Yeats, Auden, Eliot: 1939, 1940, 1941
Colm Tóibín, 22 January 2026
“... now and England.It is not lost on the reader that this is England in wartime, that ‘the broken king’ invoked in the poem may be Charles I, but could also become George VI if England were to lose the war. The light here is not the light of heaven or the light of St John’s Gospel. It is winter light. It happened. And ... ”