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Champions League: Man City have Madrid mountain to climb, are PSG better minus Mbappe?

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Champions League: Man City have Madrid mountain to climb, are PSG better minus Mbappe?

Erling Haaland scored against Real Madrid for the first time in his career.

And then scored another.

But Manchester City still lost at home to the Champions League holders.

It will have felt all too familiar for Pep Guardiola and his team as they threw away a 2-1 lead with four minutes of normal time to play at the Etihad, being stung first by one of their former players, Brahim Diaz, and then the tireless Jude Bellingham, who steered the ball home from close range in added time.

Oh, and earlier in the game Kylian Mbappe had scored with his shin.

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Carlo Ancelotti’s side take a 3-2 advantage into the playoff second leg next Wednesday at the Bernabeu, with a place in the Champions League last 16 at stake.

Elsewhere in Europe’s elite club competition, a rocket from Weston McKennie helped Juventus beat PSV, Borussia Dortmund thrashed Sporting CP in Lisbon and Ousmane Dembele continued his ludicrous start to 2025 with two goals as Paris Saint-Germain beat Brest 3-0.

Elias Burke and Seb Stafford-Bloor analyse the key moments from all the Champions League action on Tuesday night…


Typical City… and typical Madrid?

In the battle between the Champions League’s perennial comeback kings Real Madrid, and City, who have made a habit of getting pegged back this season, it should come as no surprise it ended the way it did.

GO DEEPER

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The Briefing: Man City 2 Real Madrid 3 – Bellingham’s late, late winner and another City collapse

After an exceptional assist for Mbappe’s goal, Dani Ceballos went from hero to villain 20 minutes later, tripping Phil Foden just inside the box in the 80th minute. Haaland tucked away the resulting penalty, his 49th goal in 48 Champions League games.

Fortunately for Ceballos, two errors in quick succession from Ederson allowed Diaz, who has a Premier League medal with City from their centurion 2017-18 season, to level the scores at 2-2.

Then, after Vinicius Junior went through and lifted a shot/pass over Ederson’s head, Bellingham gambled to tap in a stoppage-time winner from close range to put Madrid 3-2 up ahead of the second leg in Spain.

For City, it was yet another disastrous late collapse after the Feyenoord and PSG debacles in the league phase. Now, they have given themselves a mountain to climb in overturning the deficit at the hardest place to win at in the Champions League.

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Are PSG actually better without Mbappe?

Few would have expected PSG to improve when Mbappe left for Real Madrid last summer. But, judging from their comfortable 3-0 win against Brest and impressive form in 2025, coach Luis Enrique appears to have found a harmony in Paris that he struggled to create when the France superstar was leading the line.

As it’s transpired, Ousmane Dembele, 27, once considered a talent so promising that Barcelona paid a fee rising to £135 million, reported by BBC, to sign him as a 20-year-old from Borussia Dortmund in 2017, has more than filled his shoes after an inspired tactical switch from the coach.

Since Enrique brought Dembele into the central striker role from the wings, the position he has fulfilled since emerging as a talented youngster, his goalscoring production has exploded — and his two goals against Brest were another example. His first demonstrated his confidence, dribbling into the box before whipping a left-footed effort into the near post. His second, a deflected finish with his right foot after reacting quicker to a loose ball than the Brest defenders, highlighted his anticipation as a goalscorer. Scoring with both feet is not an unfamiliar feat for Dembele, who famously does not know which is his stronger foot.

It was his third brace of the year to go along with two hat-tricks and 15 goals in total — already more than his entire tally in 2024. This switch has given PSG a fresh attacking verve and resulted in a more balanced unit.

Who knows, it might be enough to push the French champions from a side that was teetering above the elimination zone for much of the league phase to contenders for the trophy.


USMNT midfielder McKennie sprinkles some magic for Juventus

McKennie dedicated his celebration to Harry Potter but it was his wand of a right boot that provided the magic as he opened the scoring for Juventus against PSV.

With the USMNT midfielder lurking on the edge of PSV’s box, the ball broke in his direction, bouncing at a good height to strike. McKennie, who is no stranger to scoring spectacular goals, approached the ball at an angle, allowing him to shift his body weight to the left to get over the shot and control his effort while striking through it.

The result was an unstoppable blend of control and power. His shot flew past Walter Benitez in the PSV net, inches below the crossbar. It’s probably a good thing the ball missed him, too, as it would have taken him with it into the back of the net if he was in the way.

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McKennie, who is a huge Harry Potter fan, celebrated with an imitation of the “Expelliarmus” spell from the film and book franchise. He has a lightning bolt tattooed on his finger in tribute to the speedy Gryffindor seeker, and in 2023 he was pictured alongside Matthew Lewis, who plays Neville Longbottom in the films, posing with a USMNT shirt alongside Brenden Aaronson.

In December, club and national team-mate Timothy Weah joined in on the fun, celebrating together with the “Expelliarmus” after McKennie scored against City.


Rooney and Mbappe: masters of the shinned volley against Man City

Wayne Rooney’s brilliant overhead kick in Manchester United’s 2-1 win over City in 2011 will take some beating as the greatest shinned goal ever scored against City (and perhaps anyone), but Kylian Mbappe surely claimed the silver medal with his goal in the second half for Madrid.

Dani Ceballos, who was playing in his first Champions League knockout match for Real Madrid seven-and-a-half years after signing from Real Betis, played a perfectly weighted lofted pass in the danger area between City’s goalkeeper and defence, which Mbappe latched onto.

With an astoundingly similar technique to his second goal against Argentina in the 2022 World Cup final, Mbappe leapt and volleyed across the ball with his right foot while falling away to the left.

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While his effort in Qatar flew past Emi Martinez, the connection wasn’t so pure in this instance, the ball looping off his shin, over Ederson, and into the corner. 

Rooney, watching from pitchside at the Etihad while working for Amazon Prime, must surely have been impressed.


Why did it take four minutes to award Haaland’s first goal?

Premier League fans are now accustomed to seeing footage of VAR officials in Stockley Park drawing lines to determine whether a player was offside, but things operate differently in the Champions League — and Manchester City fans found out the hard way.

The Etihad Stadium erupted after Haaland put the home side ahead with a left-footed finish from close range after Josko Gvardiol played a chested pass in his direction. Three minutes and 50 seconds later, another cheer went up around the stadium as the Champions League’s semi-automated offside technology confirmed the goal.

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Gvardiol was visibly onside when the initial cross was played towards him, but he, and Haaland, had moved beyond the Madrid defence by the time the Croatian made contact. As long as Haaland was in line with or behind Gvardiol, he’d have been onside, but, as evidenced by the time it took for the technology to confirm, it was very tight.

As the name suggests, the technology eliminates the potential for human error, with the offside pictures taken from cameras in real time. It debuted in the Champions League in 2022-23 and was used at the 2022 World Cup. According to the Premier League, which has plans to bring in this technology this season, offside check delays should be reduced by 31 seconds.

In this case, however, the check took so long that Alan Shearer intimated the wait may have had some relation to Jack Grealish being replaced due to a non-impact injury 10 minutes later.

“It certainly doesn’t help when you’ve got elite athletes standing around for almost four minutes,” Shearer said on co-commentary during Amazon Prime’s UK coverage of the match. “It cannot help you, or your body. It’s not acceptable that players are having to wait around for that long.”

Judging by this incident those marginal calls will continue to take time. At least we got the right decision, eh?

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Who exactly is Serhou Guirassy? 

The Champions League has an unlikely top-scorer this season: Borussia Dortmund’s 28-year-old Guinean Serhou Guirassy. His tenth goal of the competition might have been his best; it was certainly the most important. An authoritative header that looped up and into the far corner, it settled a Dortmund team who, for much of the first half in Portugal, had had to withstand pressure.

That was vital, because Dortmund have endured a torrid season and are naturally fragile. They sit a distant 11th in the Bundesliga and are now coached by Niko Kovac, who was appointed to replaced the sacked Nuri Sahin two weeks ago.

This was Kovac’s first win. More importantly, it was a result (and performance) that Dortmund will feel they can build on in coming weeks — and that sense of a first step taken owes much to Guirassy.

He was signed from Stuttgart in the summer of 2024 after scoring 28 Bundesliga goals from 28 appearances last season. It was the first truly prolific top-flight season of his career, but at times the season he has laboured at the head of a team who do not create nearly enough chances. He can snatch at opportunities and drift out of games. So, while nine goals from 18 league appearances is hardly bad, it’s not quite what it could have been.

But Guirassy is an elegant, technical footballer rather than just a goalscorer. There were times in the first half when his languid skill on the ball seemed to reassure team-mates clearly short on confidence. And, having scored the goal which changed the entire complexion of the game — truly, an exemplary header — he created the second with a perfect cross for Pascal Gross, who kneed the ball in at the back-post to give Dortmund a 2-0 advantage on the night.

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Even before Karim Adeyemi had scored a third from a flowing counter attack to effectively finish the tie as a contest, Dortmund had started to play with a confidence and security that they have lacked for many months. Guirassy alone did not provide that. By full-time, this had become a commendable team performance. But goals so often change a side’s mood and that could not have been more the case for Kovac’s BVB than it was on Tuesday night.

There were plenty of individual contributions to that, but they followed Guirassy’s lead.

Seb Stafford-Bloor

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What happens next?

Champions League playoffs

Tuesday’s results

Brest 0 Paris Saint-Germain 3
Juventus 2 PSV Eindhoven 1
Manchester City 2 Real Madrid 3
Sporting CP 0 Borussia Dortmund 3

Wednesday’s fixtures
(8pm BST, 3pm ET unless stated)

Club Bruges v Atalanta (5.45pm BST, 12.45pm ET)
Celtic v Bayern Munich
Feyenoord v Milan
Monaco v Benfica

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The second legs will be played on February 18/19.

Eight teams will advance to the last 16, to join Liverpool, Barcelona, Arsenal, Inter, Atletico Madrid, Bayer Leverkusen, Lille and Aston Villa.

The draw for the last 16, quarter-final and semi-final will take place on Friday February 21.

(Top photo: Carl Recine/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.

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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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