September 1, 1939

A core thread in the poem is the ignorance and lack of personal responsibility people feel in times of crisis. Everyday individuals look to the state to navigate the global problems the world is facing, when, the speaker argues, the true power lies in themselves. In the first stanza, the speaker describes the pervasive “odour of death” (Line 10) that has blanketed the city. This suggests something external and beyond control of the everyday person. However, they go on to point to a “psychopathic god” (Line 18) who, despite the horrors he’s inflicted, is still only a man twisted by his lived experience: “Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return” (Lines 21-22). This introduces the idea of personal choice and responsibility for those choices.

Later, the poem uses the cityscape to illustrate the broader society and its projection of protection and guidance; however, the image they project is one of the “Collective Man” (Line 37)—in other words, a product of collective individual choice. Yet by viewing it as a collective, it becomes easy to distance oneself from one’s personal responsibility to that society. The speaker describes this dismissal as a “euphoric dream” (Line 42). They argue that people can find the problems at the root of society by looking in the mirror.