Consider This And In Our Time - Analysis

A poem that talks to disaster as if it were a person

The central move of Consider This and in Our Time is audacious: it addresses an unnamed supreme Antagonist directly and treats catastrophe as something with taste, habits, and recruiters. The poem’s opening eye-catch (As the hawk sees it or the helmeted airman) signals a cold, aerial perspective, as if we are already looking down from the vantage point of power, speed, and surveillance. From there, the poem slides between luxury and ruin, private pleasure and mass panic, to argue that modern terror doesn’t arrive like a single thunderclap; it arrives as a social atmosphere—part rumor, part disgust, part invitation—until everyone finds they cannot opt out.

Plate glass, furs, and the first hint of smoke

The first section is full of leisure that is somehow already contaminated. The clouds rift suddenly, and what we are asked to look at is not a mountain peak but a cigarette-end smouldering on a border. That tiny ember on a boundary reads like a miniature war: casual, throwaway, yet capable of spreading. Then comes the bright, insulated view: the massif framed Through plate-glass windows of the Sport hotel. The plate glass matters because it lets you admire danger at a safe distance; it’s a world where nature becomes décor and conflict becomes scenery.

Inside this setting, people are described as insufficient units, Dangerous, easy, wearing furs and uniform, gathered at reserved tables. They are Supplied with feelings by an efficient band—a chilling line because it suggests emotion itself has been outsourced, standardized, and piped in. Meanwhile, those feelings are Relayed elsewhere to farmers and their dogs / Sitting in kitchens. The poem’s social map is vertical: elites in hotels and uniforms, farmers in stormy fens; yet the same broadcast culture links them, turning experience into something transmitted, shared, and manipulated.

The hinge: naming the Antagonist who has always been here

The poem’s first major turn arrives with Long ago, supreme Antagonist. We shift from scenes of modern leisure to something older and mythic: a force More powerful than the great northern whale, described as Ancient and sorry about life’s limiting defect. That phrase suggests a bleak metaphysics: the Antagonist feeds on the fact that life is limited—finite, vulnerable, prone to envy and fear. Yet Auden pins this force to specific English places: Cornwall, Mendip, or the Pennine moor. The effect is to say that what’s coming is not merely foreign or exotic; it can bloom in familiar landscapes and local histories.

We also learn that this Antagonist has a track record with the powerful: its comments on highborn mining-captains drove them toward despair—Found they no answer, made them wish to die. Now they Lie since in barrows, safely dead and out of harm. The bitter implication is a contradiction that runs throughout the poem: the dead are spared the new kind of harm, while the living must face it, no matter their class or intelligence.

Recruitment in damaged places: harbours, orchards, and a silent comb

The poem insists the Antagonist’s influence is not abstract; it has meeting places. It speaks every day by silted harbours and derelict works, in a strangled orchard, and in the silent comb where a bird was shot. These are landscapes of blockage, abandonment, constriction, and casual cruelty. They suggest that modern disaster recruits from the sites where economic life has stalled (derelict works), where nature is damaged (strangled orchard), and where violence has been normalized (a bird shot, dogs worrying something unseen). The Antagonist doesn’t need grand temples; it thrives in the leftovers of progress.

Then the voice becomes startlingly procedural, almost like a military memo: Order the ill that they attack at once; Visit the ports; Beckon your chosen out. The poem’s tone shifts from panoramic observation to command, as if we’re overhearing how panic is organized. The targets are specific: handsome and diseased youngsters, and women who are solitary agents in the country parishes. Charisma and sickness are paired; isolation becomes usefulness. The poem suggests that social unrest is mobilized through people who already feel marked, restless, or unseen.

How the rumor works: soft, horrifying, and contagious

Auden gives the Antagonist a signature weapon: not a bomb at first, but a rumour, soft and yet horrifying in its capacity to disgust. Disgust is important here: it’s a bodily, involuntary reaction, and once it’s activated it can override reason. The rumor spreads magnified until it becomes a polar peril, a prodigious alarm. The language expands from whisper to global threat, showing how modern fear scales up through amplification rather than proof.

When the panic hits, people scatter like torn up paper, Rags and utensils caught in a sudden gust, seized by immeasurable neurotic dread. The domestic details—utensils, rags—turn catastrophe into a kitchen-level mess, but on a mass scale. The tension here is sharp: the poem begins by showing feelings being supplied by a band, and later shows feelings (dread, disgust) becoming uncontrollable, so powerful they lift entire populations like trash in a storm.

No one gets to stay private: financier, don, athlete, nurse

One of the poem’s hardest claims is that social role offers no escape. The Financier in the room Where the money is made but not spent will need his typist and boy no more: The game is up. The phrase sounds like a collapse of systems—work continuing without meaning, money accumulating without life. But the poem doesn’t only attack finance. It turns to those who thinking, pace in slippers on the lawns of College Quad or Cathedral Close: intellectuals and clergy-adjacent elites, people sheltered by institutions and tradition. It also names those who seem wholesome or carefree: people born nurses, people who live in shorts, Sleeping with people and playing fives. The effect is democratic in the bleakest sense: everyone is within reach of the Antagonist’s weather.

Auden’s most chilling sentence: it is later than you think

The poem’s warning crystallizes when it addresses Seekers after happiness and tells them, It is later than you think. That line doesn’t mean simply that time passes; it means the present is already overdue, already sliding into consequence. Auden contrasts that day—near, unavoidable—with that distant afternoon of prizes, rustle of frocks, and stamping feet, when they celebrated the ruined boys. The phrase ruined boys makes the earlier scene of awards sound grotesque: society can applaud damage as long as it’s ceremonial and safely framed, like the massif behind plate glass. The poem insists that such framing is about to break.

Optional pressure point: is disgust the poem’s real Antagonist?

If the rumor’s power lies in its capacity to disgust, then the Antagonist may not be a single ideology so much as a human reflex that can be triggered and steered. What happens when whole societies begin to treat disgust as evidence—when the feeling itself becomes the proof? In that case, the poem’s most frightening suggestion is that the Antagonist doesn’t need to invent new hatred; it only needs to redirect what is already latent in soils, in the infected sinus, and in the eyes of stoats.

The last turn: you cannot be away, and the mind will pay

Near the end, the poem crushes the fantasy of escape: You cannot be away, Not though you pack and flee down arterial roads. Even the roads are bodily—arteries—suggesting the whole society is one organism carrying panic through its veins. The closing vision is intensely psychological: the prey is driven into fugues, Irregular breathing, alternate ascendancies, until, after haunted migratory years, the self may disintegrate in the explosion of mania or lapse into a classic fatigue. Disaster is not only political; it is mental weather, an internal breakdown that mirrors the external scattering.

What makes the poem linger is its double vision: it can see the hotel’s plate glass and the farmer’s kitchen, the band that supplies feelings and the rumor that unstrings them. Auden’s Antagonist is both ancient and perfectly modern, capable of turning a cigarette-end on a border into a continent-wide draft of dread. The poem’s bleak consolation, if it has one, is clarity: it refuses the story that catastrophe is sudden, or that it belongs to someone else.