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The secret of Patrick Mahomes and Andy Reid’s creative partnership: ‘Let’s see how far we can take it’

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The secret of Patrick Mahomes and Andy Reid’s creative partnership: ‘Let’s see how far we can take it’

In the days before his first Super Bowl, Patrick Mahomes was on a practice field with a small group of offensive players and coaches while the rest of the team worked on special teams.

In Mahomes’ early years as an NFL quarterback, the Kansas City Chiefs’ special teams period had become his personal lab — the time he could push the boundaries of what was possible, breaking rules, inventing plays, experimenting with new mechanics. Chiefs coach Andy Reid had a phrase for that way of thinking: “I’m giving you the keys,” he’d say.

At practice before the biggest game of his young career, Mahomes turned the keys and floored the gas. As he sprinted out to his right, he pulled the ball down and went full Magic Johnson, flinging a behind-the-back pass to tight end Travis Kelce. Deland McCullough, the Chiefs’ running backs coach at the time, watched in stunned silence.

“I’m not talking about Travis being 10 yards away,” McCullough said. “Travis might have been 25, 30 yards away.”

It wasn’t the last time Mahomes flirted with a behind-the-back pass. He teased the possibility in interviews and lobbied Reid to let him try it in a game, convinced he could pull it off. Last season, former Chiefs receiver Marcus Kemp was so sure that Mahomes still wanted to attempt a behind-the-back pass that he was hesitant to talk about it.

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“I think Pat is still trying to get it in,” Kemp said. “He has been for probably three years now.”

When Mahomes finally pulled it out in the preseason, finding Kelce against the Lions on Aug. 17, the internet did its usual thing. But the most revealing reaction came from Reid, the man who loaned Mahomes the keys years ago.

“I’ve been telling you to do that for a while,” Reid told his quarterback.


The Reid-Mahomes partnership is already one of the most successful in NFL history.

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In the six seasons since Mahomes became the full-time starter, no team in the league has won more games or scored more points. There are also the three Super Bowl trophies, the six straight appearances in the AFC Championship game and the prospect this season of the first Super Bowl three-peat, but the relationship is more than results. It is an innovative force more in line with Lennon-McCartney or Wozniak-Jobs, a prolific duo that thrives on creative collaboration.

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Mahomes says he improvised behind-the-back pass

Reid, the 66-year-old son of a Hollywood set designer, doesn’t want his players to color outside the lines; he wants them to expand the boundaries to somewhere off the page. Mahomes, the 28-year-old son of a major-league pitcher, doesn’t just want to excel at quarterback; he wants to reimagine what the position looks like.

“(Reid) has made this environment around him where he keeps people around who he believes have the same core values,” Kemp said. “I do believe he brought in Pat for that reason.”

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“That environment was like, ‘Wow,’” McCullough said. “The juices were always flowing.”

Reid pushed Mahomes to think bigger from their first practices together in 2017. “I want you to stretch the offense,” the coach would tell his quarterback again and again.

That meant taking deep shots. Forcing tight-window throws. Exploring what was possible, even if it meant Mahomes might occasionally fail.

“Let’s see how far we can take it,” Reid would say.

As the two became more comfortable with each other — and as Mahomes displayed rare talent — they fostered a creative energy that allowed them to bring the most out of their individual abilities. Reid was the offensive guru who would try anything, the kind of tinkerer who once put a 350-pound nose tackle at running back and implored his assistants to follow a simple rule: “Don’t Judge.” Mahomes was the quarterback who believed he could pull off anything, a risk-taker who unleashed his first no-look pass during the fourth quarter of a close game in college.

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Veteran players in Kansas City began to notice something in the early years.

“That youthful exuberance that Pat has has rubbed off on Coach and gave him some extra life,” said Mitchell Schwartz, a former Chiefs offensive lineman. “Because he didn’t have to be quite so regimented. He had this guy who was able to do what he wanted to do.”

Reid’s willingness to explore allowed Mahomes to tap into the full depth of his unique and often unconventional skills. When Mahomes was backing up Alex Smith in 2017, he ran the scout team. One day, Reid whistled and called over Brad Childress, then the team’s assistant head coach. Reid told Childress to pull out his play sheet and start marking plays: “Play 3, Play 5, Play 6, Play 8 … ”

Reid had just witnessed Mahomes throw at least four no-look passes, bewildering veteran linebacker Justin Houston and the rest of the first-team defense.

“Justin Houston’s reaction — it was unbelievable,” Childress said. “He looked in the flat. He looked at the quarterback. He looked where the ball got completed. He looked at Coach Reid. He looked back at the quarterback. He looked back at the flat. He’s like: ‘What just happened?’”

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Reid kept his poker face. Just watch the film of those plays, he told Childress. But Childress had been around long enough to know: Reid was hiding a smile.



Patrick Mahomes confers with Andy Reid before Super Bowl LVIII in February. (Harry How / Getty Images)

When Schwartz played for the Chiefs from 2016 to 2020, the team held a walkthrough practice on Tuesday after they watched film. Players wore regular clothes. No cleats. Pretty casual vibe.

There was one unique feature: Every week, Reid wandered around with a little piece of paper scribbled with new plays even his assistant coaches hadn’t seen before. To players and coaches, Reid looked like a man weaving through a full-sized chess board, pulling receivers into new spots, moving a tight end a few yards this way, trying to visualize the geometry.

It wasn’t a solo process. Reid would hold a notecard up in the huddle, allowing players to, as Kemp said, “figure it out in their mind.” Then they would line up. Usually the play didn’t even have a name.

“He might go through seven or eight things and maybe four of them make the cut,” McCullough said.

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The process felt so elemental — as if a play was being invented in real-time — that it demystified the process. Players were empowered to offer their own suggestions and tweaks. It was exactly what Reid wanted.

“That’s where Patrick started to feel comfortable enough to create those plays by himself,” Kemp said. “It was seeing the head man do it and work through it on the field. You didn’t have to have a perfect play that you had to bring to him.”

Under Reid, the Chiefs are famous for mining plays from anywhere: friends, rivals, college games, the 1948 Rose Bowl. Even from insane-seeming ideas during walkthroughs.

“I feel like Coach just kind of observes stuff Pat does during practice having fun and is like, ‘Hmm, that could be pretty cool,’” Schwartz said.


The most outside-the-box collaboration of the Reid-Mahomes era came on Jan. 7, 2023. That was the day the Chiefs ran “Arctic Circle” — otherwise known as the “Circle of Death” — a play that began with a spinning huddle and descended into pure anarchy.

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Running back Jerick McKinnon lined up in the shotgun, ran a run-pass option, then flipped the ball to Mahomes, who stopped and threw the ball back across the field to receiver Kadarius Toney, who scampered into the end zone only for the touchdown to be wiped out by a holding penalty.

The plan was pure razzle-dazzle, but the spinning huddle was even weirder. The only people who weren’t fazed were the players on the field.

“We had seen it for pretty much for the entire year in different capacities,” Kemp said.

The play had been born at a series of Saturday walkthroughs, when the Chiefs would run through a list of Hail Marys and end-of-game trick plays. After running many of the same looks for four or five years, the staff started looking for ways to spice it up.

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“That’s a time for Pat and the entire offense to get creative,” Kemp said. “It doesn’t really matter if it’s legal or not.”

At some point, someone wondered: What if we all started spinning in a circle before breaking the huddle?

What looked like chaos was actually a finely edited script: Reid took a weird idea and broke it down step by step, one of the hallmarks of his success. “He’ll poke out the details of it so he can teach it over and over and over again,” Kemp said. “He told everybody specifically what direction to turn and when to break and who was going to call it and where the receivers needed to end up and how they needed to do specific things. I think that’s why it worked out: details.”

After several Saturdays of tinkering and perfecting the circle-of-death concept, Reid signed off: Let’s put it in.

Of course, Mahomes has the kind of talent that makes any idea seem like a good one. “Pat is one of those dudes that is really good at a lot of things he does,” Kemp said, “so he’ll do something randomly and it will just click for him or a coach and they’ll find a way to incorporate it.”

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When Mahomes took over as the starter in 2018, he started lobbying to throw a shovel pass underhand because he thought it would disguise the play better than a traditional shovel pass. When the timing didn’t work, Reid built a new formation over the course of two or three weeks so it would.

The play became a staple.

Around the same time, Mahomes started making center Austin Reiter practice snaps on the run. It began as another fun practice experiment, but soon enough the quarterback was asking assistant coach Tom Melvin if it was legal, and then he took it to the finishing lab — the special teams period — where he worked on plays with Kelce. All that was left was Reid, who installed a play called “Ferrari Right.”

“Coach Reid knows that fine line where he’s just crazy enough but just safe enough,” said Anthony Gordon, a former Chiefs quarterback.

“It was never a tense environment,” added Matt McGloin, another former quarterback. “It was always fun. It was always exciting. You were always learning, which was incredible. It was always a big collaborative effort.”

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One day before the 2018 season, Mahomes and Reid ran through a play sheet for an upcoming preseason game. Mahomes had made one career start, against Denver the previous year, and Reid was in his 20th season as an NFL head coach. But when Mahomes said he didn’t like one of the plays in the game plan, Reid crossed it off.

“That’s the confidence that Andy had in his players,” McGloin said.

Six years later, the partnership thrives.

On the eve of last season’s AFC Championship Game in Baltimore, Mahomes sat in another meeting with Reid as the team’s offensive staff talked through end-of-game plays. If they needed to convert a third-and-long to win the game, Mahomes said he wanted a play that could beat man-to-man coverage and counter the Ravens’ pressure.

The next night, the Chiefs led the Ravens 17-10 with 2:19 left. It was third and 9. Mahomes walked over to the sideline.

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“Give me the ball,” he said.

Reid knew the play Mahomes wanted. He handed the keys to Mahomes again.

The Chiefs lined up three receivers to the left, the Ravens showed Cover Zero, and Mahomes found receiver Marques Valdes-Scantling on a deep shot over the middle, sending Kansas City back to the Super Bowl.

(Illustration: Meech Robinson / The Athletic; photos: Ryan Kang / Getty Images; David Eulitt / Getty Images)

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Poetry Challenge Day 3: W.H. Auden, The Poet and His Technique

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Poetry Challenge Day 3: W.H. Auden, The Poet and His Technique

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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).

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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.”

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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.

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“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 

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Of stars that do not give a damn, 

I cannot, now I see them, say 

I missed one terribly all day. 

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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.

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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.

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W.H. Auden (left) and Chester Kallman in Venice, in 1949. Stephen Spender, via Bridgeman Images

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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, 

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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.

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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.

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Scansion marks from one of Auden’s notebooks, dated 1955-65. Copyright by The Estate of W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. W.H. Auden papers, Berg Collection, The New York Public Library. Photograph by Angelina Katsanis for The New York Times.

He gathered rhymes and other words with a lexicographer’s zeal and a crossword puzzler’s precision.

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Lists of rhyming words from another of Auden’s notebooks, dated 1957-59. Copyright by The Estate of W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. W.H. Auden papers, Berg Collection, The New York Public Library. Photograph by Angelina Katsanis for The New York Times.

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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 

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Of stars that do not give a damn, 

I cannot, now I see them, say 

I missed one terribly all day. 

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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!

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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.

Your first task: Learn the first two lines!

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

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Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.

Admirer as I think I am 

Of stars that do not give a damn, 

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Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.

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Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.

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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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Book Review: ‘Permanence,’ by Sophie Mackintosh

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Book Review: ‘Permanence,’ by Sophie Mackintosh

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.

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“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.”

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“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.

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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

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Poetry Challenge Day 2: Love, How It Works and What It Means

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Poetry Challenge Day 2: Love, How It Works and What It Means

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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.

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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. 

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Ada Limón, poet

Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.

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How should we like it were stars to burn 

With a passion for us we could not return? 

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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.

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If equal affection cannot be, 

Let the more loving one be me. 

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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,

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And we will all the pleasures prove,

That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,

Woods, or steepy mountain yields.

Christopher Marlowe, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

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Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:

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How should we like it were stars to burn 

With a passion for us we could not return? 

Josh Radnor, actor

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And it features strong end rhymes:

If equal affection cannot be, 

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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:

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I do not like thee, Doctor Fell

The reason why I cannot tell.

But this I know and know full well

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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.

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W.H. Auden as a young man. Tom Graves, via Bridgeman Images

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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:

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As lines, so loves oblique may well

Themselves in every angle greet;

But ours so truly parallel,

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Though infinite, can never meet.

Andrew Marvell, “The Definition of Love

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.”

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The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:

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How should we like it were stars to burn 

With a passion for us we could not return? 

Mary Roach, writer

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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, 

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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.

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Your task today: Learn the second stanza!

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

Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.

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How should we like it were stars to burn 

With a passion for us we could not return? 

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Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.

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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.

Advertisement

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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