S2 Ep 2: September 1, 1939 by W. H. Auden

Today's poem is a dense and complex work written at the beginning of WWII. Composed of 99 lines, it addresses the bleakness of war and violence, ancient and modern, and responds to the threat of annihilation through an eerily tidy structure.

A poem that Auden would try (and fail) to revise, describing it as "infected with an incurable dishonesty", it nonetheless continues to resonate 85 years later.