Lorenzetti, and Auden on Herod

I still like last year's Christmas text, so I think I'll reprint it, along with a copy of Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Effect of Good Government (supra), which you can see frescoed on the wall of the Sala di Nove in Siena. I first saw it nine years ago, about 45 years after I first read the Auden text, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Auden (who seems to have seen everything, and read everything) had the Lorenzetti picture in mind when he wrote Herod's account. Here is a bit of detail on the Lorenzetti:

He shows us the beams outside the windows for hanging out clothing or providing leverage to haul things up from the street below, and streets with people conversing, entering houses, or cut off form our view as they ride behind buildings. Through the open arches of the large building in the foreground we gain access to the interior of an elegant shop displaying shoes and hosiery, a school where the master teaches attentive pupils form a raised desk, and a tavern with flasks of wine set on an outdoor bar. We can also see a house in the process of construction; the workmen, standing on the scaffolding they had probably put in place only the day before, are carrying building materials in baskets on their heads and laying new courses of masonry. A young woman plays a tambourine and sings while her elegantly dressed companions dance a kind of figure eight in the street. Nearby farmers arrive from the prosperous countryside, leading donkeys, driving herds of sheep, and carrying products in baskets on their heads.

Frederic Hartt, History of Italian Renaissance Art 129 (4th ed. 1994)

Now, Herod (Auden) reflects on what little he has been able to accomplish before the greast disruption:

Barges are unloading soil fertilizer at the river wharves.
Soft drinks and sandwiches may be had in the inns at reasonable prices.
Allotment gardening has become popular.
The highway to the coast goes straight up over the mountains and the truck drivers no longer carry guns.
Things are beginning to take shape.
It is a long time since anyone stole the park benches or murdered the swans.
There are children in this province who have never seen a louse, shopkeepers who have never handled a counterfeit coin, women of forty who have never hidden in a ditch except for fun.

--WH Auden, "For the Time Being,"
Published in a book of the same name (1944)

For an critique of the poem, stressing the Christian framework, go here.