As We Like It - Analysis

A city loved and condemned at once

The poem’s central claim is that the modern city is a human achievement inseparable from human damage: we built it, we benefit from it, and we are implicated in what it does. Auden opens with an almost touristic inventory—cathedral, engines, dogs—but he refuses to let the civic picture settle into pride. The city’s grandeur sits directly on byres of poverty that run down to / The river’s edge. Even the glittering modern materials—light alloys and glass—feel less like progress than like a hard sheen over an old moral problem: the city is “ours,” and so is the misery under it.

That insistence on shared responsibility is blunt: the city is Built by the conscience-stricken, the weapon-making, / By us. The phrase doesn’t let anyone pretend innocence. Even “conscience-stricken” people are still “weapon-making”; remorse and complicity coexist. The tone here is public and prosecutorial, but the target is not some distant villain—Auden keeps circling back to us.

The missing “They” and the hunger for moral witnesses

The poem then pivots into a haunted question: But where now are They. “They” are described as people who without reproaches showed “us” what vanity chooses, who pursued understanding with patience like a sex, and who had “unlearnt / Our hatred.” In other words, they are not scolders or propagandists; they are models of clarity and uncoerced moral attention. The longing embedded in these lines is almost embarrassed by how badly it is needed: the speaker wants a standard of goodness that doesn’t humiliate, a guidance that doesn’t dominate.

That need collides with the current crowd’s emotional weather. The city is already primed for coercion: Wild rumours woo and terrify; Betrayers thunder; blackmail works. The tension is sharp: the poem remembers people who could loosen hatred, but the present runs on intimidation and spectacle. The question where now are They implies not only loss but abandonment—either the moral witnesses are gone, or the city has made itself unable to hear them.

The hinge: “Who knows?” and the triumph of spectacle

The turning point comes with Who knows?—a shrug that lands like a verdict. After that, the poem’s language hardens into pageantry and aggression: peaked and violent faces are “exalted,” and bunting and glittering / Brass swallow whatever voice remains. The phrase our great retreat is especially chilling; it sounds like a parade, but it names a moral withdrawal dressed up as national ceremony. The crowd’s lives are feverish prejudiced, and worse, they do not care. Auden makes apathy feel like an active force—something that can erase the possibility of “They” returning.

The botanist with the phial: evil as small, clinical, and ordinary

One of the poem’s most unsettling images is not a general or a demagogue, but the sinister tall-hatted botanist who stoops at the spring with an insignificant phial and releases the plague. The scale is wrong on purpose: catastrophe enters through something “insignificant,” through a posture of careful expertise. This isn’t the romance of evil; it’s the bureaucratic, scientific, almost polite delivery of mass harm—especially because the town is called ignorant, suggesting vulnerability rather than guilt in the immediate victims. The poem’s contradiction tightens here: the city can produce cathedrals and alloys, and it can also produce the knowledge and instruments to poison its own water.

Ordinary tenderness under cosmic indifference

After the plague, Auden drops the camera into a quieter register: pitiful subalterns sleep, The moon is usual, necessary lovers touch. The calm is not comfort; it is the world continuing without moral commentary. The river—so present from the first stanza—becomes alone, and the flower is trampled, small emblems of what gets flattened by crowds and history. Then the poem abruptly widens into astronomy: The planets rush towards Lyra in a lion’s charge. Against that scale, human hatred looks both ridiculous and terrifying: ridiculous because the cosmos doesn’t notice; terrifying because, in the human world, it still works.

Hate’s bond, death’s answer, and tomorrow anyway

The ending refuses a clean moral arc. The speaker asks, Can / Hate so securely bind? and then answers the harder question—Are they dead here?—with Yes. Whatever “They” stood for, it has not survived this city’s retreat. Yet the poem does not grant hatred the last word as an ideology; it grants it a brutal kind of efficacy: the wish to wound has the power. Then comes the bleakest consolation: And tomorrow / Comes. The closing, curt sentences—It’s a world. It’s a way.—sound like acceptance, but they read more like an indictment of how easily people normalize what they’ve made. The poem leaves us inside that tension: tenderness persists, morning arrives, planets rush on, and still the city’s proud surfaces—glass, alloys, brass—shine over the fact that the will to harm can organize a whole civilization.