Culture
Poetry Challenge Day 5: The Role of Poetry In Our Lives
We’ve come to the end of our Poetry Challenge. In four days, we’ve committed the four stanzas of “The More Loving One” to memory, and taken some time to ponder its intricacies and appreciate its meaning. (Just joining us? Start here anytime.)
Now what?
In one of his notebooks Auden observes that “a poem or a novel is a gratuitous not a useful object, like a lathe or an automobile.” He wasn’t being modest or dismissive. The impracticality of poetry is a feature, not a bug. It doesn’t do anything, which may be why, as a species, we can’t seem to do without it.
This is how Auden assessed poetry’s value in his elegy “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”:
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
Poetry is part of everyday human reality, and also one of our tools for taking stock of that reality and commemorating our passage through it, alone and together.
A poem is a gift — a gratuity, you might say, offered for no special reason. Auden’s gifts were abundant, and his generosity was legendary. His biographer Edward Mendelson has documented a pattern of discreet, sometimes secret kindness directed at friends, colleagues and strangers: money lent; hospital bills paid; hospitality offered freely along with food, companionship and advice.
Auden’s later work often operates in a similar spirit. Some of his best verse of the postwar era takes the form of letters, wedding toasts, public remarks and dinner-party witticisms, as if poetry were a grand game of words with friends.
“The More Loving One,” first published in Britain at Christmastime in 1957, is a modest, thoughtful present for the reading public. (A few years later, as it happens, it ran in the Book Review.) At first glance, its intention seems to be, above all, to provide a bit of amusement. Anyone can pick it up, pass it along, tuck it away, find a time and place for it — as we have done this week.
Should we hear it once more, before we go?
As we have seen, there is much more to these lines than clever words and pleasing sentiments. Auden applies the balm of irony and rhyme to matters that might otherwise be too grave, too daunting, too scary to deal with. Are we alone in the universe? How should we love? Why should we care?
Instead of a definitive response, Auden offers a thought experiment. Suppose the worst: stars that don’t give a damn; asymmetrical affections; an empty sky. What are we to do?
The answer — care anyway! — reflects the eccentric, stubborn Christianity of Auden’s later years. Faced with the possibility of nothing, the speaker nonetheless chooses to surrender, to love, to believe. This is not a practical decision. It’s an aesthetic impulse, an entirely gratuitous choice.
It’s also a refusal of solitude. We picture the speaker alone, looking up at the chilly night sky, talking himself through his mixed feelings about it. But of course he isn’t alone. We’ve been here the whole time, accepting the gift and sharing it, standing beside our poet as he beholds the stars.
Fill in the entire poem! Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite it.
Question 1/8
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
The final challenge: You’ve been training for this all week. Now show off what you know.
We’re going to do the whole poem, starting from the top. You’ll have emoji hints for each round.
👀👆✨🤓🧠🙂↕️4️⃣🫂🏃🏻😈
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.