Culture
Court Vision: Why is NCAA Tournament expansion talk a thing? Is Gonzaga really in trouble?
Did March sneak up on anyone else?
We have been enjoying the regular season so much that we kind of forgot it’s almost over. But the reality is, the first conference tournament bracket — thanks, Atlantic Sun — is already out. League titles are being clinched. The bubble is bubbling. All of the things!
But that means it’s time for one of our least favorite annual storylines: greedy, grubby fingers trying to wreck something that doesn’t need fixing.
1. NCAA Tournament expansion
On “College GameDay” two weekends ago, ESPN’s Pete Thamel reported (almost unprompted) that while NCAA Tournament expansion talks are still ongoing, decision-makers “seem to be down the road” with a concept that would alter the best postseason in sports by growing the field from 68 teams to potentially 76.
“We should know fairly soon,” Thamel said. “Two, three months. Something like that.”
Hubert Davis’ North Carolina Tar Heels are 1-10 in Quad 1 games this season. (John Byrum / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
At the risk of calling expansion “imminent,” Thamel isn’t reporting this live on GameDay if it weren’t a serious possibility. And given that timeline, the NCAA and its television partners may settle on an agreement in time to adjust the 2026 tournament. All of which is a long way of saying, this very well may be the last Big Dance as we know it and as we’ve known it since 1985.
Mechanically speaking, what might going to 76 teams look like? An expanded First Four, per Thamel, with eight teams competing in Dayton — where the First Four is held annually — and eight more at another site to be determined (likely outside of the Eastern time zone, for logistical reasons).
Using The Athletic’s latest bracket prediction, let’s consider what this year’s field would look like with 76 teams. All of the following would be included, rather than sweating out their spots:
- Indiana (17-11), which already has announced coach Mike Woodson will be stepping down
- Wake Forest (19-9), which has one Top-25 win all season and has lost consecutive games to 11-17 NC State and 14-14 Virginia
- North Carolina (18-11), which is 1-10 in Quad 1 games with a single victory all season over a team currently thought to be in the field
- SMU (21-7), which has zero top-50 wins all season
- Plus Cincinnati, Xavier, Boise State and TCU, which have combined to go 37-31 in their respective conferences with just two Top-25 wins
Other than SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, who wants that?
Regarding Sankey, whose tenure has included going scorched earth on everything college sports hold dear in pursuit of cartoonish stacks of cash, it should surprise no one that Thamel said expansion conversations have been “driven by the power conferences.” Sankey even told The Athletic last spring that automatic bids for smaller conferences should be “part of the review” of the NCAA Tournament. Suffice it to say, it’s obvious how this is going to go: More mediocre high-major teams (like the ones above) will be included while deserving mid-majors get left out in the cold.
Which of these resumes is more deserving of making the Big Dance?
| STAT | TEAM A | TEAM B |
|---|---|---|
|
RECORD |
19-7 |
17-11 |
|
NET RANKING |
49 |
36 |
|
KENPOM RANKING |
43 |
38 |
|
QUAD 1 RECORD |
4-5 |
3-11 |
Reasonable arguments can be made for both sides. It’s a coin flip. Do you prefer the total wins and better Q1 record or the metric rankings? Time’s up. Team A is … San Diego State, and Team B is … Georgia. In The Athletic’s latest bracket, those two face off in this season’s First Four.
The point is that both have defensible arguments for inclusion. But does anyone think that many — if any — of those additional bids are going to teams like SDSU? From the Mountain West, Missouri Valley or Big West, instead of the SEC?
If you do, I have a bridge to sell you.
The simple logic is that more games equal more revenue. NCAA Tournament revenue accounts for, at most, five percent of the budget at most high-major schools (although it’s more at mid- and low-majors). That’s not nothing, but in the grand scheme of modern college sports, it’s not the end-all, be-all. The motivation for expansion, then, is as much about “inclusion” as anything else. With Division I men’s basketball having ballooned to 364 teams — which is a story for another day — only 18.7 percent of Division I is represented in a 68-team field. And while 76 teams are only marginally better, at 20.9 percent of teams, that does move the needle at least a little closer to the 25 percent threshold recommended by the NCAA Division I Transformation Committee in January 2023.
But who cares what that committee recommended?
The NCAA Tournament has existed in its current iteration for four decades and has proven time and time again that it needs no alterations. Need anyone be reminded of Saint Peters’ Elite 8 run in 2022? Fairleigh-Dickinson in 2023? Florida Atlantic vs. San Diego State in the Final Four? People like Sankey aren’t advocating for more of those opportunities; they’re advocating for more dollars in their pockets and more of their toys in the sandbox — at Cinderella’s expense.
2. It’s time to talk Gonzaga
Gonzaga isn’t going to miss the NCAA Tournament, right?
It’s closer than you’d think and closer than the Zags truly have been to the cutline since maybe 2011. Mark Few’s team went 25-10 that season with just three top-50 wins in the regular season, compared to two sub-100 losses. It ultimately earned a No. 11 seed — one of just three times in the past two decades (the others being 2007 and 2016) that Gonzaga has been a double-digit seed.
Now compare that to this season. Gonzaga’s on the same pace: 22-8 with only two top-50 wins, both of which came in November. And while these Zags don’t have any sub-100 losses weighing down their resume, they don’t have any wins over sure-fire tournament teams. (Baylor and San Diego State — Gonzaga’s two top-50 wins — are solidly on the bubble.) Frankly, the computer rankings are carrying a lot of weight for Few’s team as Gonzaga is in the top 10 in both the NET and by KenPom. After Gonzaga, the next highest-ranked NET team with two or fewer Quad-1 wins is VCU, at 29.
GO DEEPER
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While Few’s team isn’t below the cutline, it would serve the Zags well not to fall flat in their regular-season finale vs. San Francisco on Saturday or in the WCC tournament. Bracket Matrix has Gonzaga as a No. 9 seed, but that’s before Tuesday’s, Wednesday’s and Thursday’s results factor in. (The SEC earned several massive bubble wins this week, like Arkansas over Texas and Georgia over Florida.)
With Saint Mary’s sweeping the regular-season series and clinching the WCC outright for the second straight season, it’s the first time since 1990-92 — when Few was still a fresh-faced assistant — that Gonzaga hasn’t earned at least a share of the WCC regular-season title in consecutive campaigns. That speaks to the team’s relative mediocrity as well as anything.
Gonzaga’s at the point where it’s going to get the benefit of the doubt from the committee. And it’s not like it has any bad losses, with an overtime road defeat at 20-win Oregon State as the worst of the bunch.
But it’s a situation worth monitoring during the next few weeks. I wouldn’t bet on the Zags missing the field if the bracket dropped today, but if nothing else, Gonzaga making a 10th consecutive Sweet 16 — which would break its tie with Duke for the longest such streak of the modern era — feels, unlikely.
3. A bubblicious spotlight
Three teams that, for better or worse, won’t go away:
Arkansas: This feels impossible given the Razorbacks’ early season “defense,” but it’s true: Arkansas has the fifth-best adjusted defensive efficiency in the country since Feb. 1, per Bart Torvik, ahead of juggernauts such as Duke, Tennessee and Houston. And it’s not like John Calipari’s team has been playing bad teams this month. Arkansas is 5-3 during that stretch with wins over Kentucky and Missouri, which are both tracking as top-four seeds. So, what gives?
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Men’s college basketball bubble watch: SEC hopefuls surging just before March
For starters, credit to Calipari, who most of the college basketball universe was doubting weeks ago. And why wouldn’t we? Arkansas defended ball screens about as well as you and I do, dear readers. The proof, from the Hogs’ first SEC game vs. Tennessee:
Does the primary defender stop his man? Nope. How about the screener’s defender stopping the roll man? Also no. It’s not quite a red carpet to the basket, but it’s as close as you’ll find in a high-major conference game.
Now compare that to Wednesday night and Arkansas’ ball-screen defense vs. Texas:
That’s the same primary defender, D.J. Wagner (No. 21), only he looks like a different player. He chased over the screen and prevented the easy drive or pull-up jumper. Meanwhile, Jonas Aidoo (No. 9) stayed level with the screener as soon as he rolled, cutting off any potential passing window. The roll subsequently got blown up on the backside by Johnell Davis. Julian Larry still attempted the post entry, and Aidoo came away with the easy steal. Overall, it was much stickier, stouter coverage.
Opponents have shot only 30 percent from 3-point range against Arkansas this month, per Bart Torvik, and that is a top-50 rate nationally. That’s more like Calipari’s old Kentucky teams, which relied on lanky athletes to disrupt opposing actions. Combine that defensive surge with Zvonimir Ivisic’s offensive ascent — the 7-foot-2 Croatian has the first three 20-point games of his career in the Hogs’ past six games while shooting 40 percent from 3 — and Calipari has a team that suddenly doesn’t look so fun to play against.
GO DEEPER
What Georgia’s upset win over Florida means in SEC, NCAA race
Georgia: Maybe the biggest bubble result of the week was Georgia’s shocking 88-83 win over Florida. But the final score doesn’t nearly do that game justice. UGA led by as many as 26 points in the first half before Florida mounted a comeback. The Gators eventually went on a 13-0 run in the final few minutes to take their first lead all night, 79-78, with less than 90 seconds to play. But soon after, Blue Cain delivered what turned out to be the game-winning 3-pointer on his first attempt from deep in the game:
Georgia forced a turnover and a missed deep 3 on Florida’s next two possessions to seal it. Wildly, that completed Georgia’s first AP top-five win since January 2004, and it might be the final piece to the Bulldogs’ NCAA Tournament resume. A 5-10 SEC record is not anything to write home about, but the overall resume ain’t bad.
A nonconference, neutral-court win over St. John’s has aged marvelously, as has a home win over Kentucky in Georgia’s second SEC game. Plus, every loss is to a top-40 team. And with Texas, South Carolina and Vanderbilt left on the schedule, there’s room for Mike White’s team to stack a few more wins and eliminate any doubt.
North Carolina: Since the NET was first introduced in 2018-19, only one team has made the NCAA Tournament with a single Quad 1 win: Drake in 2021.
That doesn’t bode well for UNC, which is currently 1-10 in Quad 1 games. But the good news? The Tar Heels, who have won four straight behind a revamped starting lineup (albeit against terrible competition), have seemingly rediscovered some confidence, just in time for one last crack at a second Quad 1 win.
The bad news is that the game is against Duke, which looks like the best team in the country and led by more than 30 the first time the rivals faced off in early February.
On one hand, that matchup remains awful for the undersized Tar Heels. But at the risk of getting Tar Heels fans’ hopes up: What if Hubert Davis’ team has found something of late? Because very quietly UNC has posted the fourth-best adjusted offensive efficiency in the country during this winning streak, per Bart Torvik. (Don’t say anything about the 198th-ranked defense.) Admittedly, those wins have come against 12-16 Syracuse, 11-17 NC State, 14-14 Virginia and 16-12 Florida State. But the larger shift behind that surge might carry: Davis once again tweaking his starting lineup and finally adding some size.
He reinserted 6-9 graduate forward Jae’Lyn Withers, who started UNC’s first seven games, into the starting five, which allowed Davis to stop misplaying 6-6 freshman wing Drake Powell as a small-ball four. Those decisions in turn sent sometimes-starters Ian Jackson and Seth Trimble to the bench, although both still see significant minutes. It’s not a direct correlation, but that spacing and lineup balance have contributed to UNC, which shot a middling 34 percent from 3 all season, suddenly knocking down 44.4 percent of its 3s the past two weeks, good for the 15th-best rate in the country.
Is that sustainable? That’s both a Withers-specific and big-picture question. As for Withers, there is a massive discrepancy between his production in UNC’s first 25 games and its past four:
- First 25 games: 4.6 points, 3.4 rebounds and 38.2 percent from 3 in 14 minutes per game
- Past four games: 13.5 points, 6.5 rebounds and 62.5 percent from 3 in 23.5 minutes
Expecting a player who made 13 of his 34 3-point attempts during the first four months of the season to suddenly keep up a 10-for-16 rate is almost definitely setting Withers up to fail. But the spacing he provides might not be fool’s gold and might provide UNC its best chance of countering Cooper Flagg and Duke.
Beating Duke is UNC’s easiest way to push to the right side of the bubble, but even a loss in that game isn’t necessarily fatal if the Tar Heels’ newfound lineup leads them on a mini ACC Tournament run. Crazier things have happened.
(Top photo of Mike Woodson: Joe Robbins / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Now that we’ve memorized the first half of our poem, let’s learn a little more about the man who wrote it. (Haven’t memorized anything yet? Click here to start at the beginning.)
For most of his life, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was a star. He was widely read, quoted, argued over and gossiped about, achieving a level of fame that few writers now — and not many then — could contemplate. His New York Times obituary did not hesitate to call him “the foremost poet of his generation.”
Celebrity of that kind is ephemeral, but Auden’s words have continued to circulate in the half century since his death. Maybe you’ve heard some of them before. In the 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” his poem “Funeral Blues” is recited by Matthew (John Hannah) over the casket of his lover, Gareth (Simon Callow).
In the Gen-X touchstone “Before Sunrise” (1995), Jesse (Ethan Hawke) regales Celine (Julie Delpy) with an impression of Dylan Thomas reading Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.”
In both these scenes, the characters use Auden’s poetry to give voice to a longing for which they otherwise might not have words. Auden’s poetry is often useful in that way. It speaks to recognizable human occasions, and it isn’t always all about him.
“The More Loving One” might not be something you’d quote at a funeral or on a date, but it is almost effortlessly quotable — the perfect expression of a thought you never knew you had:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Ken Burns, filmmaker
The word “I” occurs five times in this stanza, but we don’t know much about the person speaking. His personality is camouflaged and revealed by craft.
Auden, born in the northern English cathedral city of York, began practicing that craft as a schoolboy, and honed it at Oxford. Not long after graduating in 1928, he was anointed by critics and readers as the great hope of modern English poetry. A charismatic, divisive figure, he gathered acolytes, imitators and haters.
He swam in the intellectual and ideological crosscurrents of the 1930s, drawing Marxism, psychoanalysis and mystical nationalism into his writing. Assimilating a daunting array of literary influences — Old English and Ancient Greek, French chansons and Icelandic sagas — he forged a poetic personality that was bold, confiding and seductive.
His love poems of that era were candid, discreet dispatches from a calendar of feverish entanglements, wrenching breakups and one-night stands, usually with other men. He also wrote about the feverish politics of the time — class conflict; the rise of fascism; the Spanish Civil War — in ringing rhetoric he later disavowed.
In 1939 Auden moved to America, acquiring U.S. citizenship after World War II. In New York he fell in love with Chester Kallman, a young American writer who became his life partner.
It was a complicated relationship, starting as a passionate affair and enduring through decades of domestic companionship and creative collaboration. Kallman’s refusal to be sexually exclusive wounded Auden, a dynamic that poignantly shades this poem’s most memorable couplet:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Yiyun Li, writer
In America, Auden distanced himself from the radical politics of his earlier career and embraced Anglican Christianity. His intellectual preoccupations shifted toward religion and existentialism — to the kinds of big questions we think about late at night, or when we look to the sky.
Making the leap from wunderkind to grand old man without seeming to stop in middle age, he became a mentor for several generations of younger poets. He was a prolific and punctual contributor of reviews and essays to various publications, including this one, for which he wrote a rave of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” in 1954.
Through it all, Auden devoted fanatical attention to the finer points of poetic technique. His notebooks are full of numbers, word lists and markings that show just how deep this commitment went. He counted every syllable, measured every stress.
He gathered rhymes and other words with a lexicographer’s zeal and a crossword puzzler’s precision.
The third stanza of “The More Loving One” is a miniature showcase of Auden’s skill. Of the four epigrams arrayed before us, it may be the most technically perfect.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
W.H. Auden, poet
The rhythm is flawless, without an extra syllable or an accent out of place. The grammar is also fastidious. Here is a single sentence, springloaded with equivocation, beginning with one idea and sliding toward its opposite.
This quatrain is the poem’s ideal formal representation of itself, a kind of proof of concept: four lines of impeccable iambic tetrameter in an AABB rhyme scheme. The by-the-book regularity of this stanza should give you a leg up in memorizing it, and you can test yourself below!
But the rest of the poem is an argument against perfection, just as it is a celebration of uncertainty and humility — as we’ll see tomorrow.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Your first task: Learn the first two lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).
This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Ada Limón, poet
Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
David Sedaris, writer
The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Josh Radnor, actor
And it features strong end rhymes:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Samantha Harvey, writer
These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.
This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.
But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.
What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.
This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”
The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Mary Roach, writer
The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tim Egan, writer
Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the second stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
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