Et in Arcadia Ego

By WH Auden

Who, now, seeing Her so

Happily married,

Housewife, helpmate to Man,

Can imagine the screeching

Virago, the Amazon,

Earth Mother was?

Her jungle growths

Are abated,

Her exorbitant monsters abashed,

Her soil mumbled,

Where crops, aligned precisely,

Will soon be orient:

Levant or couchant,

Well-daunted thoroughbreds

Graze on mead and pasture,

A church clock subdivides the day,

Up the lane at sundown

Geese podge home.

As for Him:

What has happened to the Brute

Epics and nightmares tell of?

No bishops pursue

Their archdeacons with axes,

In the crumbling lair

Of a robber baron

Sightseers picnic

Who carry no daggers.

I well might think myself

A humanist,

Could I manage not to see

How the autobahn

Thwarts the landscape

In godless Roman arrogance,

The farmer’s children

Tiptoe past the shed

Where the gelding knife is kept.

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Next week, my ode to the food chain (which may not be as good as Auden take on the destruction of the earth!)