I believe Auden's poem, The Shield of Achilles, is meant to show the stark reality of life. He points out that people sometimes like to ignore the severity of situations and look at the happier sides of them. Auden appears to have adapted Achilles' shield to real-life situations such as war, sacrifice, rape, and murder.
Instead of "Marble well-governed cities and ships upon untamed seas, there was "an artificial wilderness and a sky like lead." This paradoxical verse is meant to show that a shield of war is an instrument of death
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