Poem of the Week: ‘Roman Wall Blues’ by W. H. Auden
2 December 2024
Our poem of the week is W. H. Auden’s ‘Roman Wall Blues’.
Roman Wall Blues
Over the heather the wet wind blows,
I’ve lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose.
The rain comes pattering out of the sky,
I’m a Wall soldier, I don’t know why.
The mist creeps over the hard grey stone,
My girl’s in Tungria; I sleep alone.
Aulus goes hanging around her place,
I don’t like his manners, I don’t like his face.
Piso’s a Christian, he worships a fish;
There’d be no kissing if he had his wish.
She gave me a ring but I diced it away;
I want my girl and I want my pay.
When I’m a veteran with only one eye
I shall do nothing but look at the sky.
Copyright © W. H. Auden, 1937. Used by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd. All rights reserved.
‘Roman Wall Blues’ by W. H. Auden appears as part of ‘Twelve Songs’ in Auden’s Collected Poems.
The collected poems of W. H. Auden – edited by Edward Mendelson – gathers together one of the most important bodies of work that twentieth century English poetry has to offer.
W. H. Auden was born in York in 1907 and brought up in Birmingham. His first book, Poems, was published by T. S. Eliot at Faber in 1930. He went to Spain during the civil war, to Iceland (with Louis MacNeice) and later travelled to China. In 1939 he and Christopher Isherwood left for America, where Auden spent the next fifteen years lecturing, reviewing, writing poetry and opera librettos, and editing anthologies.
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