How is the modern shield in "The Shield of Achilles" different from the classical shield? Explain.

 In “The Shield of Achilles”, Auden uses the image of Achilles’ shield being forged to comment on the effects that modernity has had on nature. Auden presents modern society as bleak and meaningless, constraining nature or creating perverse hybrids of the natural and the man-made, as well as humans and landscapes. By the final stanza the opposition set up between the classical age and modern society collapses through Auden’s association of the classic hero Achilles with modernity. Therefore, the poem presents modernity and this destruction in a negative and hopeless way, as it is an inevitable, natural progression from the classical age. The poet tells about the shield of Achilles who was according to Greek mythology, one of the Greek heroes of the Trojan War.      

 

At the beginning of the poem, Auden has described the Homeric shield of Achilles, on which the brightness and beauty of the Greek world has been inscribed. That is, the mother of Achilles, looks at the shield hung over the shoulder of her son. This shield was specially made for him by Hephaestus, the blacksmith of the gods. On the shield the artist Hephaestus had carved beautiful scenes depicting orchards, well governed cities with marble statues and calm seas with beautiful ship sailing on them.

 

  The shield of Achilles was much decorated with beautiful scenes mirrored Greek and sights carved upon it. In this way the shield mirrored Greek culture and way of life. The shield here is a symbol of art.

 

  Auden describes the classical shield of Achilles, on which beautiful scenes are carved. Then the poet describes the modern shield made by a modern blacksmith, and the scenes carved on it,

“ But there on the shining metal

His hands had put instead

An artificial wilderness

And a sky like lead.”

 

In these lines the past is contrasted with the present, and contemporary ugliness is stressed by means of a mythical technique.  Here the poet comments on the modern condition.

 

 

The scenes carved on it refer to the contemporary wasteland in which life is artificial, and people are the spiritually dead. It is all a spiritual desolation, and life is unnatural, empty and hollow. This symbolizes the ugliness of the contemporary urban-industrial civilization.

“A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,

Loitered about that vacancy; a bird

Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone;

That girls are raped that two boys knife a third,

Were axions to him, who’d never heard

Of any world where promises were kept,

Or one could weep because another wept.”

Here the poet tells about modern shield in  different from the classical shield. In the poem we are told that on the classical shield were carved pictures of athletes busy in their games, and men and women dancing rhythmically and sweetly On the modern shield, on the other had, there are no dancing floors or playgrounds but only weed choked fields. There are no sportsman but only a tattered boy callously throwing stones at birds, or girls being raped, or boys quarrelling among themselves and knifing each other. Life is brutal and beastly here, entirely lacking in the sympathy, love and friendship, which characterized life in the past.

 

In this way the poet tried to make difference between the modern shield and the classical shield which the poet has highlighted in the poem.