Sexual Victims of War

Extract

It' surprising that Stephen E. Severn' article “The Library of Congress Variant of ‘The Shield of Achilles’” (124.5 [2009]: 1761-67), so earnestly devoted to explaining in detail a variant word in a handwritten copy of a poem, should misquote four lines about which there is no dispute. Auden' “unintelligible multitude” in “The Shield of Achilles” is here assembled on a “plane without feature, bare and brown” (1762). How could a million “eyes” and “boots in line” possibly fit, much less stand, on that brown plane–or in it? And why is it “bare”? The line, of course, should read (and does in all editions), “A plain without a feature….”