The 80th anniversary of D-Day is a moment for both gratitude and apprehension

I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-second Street

Uncertain and afraid

As the clever hopes expire

Of a low dishonest decade..."

So begins WH Auden’s damning poem “September 1,1939”, written soon after German tanks rolled into Poland. I have been thinking about it a lot lately, marvelling at its masterly structure, at the poet’s intellect, wondering why he later turned away from it, and coming back again and again to the phrase “a low dishonest decade”. 

It sits with me, heavy and oppressive, like one of Churchill’s black dogs. As the 80th anniversary of D-Day approaches, Auden’s words have never felt more pertinent, or more prescient.