The Full Text of “The Fall of Rome”
The Full Text of “The Fall of Rome”
-
“The Fall of Rome” Introduction
-
"The Fall of Rome" is W.H. Auden's surreal vision of a society in the last throes of decadence. In this poem's dream-world—part postwar West, part ancient Rome—ominous storms rumble over "flu-infected cit[ies]," a grim grey backdrop for scenes of luxury and futility. A drawling, self-indulgent upper class jostles an underworld of "outlaws," "absconding tax-defaulters," and an unfortunate (and unforgettable) "unimportant clerk" despairing at his desk: citizens of this crumbling society are either frivolous or desperate. This, the poem hints, is the way that empires always end, in tumbles of folly and injustice. But there's beauty and continuity to be found in a world beyond the one that humans have made for themselves. A final image of reindeer traversing "miles and miles of golden moss" offers a moment of hushed transcendence, a vision of natural forces vaster and stronger than those that govern the rise and fall of empires. Auden first published this poem in a 1947 issue of Horizon magazine and later collected it in his books The Shield of Achilles (1955) and Nones (1957).
-
-
“The Fall of Rome” Summary
-
Stormy waves crash against piers and rain hurtles down on an abandoned train. The caves in the mountains are full of bandits.
Ladies' evening gowns become more and more extravagant. Treasury officials chase fleeing tax evaders through small-town sewers.
Secret magic ceremonies put all the ritual prostitutes in the temples to sleep. Fashionable writers and critics all have imaginary friends these days.
Stern, cerebral Cato might promote traditional paths of study. But meanwhile, muscular soldiers are rebelling, demanding more food and more money.
The Emperor's bed is cosy (and occupied) as, somewhere else, an insignificant office worker writes "I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK" on a form printed on pink paper.
With neither money nor pity to their names, little red-legged birds, brooding on their spotty eggs, keep an eye on the cities, whose citizens are all diseased with the flu.
Somewhere completely different, huge herds of reindeer make their way across vast expanses of golden moss, noiseless and swift.
-
-
“The Fall of Rome” Themes
-
The Transience of Empires
"The Fall of Rome" takes place in a strange and dreamlike hybrid world, part ancient Rome, part 20th-century West. The mixture of these two eras paints a picture of the way that great powers rise and fall. Any world order, Auden suggests in this poem, is just as fragile and transient as once-mighty Rome's was—our own very much included.
At the moment, there's still plenty of wealth, luxury, and ease floating around in this poem's decadent dream-world. The design of "evening gowns" grows ever more "fantastic" (or outlandish), the official "temple prostitutes" loll in spellbound sleep, and the members of the "literati" (the literary scene) spend their time conjuring up modish "imaginary friend[s]" to impress each other with.
But these frivolous pursuits sit just on top of a desperate underworld. "Unimportant clerk[s]" suffer quietly at their enervating desk jobs. "Absconding tax defaulters" flee through the "sewers of provincial towns," pursued by grim "agents of the Fisc" (treasury officials). "Outlaws fill the mountain caves." Dangerous Marines "mutiny for food and pay." This is a world of drudging misery and the threat of violence. Ominous storm winds and "flu-infected cities" complete a picture of a civilization that won't hold together for much longer.
This unstable, increasingly lawless world is ignored or mismanaged by people higher up the social scale. "Caesar," the emperor, who should probably be keeping an eye on these things, is instead nestled up with a bosom companion or two in his spacious "double bed." And "Cato," a senator opposed to Caesar who pleads for a return to a world guided by the "Ancient Disciplines" (perhaps the historical Cato's Stoicism), is too "cerebrotonic," or intellectual to a fault, to have much effect on the populace.
The dream-Rome Auden depicts shows all the telltale signs of an empire in decay: outrageous inequality, flippant immorality, and a crumbling social order. By making its dark, droll connection between the fallen Rome of Caesar and Cato and Auden's contemporary world of literati and "unimportant clerk[s]," the poem suggests that things aren't looking too bright for the postwar West. The poem's surreal dreaminess further suggests that there's something unreal and absurd about any civilization's illusions of power and importance. Caesar's plush comfort is as much a dream as any chic scribbler's "imaginary friend."
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-28
-
The Persistence of Nature
When human civilizations collapse, "The Fall of Rome" suggests, nature takes no notice whatsoever. Rather, it goes about its business, slowly digesting what humanity leaves behind and galloping on. Through images of the natural world that range from darkly comic to awe-inspiring, Auden suggests that nature's persistence might equally feel a little insulting and profoundly comforting to a human observer caught up in chaotic world events.
The forces of nature make their first appearance at the beginning of the poem, where the speaker describes piers "pummelled by the waves" and rain that "lashes an abandoned train." These images of pummeling and lashing paint a picture of nature violently eroding human things. That ominous "abandoned train" (abandoned why, and by whom? What disaster left it there?) will rust away under the rain eventually, and the piers from which people set out across the oceans will fall.
But nature's erosion of human things certainly isn't personal; that would be too big a compliment to the human ego. Rather, the natural world goes about its business quite apart from human civilization, a fact that one might equally find funny, humbling, or profoundly moving. Auden gets at all these emotions through two separate portraits of animals doing what they do.
The first is a vision of "little birds with scarlet legs" nesting outside humanity's "flu-infected cit[ies]." They "eye" these suffering, crumbling human places with a certain wariness, but leave them very much alone. They have their own business to attend to: they're "sitting on their speckled eggs," raising the next generation of little scarlet-legged birds. Auden comically stresses the birds' separation from humanity by remarking that they're "unendowed with wealth or pity." They don't participate in humanity's wealth-based systems of power, and they don't get caught up in human emotions. They're doing their own thing. The pigeons, this stanza suggests, have more permanence than the cities they scrounge in, and they stand outside those cities' self-importance, mocking them with their indifference.
That's the funny reading. The profound reading comes in the final stanza, where the speaker looks "altogether elsewhere" from the crumbling civilization to a place where:
[...] vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.Grand, silent, and "vast," this scene reminds readers of the presence of an enduring "elsewhere," a world of powerful natural beauty going on far beyond the scope of human concerns.
It might be frightening to imagine everything human vanishing beneath the lashing rain, this poem suggests. But such an imagining might also allow an opening-up of the imagination to something transcendent and enduring.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-3
- Lines 21-28
-
-
Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Fall of Rome”
-
Lines 1-4
The piers are ...
... the mountain caves.The first stanza of “The Fall of Rome” introduces a world of ominous greyness. In the middle of a storm, something has gone wrong—or is on the way to going wrong, bit by inexorable bit.
The poem begins by juxtaposing a series of forlorn and stormy images. "The piers are pummelled by the waves": the ocean is beating against the piers as if trying to break them apart. There's no one here in this vision, just a pier and a storm. Meanwhile, out in a "lonely field," "the rain / Lashes an abandoned train." This is violent weather, pummeling and lashing, and it's attacking a human world that seems beset with mysterious, alarming trouble. How, readers might wonder, did that train come to be abandoned? What happened to its conductor and its crew and its passengers? But all that readers get to see is the weather attacking human things in a process of erosive ruination.
Abruptly, then, Auden leaps to another image in this desolate landscape: "Outlaws fill the mountain caves." Next to the industrialized greyness of the abandoned train and the storm-battered piers, this image feels like it comes from a storybook. Mountain caves crawling hyperbolically with bandits don't quite belong to a gloomy modern world. But there's a similar tone of threat here, quite as strong as the threat of the pummeling sea and lashing rain. Whole mountains teeming with outlaws can only spell trouble. And something nasty must have driven these outlaws to such inhospitable retreats in the first place.
Everything here feels somewhere between gloomy and uneasy, with hints of surreal strangeness. Right away, readers may feel they're entering a dream-world, and not the wish-fulfilling kind. But there's a lightness to the tone here, too, a dry and watchful quality. This poem's omniscient narrator of a speaker isn't bemoaning anything or condemning anything. Quietly, unflinchingly, he merely observes.
This atmospheric first stanza set the stage for a poem whose title, "The Fall of Rome," warns of slow-motion disaster. The Roman Empire did, famously, decline and fall, slowly collapsing over a period of centuries. But the dream-world this stanza introduces, with its abandoned train, doesn't appear to be that Rome—though flickers of the historical Rome will appear later, as readers will see. Rather, this grey and sinister landscape will soon reveal itself to have a lot in common with Auden's own 20th-century world.
Auden tells this tale of a civilization in decline in a controlled and rhythmic form. Each stanza is a quatrain (or four-line stanza) written in tetrameter (lines with four strong beats, as in "Outlaws | fill the | mountain | caves"). Crisp and compact, the stanzas have a pulsing, inevitable steadiness. There's a similar feeling of inevitability in the poem's ABBA rhyme scheme, a circular pattern that supports a tone part sinister, part darkly comic. That return to the A rhyme can feel equally like punchline or fate.
-
Lines 5-8
Fantastic grow the ...
... of provincial towns. -
Lines 9-12
Private rites of ...
... An imaginary friend. -
Lines 13-16
Cerebrotonic Cato may ...
... food and pay. -
Lines 17-20
Caesar's double-bed is ...
... pink official form. -
Lines 21-24
Unendowed with wealth ...
... each flu-infected city. -
Lines 25-28
Altogether elsewhere, vast ...
... and very fast.
-
-
“The Fall of Rome” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
-
Juxtaposition
Juxtapositions build the foundation of this poem's dark humor. Depicting a crumbling empire marked by a mixture of queasy luxury and inexorable decay, Auden lines up jarring images next to each other, creating contrasts that are as funny as they are sinister.
The second stanza offers a good example:
Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.On top, readers find a glamorous world of "evening gowns" that are growing ever more "fantastic," ever more elaborate and outlandish. This single line suggests a drawling, jaded kind of fashion; the rich clearly have to make their going-out clothes wilder and wilder to keep themselves from getting bored.
Beneath them, meanwhile, people who couldn't or wouldn't pay their taxes make the most squalid of escapes through the "sewers of provincial towns," pursued by the grim "agents of the Fisc" (treasury officials). Auden depicts the panic and stench and fear of this scrambling escape in exactly the same level tone he uses to describes the evening gowns. That makes the juxtaposition between two quite different ways that money acts in this world feel all the sharper.
There's a similar sharp contrast between the players in the fifth stanza:
Caesar's double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.As with the evening gowns, Auden doesn't have to say much about what Caesar is up to in order to conjure up a world of languid excess. The clear implication is that the Emperor's wide and luxurious bed (an English "double-bed" is what Americans would call a queen) is kept warm by a steady flow of company. He's spending most of his time making sure the sheets never cool.
While the man who's purportedly running this civilization wallows in bed, the poor "unimportant clerk," drudging away in an office, makes a silent, Bartleby-ish objection to his lot. The fact that he does so by writing one rather formal sentence on a "pink official form" suggests how deeply he's engulfed in bureaucracy and despair. All he can do is spoil a single form, one whose pinkness suggests it might even be a carbon copy, part of an endlessly reduplicated sea of pointless paperwork.
Similar darkly comic juxtapositions arise all through the poem: between brainy "cerebrotonic Cato" and the beefy "muscle-bound Marines," between the dreaming "temple prostitutes" and the fantasizing "literati." But perhaps the poem's most powerful and important juxtapositions are those between ancient Rome and the modern world and between human civilization and nature.
The poem's title, "The Fall of Rome," nods to the fact that even the most powerful empires fall. Throughout the poem, the interweaving of classical figures like Julius Caesar with modern types like the unimportant clerk suggests that Auden sees certain interesting parallels between the way that Rome toppled into dictatorship and decline and the direction the 20th-century world appeared to be heading.
And through images of "little birds with scarlet legs" and "vast / Herds of reindeer" going about their business altogether unperturbed by the turmoil of the civilization the poem depicts, Auden suggests that nature ticks right along in its ways, indifferent to human political turmoil. It's a thought that might be humbling to Caesar, expansive and vivifying to an unimportant clerk.
Where juxtaposition appears in the poem:- Lines 1-28
-
Allusion
-
Imagery
-
Enjambment
-
-
"The Fall of Rome" 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.
- Piers
- Pummelled
- Fantastic
- Fisc
- Absconding
- Literati
- Cerebrotonic
- Cato
- Extol
- Ancient Disciplines
- Unendowed
-
(Location in poem: Line 1: “The piers are pummelled by the waves”)
Platforms on posts that reach out into the sea. They can be used either as places for boats to tie up or as places for entertainment and strolling.
-
Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Fall of Rome”
-
Form
"The Fall of Rome" uses an even, measured form. It's built from seven quatrains (four-line stanzas) written in tetrameter (lines of four beats), like so:
Caesar's | double- | bed is | warm
As an | unim- | por tant | clerk
Writes I | DO NOT | LIKE MY | WORK
On a | pink of- | ficial | form.Auden's speaker thus keeps a level eye on the absurd and sinister goings-on of a waning civilization. The even tick-tock of the stanzas gives the strangeness and chaos the poem depicts a strange feeling of inevitability. So does the ABBA rhyme scheme, in which each stanza's rhymes venture out and then return to where they began.
The regular shape of these stanzas also provides a ground for the poem's final unexpected moment, a leaping-off from the sordid struggles of the city into the awe-inspiring silence of reindeer crossing "miles and miles of golden moss," somewhere "altogether elsewhere" and unperturbed.
-
Meter
"The Fall of Rome" uses a steady, pulsing tetrameter (that is, a meter with four beats per line). Auden doesn't stick to any one metrical foot here, but switches back and forth between iambs (feet with a da-DUM rhythm) and trochees (feet with a DUM-da rhythm). Here's how the first stanza scans:
The piers | are pum- | melled by | the waves;
In a | lonely | field the | rain
Lashes | an ab- | andoned | train;
Outlaws | fill the | mountain | caves.This stanza also offers a good example of one of the poem's most distinctive metrical features: catalexis, in which the closing syllable of a line is cut off. Almost every line in the poem uses a masculine ending (closing on a stressed syllable), even the trochaic lines that might more typically use a feminine ending (closing on an unstressed syllable).
As one can hear if one listens to Auden reading the poem aloud, these missing closing syllables often introduce pauses into the lines, vacancies that sometimes fall in unexpected places (as in the enjambed "rain / Lashes" in lines 2-3). The result is hypnotically rhythmic, but also sometimes disorienting, a touch off-kilter. That all feels fitting in a poem about the collapse of empires, a process that's at once chaotic and grimly predictable.
-
Rhyme Scheme
The poem uses this consistent, enfolding rhyme scheme:
ABBA CDDC EFFE
...and so on, in a pattern of sound that always comes back to the place it began. Here, Auden often uses that return to create surprising, even funny juxtapositions—for instance, by bringing fantastical "evening gowns" into dialogue with the "sewers of provincial towns."
Perhaps there's something melancholy, antique, or ghostly in the rhyme, too. This is the same long-worn pattern that starts out Italian sonnets, and the same pattern that Tennyson used to examine a profound tragedy in his In Memoriam. It's a pattern that, like grief, keeps turning back on itself.
The poem's rhymes thus support a tone that mingles the comic and the ominous. Each stanza's rhymes raise and then satisfy a moment of sonic suspense, with a return that can equally feel like a punchline and a haunting.
Once, the rhyme also reveals something of the poet. The English Auden moved to the United States a few years before he wrote this poem, and one of his rhymes shows a certain transatlantic influence: he rhymes "clerk" and "work," using the American pronunciation of "clerk" (clurk) rather than the English (clark).
-
-
“The Fall of Rome” Speaker
-
The poem's speaker is an omniscient observer watching over a wide sweep of the world. If far-off and all-seeing, he's not unmoved by what he sees: the particular things he notices, and especially the way he chooses to juxtapose those things, reveal a dry humor, an arch political cynicism, a wary anxiety, and a quiet awe. This speaker doesn't overtly judge what he observes. Rather, he reveals something of the way he sees the world through precise and economical description.
For example, take the second stanza:
Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.These lines capture three layers of society. There are the rich parading in increasingly elaborate, fantastical dress; grim government officials; panicking "tax-defaulters" fleeing through the sewers. By simply containing all these figures in one short stanza, the speaker reveals the shape of his thought. Clearly, he finds something discordant in this decadent world, with its furbelows on top and sewer-grimed desperation beneath.
But there's also something funny in that discordance. The speaker doesn't decry the "evening gowns" as lavish or exorbitant: he simply makes their "fantastic" excesses absurd by juxtaposing them with the "sewers of provincial towns," the least glamorous places imaginable.
While this speaker stands a little apart from the world he describes, he also finds something ominous in it. Watching a storm in the first stanza, he perceives an erosive violence: "the piers are pummelled by the waves," the rain "lashes an abandoned train." Outside the crumbling bounds of the society he describes, the forces of nature, he notes with quiet anxiety, are waiting to gnash apart whatever's left behind.
But, as the poem's indelible final stanza reveals, this speaker also has a persistent sense of awe, an ability to reach for a perspective beyond the bounds of the human world:
Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast."Altogether elsewhere," beyond human absurdity, life goes on, this speaker knows. Its power speaks for itself.
-
-
“The Fall of Rome” Setting
-
"The Fall of Rome" is set in a strange hybrid place: part ancient Rome, part 20th-century cityscape. On this poem's stage, Cato (a famous Roman senator) and Caesar (Julius, that is) coexist with the "abandoned train[s]," "evening gowns," and "pink official forms" of the world Auden lived in.
This dreamlike setting is glamorous, ominous, sinister, absurd. Here, the wealth that supports "fantastic" evening wear and a fashionable "literati" coexists with the drudging frustration of "unimportant clerk[s]" and the panic of "absconding tax-defaulters." All these figures, languid or desperate, are surrounded with signs of disaster to come: that rain-lashed "abandoned train," mountains crawling with "outlaws," and "flu-infected cit[ies]" suggest that this is a decaying civilization, well on its way toward collapse.
The poem's mixture of ancient and modern (not to mention its title, an allusion to the long slow decline and fall of the Roman empire) creates a dream-vision of 20th-century decadence—a vision of the Western world in the wake of World War II. (Auden first published this poem in 1947, two years after the war ended.) Absurd, darkly funny, and eerie all at once, this poem's landscape suggests how unbelievably fragile empires are. No matter how powerful and enduring a world order might seem to be, the poem's setting suggests, none lasts forever; history makes that very clear.
However, there's a hint of some transcendent beauty enduring undisturbed behind the slow and ludicrous collapse of a civilization. "Altogether elsewhere" from this poem's urban goings-on, Auden concludes, the order of the natural world—vast, silent, swift, beautiful—rolls on unperturbed by the rise and fall of human empires.
-
-
Literary and Historical Context of “The Fall of Rome”
-
Literary Context
Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) 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." Auden dedicated this poem to Cyril Connolly, another colorful figure in his wide and eclectic literary circle. Connolly first published the poem in the 1947 issue of Horizon magazine, and Auden later collected it in his books The Shield of Achilles (1955) and Nones (1957).
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. His poems often deal with death and suffering in a voice that's equal parts crisp, witty, and melancholic. He also delighted in writing everything from pantoums to villanelles to scandalous limericks.
Auden was particularly interested in music. He wrote not only poems that responded to musical traditions (like "As I Walked Out One Evening," which quotes old ballads in its first lines), but 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 essays 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
This poem's visions of decadence and collapse show the marks of a certain postwar apprehension. Auden first published this poem in 1947, two years after the end of World War II—a war that left a lot of people feeling as if civilization as they'd known it might already have ended.
Alongside its bloody battlefields, World War II saw the grotesque mass murder of civilians. There was the horror of the concentration camps where Nazis murdered six million Jewish people (as well as millions of others they'd deemed undesirable, like gay people and the Roma), the devastation of the atomic bombs the U.S. dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima: those who survived the war had to reckon with scenes of hellish misery.
This poem, in which the rich carry on their flighty business as danger masses all around them, feels haunted by the fears and uncertainties of the world in the wake of WWII. Auden wrote about this war often and with pain. (He volunteered to join both the UK and the U.S. armies, in fact, but was turned down both times—ostensibly because, at 32, he was too old, but likely also because he was known to be gay.)
Like "Epitaph on a Tyrant" (another of Auden's war-inflected poems), "The Fall of Rome" presents its crumbling world from a slight surreal distance, adding a dreamlike dimension to a very real kind of fear or anxiety. Unlike "Epitaph on a Tyrant," "The Fall of Rome" offers a hint of consolation in its final vision of reindeer sweeping across "miles and miles of golden moss." People might wantonly destroy themselves and others, but the reindeer go on.
-
-
More “The Fall of Rome” Resources
-
External Resources
-
An Auden Documentary — Watch an ITV documentary about Auden.
-
The Poem Aloud — Listen to a recording of Auden himself reading the poem.
-
A Portrait of Auden — See a portrait of Auden from around the time he wrote this poem.
-
A Brief Biography — Read the Poetry Foundation's short introduction to Auden's life and work.
-
Auden's Legacy — Watch a tribute to Auden from the 92nd Street Y in New York, where Auden often went to read and teach.
-
-
LitCharts on Other Poems by W. H. Auden
-
