Brokers Roaring Like Beasts

As the markets plunge, the wise and the cultivated will, of course, be reading this Auden poem. In particular, they will, with a wry smile, be noting these lines:

'But in the importance and noise of tomorrow

When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse.

And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,

And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,

A few thousand will think of this day

As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.'

Yeats died 70 years ago on the eve of an earlier apocalypse.