Culture
Nick Saban sat on the college football throne for years. Is Kirby Smart ready for the crown?
ATHENS, Ga. — The fans walking into a Georgia baseball game on an April afternoon cannot look in on the football practice taking place across from the stadium. But there is no escaping the booming, amplified voice radiating over Rutherford Street.
“Take his f—ing job!”
“His ass wants to quit!”
“Do it again! Get it right!”
Kirby Smart roams the practice field holding a microphone, peppering his players with … feedback between each rep. Several dozen visitors, including donors, high school coaches and recruits, are treated to a colorful two-hour soundtrack of Smart’s gravelly South Georgia accent.
Nick Saban had his straw hat. Jim Harbaugh, his baseball cap and khakis.
Smart has his microphone.
Oregon head coach Dan Lanning was an assistant under Smart from 2018-21. He said a respondent in an anonymous team survey one year he was there suggested Smart ditch the microphone. So he did — for one day.
“The next day he came back out with the microphone (and) ripped into some coaches’ asses, some players as well,” Lanning said. “Nobody’s safe when the microphone is out.”
Smart, a former Georgia defensive back, was Alabama’s defensive coordinator under Saban for four national championships before landing the head-coaching job at his alma mater in 2015. He succeeded Mark Richt, who won 74 percent of his games in 15 seasons but never played for a national championship. Smart, 48, has won two national championships — the school’s first since 1980 — and played for a third. He has won 86 percent of his SEC games, including 42 consecutive regular-season games.
With Saban’s retirement and Harbaugh’s return to the NFL after last season, Smart should, in theory, be the face of the sport.
“There’s a pretty good chance he’ll go down as one of the greatest coaches ever,” said Richt, now an ACC Network analyst. “He’s young, he’s got time, he’s got the resources and the talent base in the state of Georgia. He’s got a lot going for him.”
But there’s one aspect of Smart’s program that clouds his myriad successes.
Since a January 2023 street-racing crash that killed recruiting staffer Chandler LeCroy and player Devin Willock, 10 Georgia players and one staff member have been arrested for driving-related incidents. That includes starting running back Trevor Etienne, suspended for this year’s season opener following a March DUI arrest, and cornerback Daniel Harris, who was held out of Georgia’s last game after being arrested for driving 106 mph.
“Instead of the narrative of Kirby Smart has taken over as the best coach in the country now that Saban’s gone, he’s got the best program, he’s got the No. 1 team — that’s not in the first paragraph anymore,” ESPN analyst Paul Finebaum said. “It’s what’s wrong with Georgia.”
This weekend, Smart’s second-ranked Bulldogs visit No. 4 Alabama, the longtime thorn to Smart’s program; Alabama beat Georgia in two of the past three SEC Championship Games. But that was with Smart’s former mentor, Saban, on the sideline. For the first time, Smart is the more established figure in the rivalry, with Kalen DeBoer just three games into his Alabama tenure.
And Smart has a Georgia team that’s the first since 2007 to be favored to win at Alabama.
“Kirby is in a special class,” said Georgia president Jere Morehead, who taught Smart in a business law class in the mid-’90s. “I knew he’d be successful. But his level of success is beyond anything I could’ve imagined.”
Unlike his mentor, Smart has remained largely anonymous nationally. He’s not in Aflac or Vrbo commercials. He does not make “The Pat McAfee Show” appearances. But his level of success through eight seasons as an SEC head coach largely mirrors Saban’s — two national championships apiece.
Smart first worked for Saban at LSU in 2004, before spending one season as the running backs coach at Georgia. He reunited with Saban for one season with the Miami Dolphins before following Saban to Alabama, where Smart took over defensive play calling after one season. Together, they produced top-10 defenses for eight consecutive seasons, including a 2011 unit that allowed just 8.2 points per game, the fewest at the FBS level in 23 years.
While working as an ESPN color analyst during that time, former Georgia and NFL offensive lineman Matt Stinchcomb would sometimes call Alabama games. Smart, his former college teammate, invited him to sit in on meetings with the linebackers the night before the game.
“I remember sitting there and being completely floored,” Stinchcomb said. “What was remarkable was Kirby’s mastery of the system and his ability to communicate it in a way where his guys could execute. I’d been around a bunch of coaches as a player and a commentator. He stood out.”
It seemed a matter of time before an SEC school made him its head coach. That school turned out to be his alma mater.
In 2015, when Smart was hired, Georgia had gone more than a decade since winning an SEC championship. Smart ended the drought in his second season in 2017, then brought the Bulldogs within one Tua Tagovailoa-to-DeVonta Smith miracle of winning a national title, too. Smart quickly established himself as a beast in recruiting, signing the nation’s No. 1 or 2 class between 2018-20.
While “intense” is the word most frequently used to describe the coach, those who have worked with him marvel more at his management skills and attention to detail. Smart, a four-time member of the SEC’s Academic Honor Roll while a player, holds a degree in finance from Georgia’s Terry College of Business.
“The guy could step out of coaching and take over a corporation and be a CEO and manage it the right way,” said Will Muschamp, a college teammate of Smart’s and now an analyst at Georgia. “His preparation, attention to detail, his anticipation skills — whether it’s roster management, staff management, scheme, recruiting, whatever the case may be — the guy does a really good job of managing those things.”
“There’s not a guy I’ve been around that maybe coaches harder and more intense than coach Smart, but his intelligence is what has always impressed me,” Lanning said. “Never doubt the fact that he knows exactly what he’s thinking all the time. He remembers moments and situations. It’s super impressive.”
As he has become one of the most established coaches in his profession, Smart has embraced his role as a statesman, both as chair of the NCAA Football Rules committee and, following Saban’s retirement, the most influential coaching voice in his conference. Last spring at the SEC’s annual meetings in Destin, Fla., Smart led the discussions about the new NCAA roster limits in football, which eventually landed at 105.
“Kirby’s much more vocal than coach (Saban) in those settings,” said Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin, who worked alongside Smart for two seasons at Alabama. “(Saban) obviously, when he spoke up, everybody listened, but (he) didn’t really kind of comment on everything unless it was something that was really important to him, critical to him. Kirby kind of comments on every category.”
Between the active role he has taken off the field and the winning on the field, it should put Smart in a statesman-like role. But the never-ending string of arrests in his program hangs like a storm cloud.
“If you look at (each case) individually it doesn’t really change your opinion (of Smart). But the combination does sound bad,” said Finebaum.
Kirby Smart (here in 2023) has had major success in a short amount of time as head coach at Georgia. (Kim Klement Neitzel / USA Today via Imagn Images)
On Jan. 14, 2023, Georgia celebrated its second consecutive national championship with a parade and stadium celebration. At 2:45 a.m. that night, LeCroy, a 24-year-old recruiting staffer driving a university-leased Ford Expedition with three passengers at 104 mph, engaged in a high-speed race with Bulldogs star Jalen Carter, a soon-to-be top-10 NFL draft pick. LeCroy and one of the passengers, Willock, an offensive lineman, were killed when the vehicle crashed into two power poles and a tree. Toxicology reports showed LeCroy’s blood alcohol level at the time was .197.
Carter pleaded no contest to reckless driving and racing charges and was sentenced to 80 hours of community service.
One of the passengers in LeCroy’s vehicle, Victoria Bowles, sued the LeCroy estate, Carter and the Georgia Athletic Association, claiming she suffered spinal cord injuries that have caused “likely permanent disability.” Bowles, who was seeking around $172,000 in damages from each defendant, reached a settlement with Georgia last month.
Citing text messages between various recruiting staff members in the years prior to the crash, the complaint alleged staffers “regularly drove recruits and their guests after consuming alcohol.”
UGA disputed the claims.
Smart has suspended several of the arrested players, but said this summer that the school’s name, image and likeness collective has withheld payments from players as penalties for arrests and speeding tickets.
The reckless driving incidents in his program continue to occur, including three this summer and Harris’ arrest two days before Georgia played at Kentucky on Sept. 14.
He was asked in July why his program is so disciplined in everything but this area.
“It’s a great question,” Smart said. “And I’d love every solution possible because we actually write down now every time we talk about it and every time we address it, and we have someone in every meeting that hears that … it was like 162 times it’s been mentioned.”
His main strategy has been inviting guest speakers on the subject. They’ve included former NFL star Donte Stallworth, who was suspended for the 2009 season after striking and killing a pedestrian while intoxicated; former Georgia and NFL defensive end Jonathan Ledbetter, who was arrested on a DUI charge during Smart’s first season; and a prosecutor in the case of ex-Raiders receiver Henry Ruggs, currently in prison in Las Vegas for killing a woman while driving 156 mph.
Carson Beck, Georgia’s starting quarterback who now famously drives a Lamborghini, said the message is indeed hammered home.
“It’s been a serious issue on our team. But also we have hundreds of players, and a large percentage of our guys are very focused and very on top of that,” Beck said. “But obviously there are guys who have made mistakes, and there are consequences for that.”
Still, the incidents keep coming.
In addition to the driving incidents, receiver Rara Thomas was dismissed last month following an arrest on domestic violence charges, his second in two years. (The first charge was pleaded down.)
Richt, who dealt with numerous players’ legal issues during his time in Athens, said Smart is taking undue criticism.
“You can put everything you want in place,” Richt said, “but you can’t live their life for them, you can’t babysit them, you can’t be with them every step of the way to prevent them making a bad decision sometimes.”
Nick Saban, left, and Kirby Smart are forever tied. (Todd Kirkland / Getty Images)
Smart modeled many facets of his program on the juggernaut he helped Saban build at Alabama. Now he is attempting to build a dynasty that matches or exceeds the lofty bar his mentor set. In March, Smart told ESPN, “We’ve been relevant every year but the first one. But I want more than relevance. I want dominance.”
Asked what dominance looks like in a 12-team College Football Playoff, Smart said, “Dominance would not be defined by just getting in, it would be by getting to the Final Four or whatever you would call it in football. … Because at the end of the day, you’re gonna have to beat a really good football team in order to make it to the finals.”
In May, Georgia signed Smart to a 10-year contract that pays an average $13 million per year, making him the highest-paid coach in the sport. Saban previously held that title, making $11.4 million in his last season. It’s another point to be made that Smart is, as Lanning puts it, “the new GOAT.”
“I don’t want to put the mantle on him as being the next Nick Saban. That’s sort of an unfair place to put him at the beginning of a football season,” Morehead said. “I’m confident that going forward he will continue to enjoy great success.”
But the latest player arrests this summer prompted some writers to make comparisons to a more polarizing national championship coach whose legacy has been clouded over time by his players’ myriad off-field issues. One columnist likened Smart more to Urban Meyer than Saban.
Smart, notably, has changed his public tone on the off-field issues, from saying last year that it was a national problem, to dropping that and saying as recently this week that the issues “are terribly disappointing and something that we don’t stand for.”
Morehead calls the incidents “unacceptable” but lauds Smart for how he’s handled them.
“I’d really love to know how many other schools have brought in the outside speakers we’ve brought in, or have taken the disciplinary measures against violators that we’ve taken,” he said.
Smart certainly holds players accountable on the field. Even at practice, he’s the guy everyone sees getting heated during games. It’s often a mixture of humor and scolding, but always intense.
Star safety Malaki Starks, now in his third year in the program, says his coach seems to exist with a permanent chip on his shoulder. Which may seem odd given his accomplishments that few can match.
“When I first got here, I said, ‘Why are you like this? Like, what’s up with you?’” Starks said. “He just told me that he’s obsessed with getting better every day.”
Smart’s accomplishments no doubt will remain closely linked to Saban’s. Is he ready to take his mentor’s place atop the college football coaching hierarchy?
If so, the first step takes place Saturday at Saban’s former home stadium.
(Top photo: Rich von Biberstein / Icon Sportswire via Getty)
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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