The Shield of Achilles

What do the Trojan War and modern warfare have in common? According to W. H. Auden's "The Shield of Achilles," the answer is politics, desolation, and an abundance of death. Painting a bleak picture of dehumanization and suffering, Auden reimagines the valor of Achilles's shield as presented in Homer's The Iliad and uses it instead depict warfare as dehumanizing, brutal, and devastating.

The Shield of Achilles at a Glance

The Shield of Achilles poem and book by W. H. Auden

The poem "The Shield of Achilles" was first published by British-American poet W. H. Auden in 1952. It was later republished as the title poem of his 1955 collection The Shield of Achilles. This poem was written toward the latter half of Auden's career, when the major focus of his writing was on theology and Christianity. This collection won the National Book Award in 1956.

Auden was born in 1907 in England. He was educated at Oxford where he became deeply influenced by Marxist and psychoanalytical theories. When he left England for America in 1939, Auden was already well-known as a left-wing writer for his poetry as well as the plays he wrote with his mentor, sexual partner, and friend Christopher Isherwood.

Many of Auden's contemporaries saw him leaving England as a betrayal, believing that he fled to avoid fighting in World War II. He left roughly eight months before Britain declared war on Germany. Contrary to the assumptions his contemporaries made about him, Auden actually attempted to enlist in the United States Army, but he was turned down because of his sexual orientation.

Despite never actually fighting in the war, Auden was recruited by the U.S. Army’s Strategic Bombing Survey after the war to help investigate the effects the Allied bombing had on German cities. This experience, as well as his time in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, directly influenced Auden's perception of war.

Fig. 1 - Auden's time working with the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey surveying the damage of World War II in Germany deeply impacted his perception of war.

"The Shield of Achilles," written after World War II and during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, offers a distinctly anti-war sentiment, in tune with the devastation Auden witnessed during his own lifetime.

The Shield of Achilles Summary

"The Shield of Achilles" presents Auden's twist on the classic Greek myth of Achilles. As in the original story in Homer's Iliad, Thetis, Achilles' mother and a sea-goddess, asks Hephaestus, the god of fire and the forge, to make armor for her son. He complies and she watches him work, thinking that he will decorate Achilles's shield with glorious images of warfare: ships on seas, sacrificial cows covered in flowers, and victorious men and women dancing. Instead, in Auden's version, Hephaestus depicts war as desolating and dehumanizing. He adds millions of soldiers ready to die in a field of nothingness, barbed wire, indifferent officials, and further devastation. There is no hint of the glory or victory that Thetis wished for her son, and as Hephaestus walks away Thetis realizes that Achilles will soon die.

The Shield of Achilles Analysis

The major literary devices used throughout the poem are allusion, ekphrasis, and juxtaposition, which create the central tension between the romanticized view of war and the harsh reality of warfare. The more subtle devices like metaphor, simile, and repetition help to convey the poem's main themes.

Allusion

The poem relies heavily on allusions to Greek mythology, starting with the title and carrying on through the poem to each of the main characters. The characters themselves are not revealed in full until the final stanza when the speaker notes,

Achilles was a Greek hero of the Trojan War in many legends, not just in The Iliad. He was renowned for being the bravest and most successful soldier of Agamemnon's army in the Trojan War. It was prophesied that the Greeks could not win the war without him, so they scoured the country looking for him. The Iliad depicts the last year of the Trojan War, including when Achilles kills the eldest prince of Troy, Hector. Although The Iliad never mentioned Achilles's heel as his only weak spot or his ultimate death, later accounts affirmed that Paris, the younger prince of Troy, killed Achilles with an arrow to his heel.

Fig. 2 - Achilles was renowned as the greatest soldier in the Trojan War.

Hephaistos, or more commonly Hephaestus, is the Greek god of fire, forges, smiths, and craftsmen. He made all of the armor for the gods and goddesses of Olympus, while Thetis was the mortal hero Achilles's mother and a Greek goddess of water.

The other allusion in the poem speaks to the brutal sacrifice that the soldiers are being asked to make in the name of war and glory. The speaker makes an allusion to Jesus Christ and the two other criminals that are crucified with him:

Jesus, who was biblically without sin, was put to death because he was seen as a political threat. Similarly, the Greek soldiers, including Achilles, were brought into the Trojan war over politics (the king of Mycenaean Sparta sieged Troy because his wife had run away with the Paris, the prince of Troy). Like Jesus, soldiers paid the ultimate sacrifice with their lives because their leaders wanted to maintain their political power.

Ekphrasis

The form of the poem is an ekphrasis, meaning a detailed description of an art piece, whether real or imaginative. One of the most well-known examples of ekphrasis is Homer's description of Achilles's shield in The Iliad. In Homer's original version, Hephaistos creates the art on Achilles's shield, depicting glory, nobility, and vitality. When Auden's Thetis watches Hephaistos, she expects him to do the same. Instead, the art of the shield tells a much different story:

As the poem progresses, the main tension grows between how Thetis imagines the art on Achilles's shield and what Hephaistos actually depicts. The artwork itself reveals the tension and the themes in the poem.

Juxtaposition

Juxtaposition occurs between the glorified images that Thetis thinks the shield will depict of war and the way war is actually depicted. There is tension between her romanticized preconceptions and reality as she realizes that war is much more brutal and deadly than she anticipated. This occurs throughout the poem, but perhaps the most vivid depiction occurs in stanzas seven and eight:

The juxtaposition shows how out of touch with reality the goddess really is. She thinks the war will be glorious and fulfilling because she doesn't have to fight in it herself. Like other bystanders, she romanticizes the beauty and glory of war because she has never experienced it. The difference between what she thinks the war will look like for her son and the ultimate destruction that it ultimately brings is jarring. As opposed to entertainment, happiness, and glory, the only things that await Achilles, and in fact, civilization, are desolation, violence, and sorrow.

Anachronism

Anachronism hints that Auden is actually referring to modern warfare instead of ancient wars. Lines 31 and 32 read,

Barbed wire wasn't invented until the 1800s, long after the Trojan War and Achilles' time. Starting in World War I and continuing into World War II, barbed wire was used to trap enemies and as a defense mechanism. In this poem, barbed wire protects officials from danger and sets them distinctly apart from soldiers, who are marching straight into war. Anachronism reveals that the speaker is actually critiquing modern warfare and the leaders who sit in safety bored, while their soldiers face unimaginable horrors.

As another anachronism, these two lines contain a striking allusion to the Holocaust. Barbed wire surrounded concentration camps where millions of people were tortured, starved, and murdered. The bored officials cracking jokes are the guards of the camp, who were indifferent and even delighted in the prisoners' suffering.

Fig. 3 - Although barbed wire didn't exist in Achilles's time, the speaker uses it to hint that he is actually speaking to the brutality and desolation of modern warfare.

Metaphor

Metaphor is used to show just how powerless ordinary people, especially soldiers, are in times of war. While the officials sit behind their barbed wire, commanding armies from a safe place so removed from the fighting that they are actually bored of it, the soldiers' and common people's lives are placed in the metaphorical hands of those in power:

The vast majority of the world, everything that is beautiful and majestic and valiant, is controlled by "the hands of others"— the leaders who never get their own hands dirty but will send soldiers to their death. This metaphor shows the imbalance of power in war but also in human society in general.

Repetition

The repetition of the phrase "She looked over his shoulder" (1, 23, 45) reflects the speaker's insistence that war is bloody, horrific, and dehumanizing. It doesn't matter how many times Thetis looks at what Hephaestus is doing, hoping to find some positive outcome of the war. Each time she looks she will only be met with devastation and destruction. The desolation of war applied to those in Achilles's time, it was applicable to the two world wars of Auden's time, and it is timely even now. No matter how those in power try to spin war and no matter how they try to justify their reasons for invading other countries, it will always lead to death and destruction for innocent people, while those in power are protected from violence themselves.

Simile

The similes in this poem convey the bleak, lamenting tone of the poem. Simile starts in the first stanza with:

Lead is a toxic metal, which has been used since ancient times. Because of its toxicity, weight, and color, lead is often associated with death. Auden may also be referencing bullets historically being made out of the lead for both war and hunting. Instead of a bright, shining sky, Hephaestus depicts the sky as dark and heavy. The poem starts off grim and only darkens through the next stanzas. When describing why the soldiers are going to war, the speaker notes that their cause was proved to be justified,

Now, the sky is not the only thing that is bleak and barren. In fact, the entire landscape is dried up and flat, devoid of plants or activity. Like the landscape itself, the tone of the voice that commands the soldiers to fight is lifeless and indifferent to their suffering.

Hyperbole

Hyperbole depicts just how far-reaching the effect of war goes and also how individual soldiers become one part of a greater whole, losing their personal identities and lives:

As a whole, the soldiers have one purpose: to do whatever their commanding officers tell them to do. They stand at the ready, dehumanized and emotionless as if they themselves are the weapons and not a million individual people. The speaker doesn't describe any of them individually, nor doesn't even describe Achilles. Instead, all of the soldiers become one singular amalgamation with their individual identities stripped away.

The Shield of Achilles Themes

The major themes in "The Shield of Achilles" are the horrors of war and apathy in the face of violence.

Horrors of war

Thetis is shocked by the horrors of war in the poem, but the ease with which Hephaestus draws such horrors on Achilles's shield reflects how commonplace they really are. Interestingly war doesn't just affect the "unintelligible multitude" (13) of soldiers who line up to fight. The horrors of war trickle out into every facet of society, turning once-thriving cities into wastelands.

Think back to stanza eight, where the "ragged urchin" (53) represents a young, probably orphaned, a child with no home to go to and no family in sight. The stanza also casually mentions sexual violence against young girls and physical violence between young boys. War dehumanizes everyone involved, taking away the dignity of children, and women, even if they themselves had no hand in the war.

Auden makes it clear that war is horrific in both the ways it sends young people to their deaths and also how it devalues all forms of life.

Apathy in the Face of Violence

There are many instances of apathy in the face of violence. One of the most prominent are the leaders and officials who sit around while others are murdered in battle:

But it's not just those in power who look the other way when soldiers are murdered. Ordinary folks too, who are generally moral, simply watch others make sacrifices for them and make no attempt to stop them or help them. These people are complicit in allowing murder and violence to occur. As long as they themselves are not the ones being killed, they will be passive bystanders.

Thetis herself is also a jarring embodiment of apathy towards violence. She knows her son is "the strong / Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles" (65-66) so she knows the devastation he causes. And the idea of war doesn't bother her at all until she realizes that her son is going to die. She shows no sign of distress when she sees the shield and what happens to mortal soldiers and ordinary people in war. It is quite evident that she only cares when she realizes Achilles "would not live long" (67).

The Shield of Achilles Meaning

Using mythical allusions, Auden speaks directly about the effects of war in his own time. When Auden wrote this poem in the 1950s, the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in the Cold War and civilians and soldiers alike both feared the repercussions of nuclear weapons. The countries were in an arms race to acquire more power and accumulate more weapons, but the ordinary people themselves were terrified of another war. Like Thetis, the world leaders were hoping that military strength would bring them glory. But as Hephaestus depicts, the only thing that is guaranteed with war is destruction, death, and devastation.

The meaning of "The Shield of Achilles" is that modern warfare is not characterized by glory and valor, instead, it is a dehumanizing force that desolates every aspect of life and sacrifices innocent soldiers in the name of greater political power.