me and grabbed the GloveGlu, Lukas took the Vaseline and they started to apply them to their gloves.
Robin’s gloves had some age to them, and it had been a while since they had been used, but the GloveGlu suddenly gave them some new life. As Robin clapped his palms together and felt the stickiness of the spray start to have an effect, he nodded his head. “This stuff might actually work,” he said.
The grip initially proved to be good, certainly much better than it would have been without GloveGlu. It took a pair of old gloves that he would never have trusted for a game and made them usable again. However, despite the positive first impressions, the stickiness didn’t last very long.
GloveGlu was effective, but wore off quickly (Matt Pyzdrowski/The Athletic)
It was after just a few rounds of our shooting session when Robin noticed the gloves started to feel silky smooth. Balls that initially were lodging snugly into his gloves, started to become more difficult to catch and often bounced back out and into play. At that point, all he had to do was go and reapply the GloveGlu for it to become effective again, but I could sense his frustration each time he had to do that throughout the training.
Though Robin’s first impressions of GloveGlu were positive, Lukas, on the other hand, was doubtful about the impact Vaseline was going to have almost immediately.
As he bounced the ball up and down and caught it over and over, he shook his head. “It feels like there isn’t an ounce of grip!”, he shouted. “I don’t know how you guys think this is any good!”.
Both Robin and I looked at each other and laughed. It was like we already knew what was going to happen.
After all, when French club Bordeaux’s Swedish goalkeeper Karl-Johan Johnsson introduced the stuff to Robin almost a year ago, he went through the same progression himself. First there is scepticism and doubt, then, intrigue and wonder start to take hold, and by the end of training, nearly every goalkeeper who has ever tried the stuff ends up loving it.
Unsurprisingly, this is exactly what happened with Lukas.
When the ball started smacking safely into his gloves over and over again, it brought a big smile to his face. When he went over to the tub of Vaseline after about 20 to 25 minutes of training and grabbed another glob for the palms of his gloves, Robin and I knew he was hooked.
“OK, OK, you guys were right, this really does work well!”, Lukas said with enthusiasm in his voice.
Toward the end of training, I decided it was time to give the other two products a try.
When I read about shaving cream and hair spray online, those who used them believed they were most effective a few minutes after application. So as Robin and Lukas had a water break and we took a little pause in our session, I took out two sets of gloves and applied shaving cream to one pair, hair spray to the other, and then let them rest, palms up, next to the goal.
While there wasn’t that much I needed to do with the pair that had hair spray on, other than let them dry and rest, I did read that the pair with shaving cream on needed a little more attention. Rather than rubbing the shaving cream into the palm directly, like you would do with Vaseline, I had read it was best to squirt a generous amount onto the palm and then wait to rub it into the latex just before use.
Matt’s gloves after the initial application of shaving cream (Matt Pyzdrowski/The Athletic)
When I went over to the gloves during our next pause in training to check on their progress, it didn’t take long for me to realise that the hair spray wasn’t going to have any effect whatsoever. Though it did appear to create a sticky substance on the palms of the gloves, after just one catch of the ball the effect had entirely worn off and actually left a residue on the palms of my glove which became incredibly slippery.
Though I still decided to give hair spray a shot and had Robin and Lukas pepper me with a few shots, it was clear that catching the ball was going to be an incredibly difficult task. There was no need to explore hair spray any further. It wasn’t going to work.
After taking off my hair-sprayed gloves, I picked up my other pair that had shaving cream on them, put them on, and began to rub the shaving cream into the palms of my gloves until it was absorbed into the latex.
Matt’s gloves after rubbing the shaving cream into the palms a few minutes later (Matt Pyzdrowski/The Athletic)
When I started rubbing my palms together and felt the stickiness take hold, I suspected it was going to work as intended. The palms of the gloves remained moist but also felt a bit sticky after the shaving cream had dried, and after a few bounces of the ball on the grass, my confidence in it grew. I asked Robin and Lukas to come over so I could throw some shaving cream onto their gloves.
Robin, whose gloves were a little older and more broken down than Lukas’ pair, didn’t feel like there was much of an impact. However, when Lukas jumped in goal and started gripping shot after shot, his grin went from ear to ear.
“I don’t know what it is, if it’s mental or if I’m just having a good day, but it really does feel like it works!”, he shouted.
It may sound strange at first that shaving cream could improve the grip of your goalkeeper gloves, but when you understand how latex works, it makes sense.
Without getting too technical, latex is a foam. It is made up of thousands of tiny holes, much like a kitchen sponge. When the materials that make those tiny holes are dry, the latex becomes hard and brittle. When they are wet, the holes expand and the material becomes softer — again, like a sponge. So by adding shaving cream, you are ultimately helping keep the latex moist and sticky and allowing it to do what it was made to do in this case: grip the football.
After facing a few more shots, Robin, Lukas and I sat down next to the goal to discuss our findings.
We quickly agreed that although there was a positive effect to using shaving cream, it wasn’t as effective as Vaseline or GloveGlu and it was hard for us to imagine it would have the same effect as Vaseline in wet weather (Vaseline is designed to moisturize the latex, but also act as a repellent to prevent dirt and grime from covering the palms of your gloves when it rains).
Plus, in a game situation, when your time is so limited, you would never have enough of a break in play to go to the side of the goal and apply it effectively, whereas GloveGlu and Vaseline were much easier to apply quickly and see immediate results.
Robin, right, and Lukas discussing their experiments (Cherie Mårtensson/Ängelholms FF)
It’s been almost a year since Robin first started using Vaseline, and though it’s still an important part of his routine, his use of it has slightly changed. He found out first-hand that the negative side of using Vaseline every day is that it can damage the latex on your gloves and reduce their durability. Though Vaseline is initially moist when you apply it, when it dries out, your gloves are in danger because the Vaseline starts to be absorbed into the pores of the latex, dries it out, and can crack the gloves.
“At the beginning, I was putting Vaseline on my gloves every day, but it didn’t take long for me to realise that it wasn’t sustainable in the long run because I was going through a new pair of gloves every other week,” he said.
He would go on to explain, however, that despite Vaseline being tough on the durability of his gloves, throwing some of it on an old pair of gloves did seem to bring some life back to them. Which was something Lukas could also confirm after his own experience with the stuff.
“I have an old pair that I use now and again in training when it rains and I’m worried my grip will be impacted because of it,” he said. “I throw a dab of Vaseline on them and suddenly they have good grip again. I noticed that today as well. I was unsure what would happen since I was using an old pair of gloves I hadn’t used in a few months, but I was blown away by the results. I haven’t had that good of a grip in my gloves in a long time.”
Despite the negative impact Vaseline can have on the durability of his gloves, Robin did say he still prefers it to GloveGlu because he feels the effect from it lasts longer and gives a more “stable” feeling. However, he did admit GloveGlu works better in dry weather (which is something that can be a problem with Vaseline) and doesn’t damage the latex as much.
Some goalkeepers still stick to using their own saliva (ANP via Getty Images)
Every athlete is always looking for new and innovative ways to uncover marginal gains, and professional goalkeepers adding Vaseline to their gloves is just the latest example of that.
Though the security and trust Vaseline can provide is an incredibly important feeling for every goalkeeper, all of us agreed that it shouldn’t be used with the expectation that it’s suddenly going to fix all your problems on the pitch. It doesn’t matter how much of it you smear on your gloves, it can’t hide poor technique. That’s why it is important to perfect your technique first, then use Vaseline, GloveGlu, or another similar product as an added tool down the line if you feel it’s needed.
Most professional goalkeepers have a glove sponsorship and brands will send them new pairs pretty much whenever they ask for them. So clearly, they aren’t worried about their gloves’ durability or about what happens to them after using Vaseline.
That’s the biggest reason that we all agreed younger goalkeepers and amateurs might be wise to hold off on using Vaseline on that brand-new pair of gloves and instead save it for a rainy day or when they get a bit old and worn and need a new lease on life.
(Top photo: Charlotte Wilson/Offside via 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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