The Full Text of “The Capital”
The Full Text of “The Capital”
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“The Capital” Introduction
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In W. H. Auden's "The Capital," an unnamed capital city glitters with false promise. This city lures rural people in with the promise of freedom and wealth, but the reality of city life is sinister and bleak: the city's rich people live shallow, selfish lives, while its poor suffer dreadfully. The poem makes a cynical, even "appall[ed]" assessment of urban life. To be fair, however, rural life in the poem isn't much better, consisting mostly of "outraged, punitive father[s]" and dull "obedience." "The Capital" first appeared in Auden's important 1940 collection Another Time.
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“The Capital” Summary
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The speaker describes a luxurious neighborhood in a capital city where the rich are always waiting around, spending a lot of money, expecting something wonderful to happen. There's a tiny restaurant where lovers devour each other, and a café where people who have been thrown out of their countries have set up their own mean, gossipy little village.
The city, the speaker says, has used its charm and its elaborate infrastructure to do away with the difficulty of winter and the lively energy of the spring. People's angry, oppressive fathers are far, far away from this place: the city reveals how boring obedience to their authority is.
And yet, the speaker goes on, the city betrays its citizens, distracting them with music and flirtations and making them believe that they're endlessly powerful. Innocent people who stop paying attention to what's happening here can find themselves suddenly defeated by unknown or concealed rage.
In dark back streets, the city hides terrible things: factories whose workers' lives are treated as cheap goods just like the collars and chairs they make, and rooms where lonely people get slowly ground down, like pebbles worn down by water.
And yet, the city illuminates the sky, sending its lights far out into the huge, freezing, dark countryside. Hinting at prohibited pleasures like a nasty uncle, the city calls out alluringly every night to the children of the farmers.
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“The Capital” Themes
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The False Promise of the Big City
The speaker of W. H. Auden's “The Capital” presents the big city of the poem's title as a place of false promise. This unnamed capital city lures the naïve in from miles around with its supposed rewards of freedom, glamor, status, and luxury. But what it actually gives these people when they arrive is another matter. The modern city, Auden's poem suggests, is a corrupt and dangerous place.
As the poem’s speaker observes, the capital appears to offer wealth, fun, and a kind of freedom that people forced to live in “obedience” to small-town convention might find attractive. The city presents itself as a place where people can live big, independent lives, enjoying the pleasures of “orchestras” and flirtatious “glances” while escaping their “punitive” (that is, their oppressive and cruel) families. This capital promises to make people feel that they have “infinite powers,” the ability to do whatever they want. Even the seasons aren’t mandatory here: with its complex “apparatus” of buildings, the city can shut out the “strictness of winter.”
What’s actually going on, however, is a lot darker. All those apparently free and fun-loving citizens are in fact bored, selfish, and lonely. The rich sit around “waiting expensively for miracles to happen,” idly spending huge amounts of money while hoping that something wonderful enough to entertain them might come along. Lovers “eat each other,” an image that suggests they’re exploiting each other more than truly caring for each other. And the desperate, lonely poor get hidden away in “unlighted alleys,” treated as disposable objects for factory owners to make “temporary use” of and discard.
Those who come to the city hoping for a bigger, brighter life, then, often end up disillusioned and even crushed. They become "victims to the heart's invisible furies"—that is, they fall prey to their own hopes and passions. The city tempts them in with promises that they can live out their fantasies, then "batter[s]" them with disappointment and exploits them for its own purposes.
The city, in other words, is all a front. Its glamor is artificial and actively deceptive. Those who peek behind the curtain of fun, opportunity, and freedom will find only selfishness, boredom, poverty, and suffering.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-20
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Rural Vs. Urban Life
Along with taking a cynical look at the falsity and shallowness of big city life, this poem examines the corresponding problem of life in the countryside. In the poem, one reason that country people flock to the city (only to get chewed up and spat out) is that small-town life is itself oppressive and restrictive. In the choice between city and country life, this bleak poem suggests, there’s really no winning: both ways of life only offer different flavors of oppression.
The unnamed capital city the poem describes “beckon[s]” to the “farmer’s children” out in the country, luring them in like a “wicked uncle.” Sending its sinister “glow” far out into the countryside, it works like a beacon for rural youths who are simply fed up with their lives, titillating them with tales of the “forbidden.”
Such tales might seem particularly alluring to young rural people because country life feels so very oppressive. The countryside, the speaker observes, is a place run by the “outraged punitive father,” a kind of man who rules his children with an iron fist, punishing any step away from convention and tradition. The glittering city’s promise of freedom illuminates the “dullness of mere obedience,” making following along with the way things have always gone (and the way your dad wants them to go) seem crushingly boring.
The speaker warns, however, that the rural kids who leave the countryside to make a new life for themselves in the big city will find the capital just as “punitive” as their fathers, only in different ways. If the countryside is all lockstep obedience, the city is all “lonel[iness]”: city freedom comes at the cost of isolation. Even the “lovers” here only “eat each other,” for instance. There’s no real connection in this city, the poem implies, just predatory selfishness.
For that matter, the work these starry-eyed country kids might end up getting in the big city can be just as oppressive as any “punitive father.” People who aren’t wealthy don’t live good lives in the city: factory workers’ lives get treated as objects for “temporary use,” just like the cheap goods they make.
In this bleak view of society, the choice between country and city winds up being a choice between two different kinds of oppression. Country life means being oppressed by convention and family scrutiny; city life means being oppressed by selfishness, isolation, and inequality.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 5-8
- Lines 17-20
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Wealth, Class, and Inequality
In its critique of shallow, cruel cities, this poem also points out the vast and terrible distance between the lives of the urban wealthy and of the poor. While cities promise “charm” and “pleasures” to those who come to make their fortune there, the reality is that only the rich get to enjoy these cosmopolitan treats. Worse, the rich fund their luxurious lives by exploiting the poor, whose unseen and grueling labor makes the city run.
The wealthy of the poem’s “Capital” don’t have much to do. As the speaker archly puts it, they spend most of their time “waiting expensively for miracles to happen.” In other words, they just flop around spending money to while away the time until something wonderful enough to actually entertain them comes along. To be wealthy, in this city, is to be lazy, jaded, and bored.
Meanwhile, in dingy “unlighted streets,” the poor live out “appalling” lives of endless work. The factory owners who employ them treat them as disposable objects, things of no more importance than the cheap “collars or chairs” they manufacture. Shut away in depressing rented rooms, the poor get “battered / Slowly like pebbles into fortuitous shapes.” In other words, they get ground down, worn away by misery and loneliness.
The speaker is at their most serious as they describe these cruelties, unabashedly “appall[ed]” by the lives of the poor—and, implicitly, by the selfishness and cruelty of the rich. Nowhere are the capital’s deceptive promises more clearly revealed than in the way this big city treats its most vulnerable. This city's poor get chewed up by a system that doesn’t even see them as people.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-2
- Lines 13-16
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Capital”
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Lines 1-4
Quarter of pleasures ...
... a malicious village;“The Capital” begins by painting an uneasy portrait of a “quarter of pleasures," a neighborhood in the unnamed "Capital" city of the poem's title. Right away, this area's promises of pleasure feel ironic. The first lines of the poem use surprising phrasing to hint at lurking danger:
Quarter of pleasures where the rich are always waiting,
Waiting expensively for miracles to happen,Taken on its own, the first line makes it sound as if the rich are lying in wait, about to pounce on some unwary victim. The second line, which begins with a weary repetition of the word “waiting,” reveals that they’re not doing anything so active. Rather, they’re just lounging around, spending ridiculous amounts of money while hoping that some “miracle[]” might come along to entertain them. These opening lines set an ominous tone, making the rich sound equally bored and predatory.
If the rich are always waiting around for something sufficiently miraculous to happen, that implies that the “pleasures” available to them must be pretty empty. And so are the pleasures of the “lovers” in this quarter’s “little restaurant”: they “eat each other,” the speaker says, a metaphor that might equally suggest that:
- The lovers are shamelessly and violently kissing in public (a rather more shocking image when this poem was published in 1940).
- The lovers are cannibalizing each other emotionally, exploiting each other. Perhaps they’re using each other for money or clout. Perhaps they don’t truly like each other much.
There’s no affection in this image, only shock and greed. Even the speaker’s cry in line 3—“O little restaurant,” they intone—makes this snapshot of a stylish eatery feel hyperbolically grim.
Meanwhile, “exiles” (people ejected from their native countries, often for political reasons) loiter at local cafés. Knowing what it feels like to be cast out doesn’t seem to make them kinder or more compassionate. Instead, they merely establish a “malicious village” of their own: in other words, they form a nasty, exclusionary little group. Readers might imagine this village’s cruel gossip and its cold stares at anyone who dares intrude. Readers might even hear the exiles’ catty whispers in the sibilant /sh/ and assonant /ih/ sounds of “established a malicious village.”
So far, life in this “quarter of pleasures” seems grotesque, dull, ugly, and above all, mean. But it also seems like it’s full of failed promise. This “Capital” has wealth, lovers, a cosmopolitan international community—and none of this creates happiness, liveliness, or connection. What “pleasures” there are to be had here are shallow and selfish.
“The Capital” will diagnose the sickness of big-city living with grim (but witty) distaste. This stylish poem is written in simple unrhymed quatrains (four-line stanzas) with a quick, busy accentual meter. That means that the lines use the same number of beats, but don’t stick to any regular metrical foot (like the da-DUM of the iamb or the DUM-da-da of the dactyl). Instead, the lines can use as many unstressed syllables as the poet likes. That creates a dense, chatty tone, as readers can hear in lines 3-4:
O little restaurant where the lovers eat each other,
Café where exiles have established a malicious villageEach of these lines has five strong stresses and a whole swarm of unstressed syllables. This rhythm creates a fittingly busy sound, like the murmur in one of those “little restaurant[s]" or gossipy cafés.
Both of these lines also end with a falling-away unstressed syllable: "other," "village." So will nearly every line in the poem. These are known as feminine endings, and their downcast, drooping tone suits the speaker’s sour assessment of this capital city.
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Lines 5-8
You with your ...
... here is apparent. -
Lines 9-10
Yet with orchestras ...
... our infinite powers; -
Lines 10-12
and the innocent ...
... heart's invisible furies. -
Lines 13-16
In unlighted streets ...
... into fortuitous shapes. -
Lines 17-20
But the sky ...
... children you beckon.
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“The Capital” Symbols
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Light and Darkness
In many poems, images of light vs. darkness suggest revelation vs. concealment, truth vs. falsity, or good vs. evil. In "The Capital," however, both light and darkness symbolize deceit and concealment.
Bright lights have long been a symbol for urban bustle, and this city's lights "illumine" the whole sky for miles around, their "glow[...] visible far / Into the dark countryside." But these lively lights are also artificial, part of an elaborate urban "apparatus" that "abolishe[s]" the seasons and conceals an ugly underbelly. The city's false glitter hides an "appalling" dark side: "unlighted streets" where poverty and misery get hidden away in dim corners. Here, darkness suggests the city's secret cruelty, the grim realities that contrast with its apparent sparkling glamor.
Ultimately, the city's lights work like an anglerfish's antenna: they're a deceptive lure to attract prey. The city lights promise a change from the "dark" and oppressive countryside, but really they just mask a different kind of oppressive darkness. People who move toward this light can expect isolation and (quite likely) poverty, not fun and freedom.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 7: “Far from your lights the outraged punitive father,”
- Line 13: “In unlighted streets you hide away the appalling;”
- Lines 17-18: “But the sky you illumine, your glow is visible far / Into the dark countryside”
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“The Capital” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Apostrophe
By addressing the capital in apostrophes—direct speeches to something that wouldn’t typically be able to respond—the poem’s speaker suggests that the city is a conscious, malicious force. Rather than simply being a collection of people living in the same place, this capital is an entity like a “wicked uncle” that “beckon[s]” to rural people, luring them in and gobbling them up.
The speaker tells the city, for instance, that “you with your charm and your apparatus have abolished / The strictness of winter and the spring’s compulsion.” The apostrophe makes the speaker sound as if they’re talking to a trickster whose moxie they admire but whose motives they mistrust. It’s all very well that the city has such “charm,” the poem suggests, but isn’t there something a little creepy about living in a place that can so successfully cut itself off from the natural world? The apostrophe here makes the speaker sound like someone who has watched the city at work for a long time and knows its ways.
In other places, the speaker’s apostrophes to the city feel darkly theatrical, and perhaps darkly comical, too. When the speaker cries, “O, you betray us / To belief in our infinite powers,” they sound as if they’re making an accusation in a grand tragedy. At the same time, however, they’re examining the city’s population. These lines point out that the city is only feeding on people’s inherent egotism. The city is its people, and its people all desperately want to believe that they have “infinite powers,” the ability to do whatever they want. The poem’s use of apostrophe thus constructs a critique of city people and city attitudes as well as an indictment of the monstrous capital as a whole.
Where apostrophe appears in the poem:- Lines 5-8: “You with your charm and your apparatus have abolished / The strictness of winter and the spring's compulsion; / Far from your lights the outraged punitive father, / The dullness of mere obedience here is apparent.”
- Lines 9-10: “Yet with orchestras and glances, O, you betray us / To belief in our infinite powers;”
- Line 13: “In unlighted streets you hide away the appalling;”
- Lines 17-20: “But the sky you illumine, your glow is visible far / Into the dark countryside, the enormous, the frozen, / Where, hinting at the forbidden like a wicked uncle, / Night after night to the farmer's children you beckon.”
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Simile
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Metaphor
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Juxtaposition
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Assonance
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"The Capital" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Quarter
- Malicious
- Exiles
- Abolished
- Apparatus
- Compulsion
- Punitive
- Apparent
- Furies
- Appalling
- Fortuitous
- Illumine
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(Location in poem: Line 1: “Quarter of pleasures”)
A neighborhood of a city. This neighborhood is one that, on the surface at least, is filled with "pleasures," or indulgences and luxuries.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Capital”
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Form
"The Capital" uses a regular shape to contain an irregular, unpredictable rhythm. The poem is written in five quatrains (or four-line stanzas), has no rhyme scheme, and uses accentual meter—a meter measured out by number of beats per line rather than arranged into regular metrical feet like the iamb or the trochee. (Most of the lines here use five stresses, as in "The dullness of mere obedience here is apparent," but some use just four, as in "Victim to the heart's invisible furies.")
Taken together, these choices make the poem feel at once busy and regulated. The four-line stanzas march along staunchly and predictably. But the lines that make them up feel dense and a little unpredictable, as their stresses fall in different place and with different numbers of unstressed syllables between them.
These choices all suit a poem about a vast city that seems to offer endless possibility and in fact offers only a trap. The bustling lines fall again and again into the same rigid pattern.
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Meter
For the most part, "The Capital" is written in a rough five-beat accentual meter. That means that the lines contain five stresses but don't stick to any one metrical foot (like the da-DUM of the iamb or the DUM-da-da of the dactyl). As an example, here's how that sounds in lines 3-4:
O little restaurant where the lovers eat each other,
Café where exiles have established a malicious village;This rhythm has a fairly steady pulse, but because of all those irregular unstressed syllables, it also feels loose and conversational. There's something oddly chatty about this speaker's address to the treacherous, gleaming capital.
Every so often, the poem diverges from this meter: a few lines have four stresses instead of five. The rhythm of line 12 provides a good example:
Victim to the heart's invisible furies.
Precisely because the poem is so dense with pattering unstressed syllables, these lines don't especially pop out. They're just part of the muttering, rumbling rhythm of the speaker's voice. The poem's sounds have the texture of the clamor in a rush-hour pub.
The meter here also helps to create a dubious, sour tone. Nearly all of the poem's lines end with the falling-away sound of an unstressed syllable: "waiting," "happen," "other," "village." The effect is somewhere between downcast and ominous.
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Rhyme Scheme
There's no rhyme scheme in "The Capital." Along with the poem's irregular accentual meter, the lack of rhyme helps to create a stern, ominous tone. There's no enlivening music here, just the quick, intricate, relentless rhythm of the speaker's voice as they describe the menacing city.
The poem does use an occasional flash of internal rhyme (as in "The dullness of mere obedience here is apparent" in line 8). It also has glimmers of alliteration or assonance (for instance, the /b/ sound that stresses the words "betray" and "belief" in lines 9-10, or the long /i/ sound that highlights the words "in unlighted streets you hide away the appalling" in line 13). But these touches are pretty subtle. This is not an intensely melodious poem: its sounds are as stark as its subject matter.
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“The Capital” Speaker
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The most readers can glean about this poem's speaker is that they seem to have intimate, first-hand knowledge of the "Capital" they describe—and that they're disturbed by what they observe. The speaker takes a remote, worldly, and quietly "appall[ed]" view of what goes on in this city. They look with disgust on its selfish lovers and obscene, blasé rich people, and with horror and sympathy on the quietly desperate poor hidden away in "unlighted streets." None of this surprises them, exactly, but none of it pleases them, either.
The speaker understands why a starry-eyed rural kid might be tempted into this den of horrors. From the outside, the city looks intriguingly free, a place where "forbidden" desires might be enacted and a childish fantasy of "infinite power[]" might be made real. That's because rural life is so oppressive! Conventional small-town life, ruled by "outraged punitive father[s]" and demanding total "obedience," drives the "farmer's children" into the city's clutches.
The speaker's pity and sympathy for people who get ground down by city life suggests that they're a thoughtful, observant person, and perhaps a person who has experienced urban disillusionment first-hand. Maybe they, too, once came to the city with great expectations.
This portrait of the city also hints at the speaker's vision of what a city could or should be. The cafés full of "exiles," for instance, might be cosmopolitan and international instead of cliquey and gossipy; the lovers kissing in the restaurants could express real sexual freedom instead of selfishness. Alas, that's simply not how things go in this capital.
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“The Capital” Setting
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The poem is set in an unnamed "Capital," a major city. (Readers might be tempted to imagine this capital as London or Berlin, two metropolises with which Auden was intimately familiar.) This glittering city seems full of promise—but it's often false promise. Luring starry-eyed rural youths in from the countryside with dreams of freedom and independence, the city ends up chewing a lot of them up, whether it treats their lives as objects for a "temporary use" like a cheap chair or beats them down with loneliness.
Even the people who appear to be having more fun in the capital seem deluded or cruel. The "lovers" in the restaurants, the speaker says, "eat each other," feeding on each other rather than really loving. The rich laze around "waiting expensively for miracles to happen," always expecting something more splendid to come along and spending ludicrous amounts of cash to while away the time. And "exiles," people forced out of their own countries, only form a "malicious village" in a local café, creating their own spiteful, gossipy world from which they can vengefully exclude other people. In short, this city promises magic and freedom, but offers cruelty, selfishness, and suffering. The capital's gloss and wealth is a dangerous, beautiful camouflage.
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Literary and Historical Context of “The Capital”
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Literary Context
Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) first published "The Capital" in his great 1940 collection Another Time (which also includes classics like "Musée des Beaux Arts" and "Funeral Blues"). Auden had such a distinctive and unusual poetic voice that many critics see him as a school of his own: he and his contemporaries Cecil Day-Lewis, Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood, and Louis MacNeice are sometimes classed together as the "Auden group."
Unlike many of the Modernist poets of his generation, Auden didn't abandon metered poetry for free verse. Instead, Auden was a great proponent of old poetic forms, plain and approachable language, and light verse: poetry, he believed, didn't have to be highfalutin to be serious and meaningful. His own poems often deal with death and suffering in a voice that's equal parts crisp, witty, and melancholic. But he also delighted in writing everything from pantoums to villanelles to scandalous limericks.
Auden was particularly interested in music, and wrote not only poems that responded to musical traditions (like his folk-song-ish "As I Walked Out One Evening") but also libretti—that is, lyrics for operas or pieces of classical music. He was also a noted essayist; his book The Dyer's Hand collects his reflections on the art and craft of poetry. Some of these he wrote when he was Oxford University's Professor of Poetry, a ceremonial position awarded to notable writers and critics.
Auden remains a well-known and well-loved poet. Writers like James Merrill and John Ashbery credit him as a major influence, and his poetry even makes some famous appearances in pop culture.
Historical Context
When Auden published "The Capital" in 1940, he had every reason to feel world-weary, disillusioned, and heartbroken over the state of civilization. By this time, World War II was in full swing, and all sorts of comfortable old certainties about the order of the world were in doubt. Many of Auden's poems from the war years grapple with the world's weaknesses and failings—and urge that people strive, in spite and because of those failings, to love each other.
Auden was horrified when war broke out in 1939 and wrote one of his most famous poems in response to the news (though he himself didn't have an especially high opinion of this poem in later years). By this time, he'd already left England for the U.S.—a move that some saw as a betrayal, though in fact Auden volunteered to return to England and join the army if he was needed. (He also tried to enlist in the U.S. Army, but the military turned him down because he was gay.) By leaving when he did, he just missed the Blitz, the infamous German bombing campaign that killed thousands of civilians and destroyed countless buildings all across the UK.
This poem might also gesture at Auden's experiences as a gay man in the early 20th century. For most of Auden's lifetime, homosexuality was a crime in the UK; sex between men was only decriminalized in 1967. Seeking community, safety, and secrecy in the big city was exactly what many gay people of Auden's generation did. This poem's vision of country kids moving to the city to escape their "outraged punitive father[s]" and embrace the "forbidden" comes with a hint of gay subtext.
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More “The Capital” Resources
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External Resources
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A Brief Biography — Read the Poetry Foundation's short biography of Auden.
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Auden's Legacy — Visit the W. H. Auden Society's website to take a look at some contemporary Auden scholarship.
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Auden's Influence — Read a recent appreciation of Auden by journalist Susan McDonald.
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An Interview with Auden — Read the Paris Review's interview with Auden to get a taste for his wit (and his pronounced opinions on poetry).
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Portraits of Auden — See some portraits of Auden via the National Portrait Gallery in London.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by W. H. Auden
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