Culture
Champions League draw: Predictions, best games and breakthrough star in league phase
The draw for the revamped Champions League league phase is — after what seemed like a never-ending ceremony — complete.
As expected, the new format ensured a smattering of mouthwatering games, as well as a few less mouthwatering ones, ahead of the start of the competition proper next month.
You can read an explainer on the new format here. But this is what our experts made of the draw itself…
What was your draw highlight — or lowlight?
Oli Kay: I liked the video explaining the format — even though it was a dig at people like me who have criticised it. My concern is that they seem to have given more thought to the video than to the format itself. It was like watching a surprisingly well conceived party political broadcast from a party whose policies you can’t stand.
Carl Anka: Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s acting. Saying the new format is going to be a “Super Le–” lonely to be hushed by UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin. “I’ve told you it’s not going to happen.”
Pol Ballus: Seeing club representatives taking a picture when their draw was completed as it was almost impossible to absorb all the teams they had been assigned to play against. They were not alone, we all struggled a bit.
Seb Stafford-Bloor: I quite liked the fixture-generation dynamic — that bit was fine. The trouble is, the comedic self-importance with which these draws are staged is something that I will never be able to get beyond. It was 37 minutes until a team was drawn! 37!
Thom Harris: Also Zlatan’s acting.
Cristiano Ronaldo with UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin (Valery Hache/AFP via Getty Images)
Are you a fan of this new format?
Kay: No, I hate it. It’s cumbersome and convoluted. At a time of growing concern about fixture congestion, there are going to be 144 matches to whittle down 36 teams to 24 when most of us could probably safely predict at least nine of the 12 teams that will drop out. More matches, less jeopardy. Just what football doesn’t need.
The problem with the Champions League has been growing financial inequality across Europe, not the competition format. They’re ditching a perfectly good format purely to make Europe’s richest clubs richer. It’s the worst of both worlds.
Anka: Ilkay Gundogan said it best after the attempted Super League collapsed.
With all the Super League stuff going on… can we please also speak about the new Champions League format? More and more and more games, is no one thinking about us players?
The new UCL format is just the lesser of the two evils in comparison to the Super League…— Ilkay Gündogan (@IlkayGuendogan) April 22, 2021
The new Champions League format exists because it should make more money for interested parties who want to maximise their earnings. It does little to address the growing wealth disparity that separates the old-money superpowers and clubs on the rise, and furthers the notion that the best place to watch the competition is sat at home, rather than in the stadium.
I’m sure it’ll be exciting after a few games but when you need this many explanation videos and articles to explain how the thing actually works, it begs the question as to whether you need to build it that way. More doesn’t always mean better.
Ballus: In general, I’m not. It’s messy, a league format without all teams playing each other doesn’t enthuse me, adding more games to the current fixture list won’t have any good impact on the players and losing the aura of the group stage is not great news either.
Stafford-Bloor: I am trying to be open-minded. It’s very much the Las Vegas residency era of the Champions League in its intent, with teams being pushed out on stage as often as possible, but at least it’s not the double group stage of 2002-03. Until we see the format operate for real, it is difficult to escape the motivations for this latest contortion — and to wonder what the next bright idea will be.
Harris: I’ll try to be positive too — at least we will see a wide variety of games. I’ll be interested to see how Aston Villa, Bayer Leverkusen and Girona fare against a bigger selection of Europe’s elite. How invested everyone will be in late January, when teams will still be squabbling for positions in the knockout stages – with some even needing a two-legged knockout round play-off after that – remains to be seen.
Which games are you most looking forward to watching?
Kay: Aston Villa v Bayern Munich
A repeat of the 1982 European Cup final which I vividly recall watching on my seventh birthday. Villa are one of those big clubs most of the modern elite were determined to leave behind when they tried to set up a “Super League” three years ago. Their presence in this season’s competition is a reminder not just of Unai Emery’s excellence but of how appalling those closed-shop proposals were. Villa v Celtic, the Stylian Petrov derby, is another one to savour.
Anka: Bayer Leverkusen v Inter Milan
Two managers quickly making a name for themselves on the cutting edge of European football, but both going about the job in different ways. I’m a sucker for any match-up that pits wing-back against wing-back. This should be a thriller.
Ballus: PSG vs Manchester City
A match-up between Luis Enrique and Pep Guardiola should not be missed. I am also quite intrigued by the Kylian Mbappe-less PSG, who have started the season impressively. I have the feeling they have a much bigger collective mentality that Luis Enrique will appreciate.
Stafford-Bloor: Bayern Munich vs PSG
Fascinating. Bayern are obviously a work in progress at the beginning of this new era, with Vincent Kompany coaching under the Champions League and needing to find an urgent solution to that team’s defensive issues. And PSG are always fascinating, almost perversely so. Mbappe has gone, so has that team’s gaudy aura, and so they will travel to Allianz Arena with a relatively young team that will need to earn its swagger.
Harris: Arsenal vs PSG
Another shout for Enrique’s Paris Saint Germain. Their new-look squad is ridiculously young, with some real superstars like Bradley Barcola (21), Joao Neves (19) and Warren Zaire-Emery (18) at the heart of the rebuild. They’ve already made a storming start to the new season, and a trip to Arsenal is just another mouthwatering clash from their extremely difficult draw.
Which of the traditional elite is most at risk of not making it to the last 16?
Kay: I wouldn’t call them part of the traditional elite, but, as a modern Champions League heavyweight (light heavyweight perhaps) and a top seed, Paris Saint-Germain might have hoped for a gentler draw than to face Manchester City, Bayern Munich, Atletico Madrid and Arsenal, among others.
Anka: The new format should protect against the sort of implosion and early elimination that Manchester United made in 2023-24. It’s up-and-comers Girona, Bologna and Stuttgart – who have had some of their best assets taken away in the summer – that should be most concerned. That said, AC Milan haven’t started the season well. Manager Paulo Fonseca feels like an odd fit for a squad with oscillating quality and there are some tough away matches in their set.
Ballus: PSG have one of the toughest draws. Playing City, Bayern, Arsenal and Atletico surely wasn’t what Luis Enrique wanted. Out of Pot 1, I see RB Leipzig as the team with the biggest struggle to go through.
Stafford-Bloor: It’s based on very little with the season being so young, but nothing about Hansi Flick’s Barcelona convinces me yet — and the Marc Bernal injury is just devastating. They have good players, a couple of exceptional ones, but they are not a powerful side. Perhaps this is a bias formed by his time with Germany and the many, many issues that occurred between 2021 and 2023, but I’m increasingly convinced that Flick’s success with Bayern Munich was a rare moment in time and a product of circumstance.
Are Barcelona really convincing? (Denis Doyle/Getty Images)
Harris: I think most of the Pot 1 sides should be fine given the new format, but Liverpool have probably been handed the toughest draw. Each game looks like it will be competitive, and a slip-up or two in tricky ties away to PSV Eindhoven and RB Leipzig for example could make things interesting. Xabi Alonso’s Bayer Leverkusen is a nightmare Pot 2 draw, too.
Which player could break through to become a major star in this group stage?
Kay: There’s a very Villa-heavy flavour to my answers, but I can’t get enough of Morgan Rogers at the moment. He looks like a player who loves the big stage and loves testing himself at the highest level.
Anka: The idea of Rogers and Jacob Ramsey running at defenders under the lights at Villa Park excites me. Aston Villa’s campaign will be fascinating. Unai Emery knows his way about a defensive mid-block and has built a career off bloodying the noses of richer European teams that don’t do their homework.
Ballus: I would have mentioned 17-year-old Marc Bernal here, the latest La Masia breakout star who was having an excellent start of the season, but his awful ACL rupture last Tuesday will prevent us from seeing that. So keep an eye on Yaser Asprilla, Girona’s record transfer and the guy tipped to compensate for the loss of the eye-catching Savinho, who joined Manchester City this summer.
Stafford-Bloor: I’ll take Enzo Millot, Stuttgart’s attacking No 8. He’s a component player, really, all about good timing and being in the right position at the right time, but he has developed rapidly over the past 18 months, benefiting from being at the centre of a side playing in quick, neat patterns. This should be the season that sees his reputation outside Germany catch up to where it is within the Bundesliga.
Enzo Millot is one to watch at Stuttgart (Sascha Schuermann/AFP via Getty Images)
Harris: I’m really looking forward to seeing if Viktor Gyokeres can make the step up to the Champions League. Since joining Sporting, he’s scored 49 goals and assisted a further 18 in just over 50 full games in all competitions, and is a very difficult man to stop once he latches onto a ball in behind.
Which stadium in this year’s competition would you most like to watch a game at?
Kay: I was going to say Celtic Park, which is hard to beat on a European night. But this season it’s Villa Park, given how much it will mean to Villa’s fans to have occasions like this. As a student in Birmingham in the mid-1990s, I went to see Villa play Deportivo La Coruna and Inter Milan. They were great nights and there must have been times in the past decade when Villa’s fans thought they would never see anything like it again.
Villa Park welcomes back Europe’s elite this season (Naomi Baker/Getty Images)
Anka: It’s a darn shame that Thiago Motta and others jumped ship from Bologna this summer, but the Stadio Renato Dall’Ara is a beautiful architectural work to visit, and the setting for one of David Platt’s greatest goals.
Ballus: I have to go with Villa Park here. I’ve experienced how this ground feels in a proper Premier League fixture, and I can’t imagine what a Champions League return will mean to the club. They’ve proved over the last year how they can make elite teams such as Manchester City or Arsenal look ordinary. Their fans won’t fear anyone.
Stafford-Bloor: The renovation of Stuttgart’s Neckarstadion was completed for the European Championship and the result is as fierce an environment as will be found anywhere. The seating restrictions enforced by UEFA will dull some of its Bundesliga ferocity, but VfB making their first Champions League appearance since 2010 should ratchet the intensity back up. A cauldron of a ground.
Harris: It would have been refreshing to see Champions League football at the Stade Francis Le Ble, the cornerless, single-tiered home of Stade Brest. It’s a proper throwback ground, and the 15,000 inside usually make a racket. However, at over 100 years old, the stadium doesn’t meet UEFA’s requirements to host a game, and Brest will have to play their home matches halfway across Brittany in Guingamp. A real shame.
Away from there, I’m sure it will be pretty deafening in the Holte End as Aston Villa make their return to Europe’s premier competition after over 40 years away.
Rank your top eight in finishing order
Kay: Manchester City, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, Atletico Madrid, Arsenal, Liverpool, Inter Milan, Aston Villa.
Anka: Manchester City, Bayern Munich, Real Madrid, Arsenal, Paris Saint-Germain, Liverpool, Inter Milan, Leverkusen.
Ballus: Manchester City, Real Madrid, Liverpool, Arsenal, Paris Saint-Germain, Bayern Munich, Barcelona, Inter.
Stafford-Bloor: Manchester City, Real Madrid, Arsenal, Paris Saint-Germain, Bayern Munich, Bayer Leverkusen, Atletico Madrid, Inter.
Harris: Manchester City, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, Arsenal, Paris Saint-Germain, Bayer Leverkusen, Barcelona, Juventus.
What are the key dates?
Matchday 1: Sep 17-19
Matchday 2: Oct 1-2
Matchday 3: Oct 22-23
Matchday 4: Nov 5-6
Matchday 5: Nov 26-27
Matchday 6: Dec 10-11
Matchday 7: Jan 21-22
Matchday 8: Jan 29
Knockout round play-offs: Feb 11-12 and 18-19
Round of 16: March 4-5 and 11-12
Quarter-finals: April 8-9 and 15-16
Semi-finals: April 29-30 and May 6-7
Final: May 31
(Top photo: Valery Hache/AFP 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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