In his own poems, this truth often adopted a moral or social guise.

Poetry,
Auden wrote, is a way of extending our knowledge of good and evil. Many of
his poems are intended to help men and women make good moral choices, even
though the way by which the poems do this is not always clear.

Auden wrote Law Like Love 1939 during an extremely fecund period in which
he also wrote The Unknown Citizen, September 1, 1939, In Memory of W.B.
Yeats, and Muse des Beaux Arts.

The poem muses on just what the law is in light of what others claim it is. The
poem presents a panoply of people and possibilities, all of which seem true
enough to some degree. In agriculture and gardening, for example, the primary
Law is apparently the sun; all actions are oriented around it and its changes. Law
can be seen in the wisdom of the old, for they have experienced the ways of
the world and can apply general principles based on their experienceand the
old can shrilly scold whether they really know whats best or not.

At the same time, the principle behind the law might not be that which has
power (the sun, or the divine as interpreted through a priest or scripture) or
experience (the aged), but that which has immediate reality, which is why the
senses of the young also seem to carry lawmaking authority to guide action. A
childs inclination can be said to be unfettered by the distorting weight of
civilization. Indeed, this seems to be the point of law-abiding scholars who
claim no natural basis for moral lawas, perhaps, the philosopher Nietzsche
claimed that ideas like good and evil are socially constructedthe evidence
is that different cultures punish different things, just as they wear different
clothes and use different words for Good-morning, as though law and morality
are just fashion and emotion.

This point of view is not far from what judges might say, that is, that they
primarily interpret their societys laws and apply precedents: Law is as Ive told
you before Law is The Law.

Another kind of power or self-actualization leads to different claims to have the

unique law for himself or herself, with special laws and exceptions that apply to
Mewhat the philosopher Kant argued was immoral.

The repetition of Law and Law is in the poem emphasizes the multiple ways
that people interpret the Law for their own ends. The irregular length of stanzas
similarly emphasizes this point. The rhymes, mainly in the form of couplets,
seem to provide ironic distance from each group of people and what they say the
Law is.

The problem presented in the poem is that none of the different kinds of people
lets an ultimate objectivity guide their morality and action. If there is a natural
law, an ultimate morality, judges might say that this is what provides their
judgment in difficult or new cases, but in this poem they do not say that. The
divine law is presented only as mediated twice through the priestly interpretation
of scripture. The sun shines differently and requires different actions in different
times and places and, besides, does not help very much outside of agriculture.

People may claim That the law is / And that all know this, but specifying it is
more difficult than people think. In the long transitional stanza from the subject
of law to the subject of love, the poem suggests that we, dear, know we know
no more / Than they, all of those above, about the law. But what really seems
to guide peoples idea of law is their own prejudices or selfishness or, to say it
more politely, their loves. They identify Law with some other word.
Philosophically the challenge is to slip out of our own position / Into an
unconcerned condition, as Kant might approve.

Perhaps this kind of objectivity is impossible for most people, or all people, even
if it would be moral and desirable. Perhaps, like it or not, law is like love. This is
how the poem concludes, with an AABB quatrain with the repeated opening Like
love we all four times. Law, it seems, is like love in that we do not really know
where it comes from or where it is taking us. It does not really compel us, and yet
we cannot escape it (fly as in flee). Both law and love make us weep because
we cannot freely get and keep what we want. And despite our promises, we
seldom obey the law or remain true to what we love.

The paradox is that we know there is and should be law, yet we cannot nail down
what it is; we want to live by certain rules but cannot. English professor and
literary critic Walter Jost sees this poem as presenting a middle way, providing a
bridge between philosophy and poetry, that is, providing hope that we can live
with good approximations of objective law without descending into solipsism or
the myth of pure social construction. Jost reminds us that each of the metaphors
earlier in the poem does shed light, after all, on what law is. We can use such
metaphors, Jost argues, as starting points for learning more about the law. If we

take those metaphors seriously, we can analyze them creatively and incorporate
them into stronger accounts of the law.

This brilliant poem is a precise and universal portrait of a tyrant. Auden, who
lived in Berlin during Hitlers rise to power, and who, like so many writers of his
generation, joined the International Brigade in 37 to fight the Fascists in Spain,
saw his fair share of tyrants. I find it devastatingly powerful that this description
can still be applied to tyrants of our own time. Tragically, the subject of this piece
is timeless.
So, whether your read this poem as about God, a scientist, artist, or a human
dictator, its clear that Auden really gets tyranny. Tyrants are after Perfection, of
a kind, he writes. An insane, inhuman, deluded idea of perfection, of course. I
am interested that Auden talks about the poetry he invented. All poetry is
propaganda, in a sense; when we write a poem, we use all sorts of ploys and
techniques to amplify our ideas or the message or emotion we wish to convey
to colour the readers mind. I find it fascinating that Auden seems to almost
identify with the tyrant in the poem, in the sense that as a poet he seeks a
certain symmetry, a certain perfection, through his art. Is that not why we create
Art? To make sense of a senseless world? To create order out of chaos? Is that not
the motivation behind all scientific inquiry? All of this paints the tyrant as a
crazed sort of creator, prepared to do anything in order to achieve his mad
visions.

When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter. This line strongly
evokes the way in which a powerful tyrant can so poison and enslave the minds
of even intelligent, respectable people, that they will follow his lead. I am
thinking here particularly of those who though ordinary, respectable people
went along with the atrocities of the Nazi party as though possessed or
sleepwalking. And how far will we go to create perfect Art? And to make our
scientific discoveries?

The final line of the poem is devastating: And when he cried the little children
died in the streets. This sentence reminds us that the subject of this poem is
real and extremely serious. Every move the tyrant makes affects the life of
somebody, somewhere.