War of the Homefront

In the poem "The Shield of Achilles" by W.H. Auden, Auden describes a very different shield than the one Hephaestus makes for Achilles in The Iliad. This new, modern version seems to be directly influenced by the events of the era in which this poem was written--directly after the second World War. In particular, it is very clear that one major difference from the shield of The Iliad is the absence in Auden's poem of scenes of peace. In the poem, Thetis searches for the images of "athletes at their games, men and women in a dance" amongst other peaceful activities. Instead she finds images of "a ragged urchin", "girls are raped", "two boys knife a third", and many other similarly depressing, violent images. I think this change from The Iliad is directly related to the simple fact that there weren't a lot of places that were not affected by World War II. Especially in England which is where Auden is from. Before "The Blitz" on London during the war, England had not experienced a threat to England itself from a foreign power since the Norman invasion in 1066. England had always been the Greeks from The Iliad. The English always travelled to other places to "sack cities" in a sense. They never fought a war against a foreign power at home. In this poem we clearly see the effect that this has. In some ways it suggests that some might have thought that England's strength was weakening and this scared them. Very similarly to how scared Agamemnon and the other Greek leaders became when Hector was so close to burning their ships or how scared the Trojans became when they realized how close the Greeks were to taking Troy.