Refugee Blues Refugee Blues "Refugee Blues" is a poem by W. H. Auden, written in 1939, one of a number of poems Auden wrote in the mid- to late-1930s in blues and other popular metres, for example the meter he used in his love poem "Calypso", written around the same time. The poem dramatizes the condition of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in the years before World War II, especially the indifference and antagonism they faced when seeking asylum in the democracies of the period. In some later editions of Auden's poetry, the poem is not identified by name but is the
The Wanderer (poem) comrades, and received precious gifts from the lord. Yet fate ("ƿyrd") turned against him when he lost his lord, kinsmen and comrades in battle—they were defending their homeland against an attack—and he was driven into exile. Some readings of the poem see the wanderer as progressing through three phases; first as the "anhoga" (solitary man) who dwells on the deaths of other warriors and the funeral of his lord, then as the "modcearig" man (man troubled in mind) who meditates on past hardships and on the fact that mass killings have been innumerable in history, and finally as the "snottor