I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened land of the earth…
YOU might remember those opening lines of September 1,, the poem W. H. Auden wrote the day after Nazi Germany started the Second World War by invading Poland. Until the scene in when Matthew reads at the funeral of his partner, Gareth, it was Auden’s best-known poem. He had just moved to New York with his then partner Christopher Isherwood.