09/01/2026 Friday Compline You can call this one a diary entry.

Horae Canonicae is a cycle of poems written by W.H. Auden in the 1950s. As the name suggests, the cycle follows the liturgical hours, with one poem per liturgical office: “Prime,” “Terce,” “Sext” etc. By the 1950s Auden’s turn towards Christianity was complete, and Christian thought permeated his poetic output until his death decades later in 1973. The cycle is kind of a portrait of his religious beliefs, blending classic Auden themes of civic duty, the nature of humanity, change and upheaval, and a sort of leftist utopianism, with an Anglo-Catholic Augustinianism. Above all, it functions as a sort of leftist-Christian cosmology. There is a temporal triple-consciousness at play: using the liturgical clock as a framework, Auden maps the rise and fall of a city, the life of Christ, and the history of the cosmos onto the hours of Good Friday. The history of the universe and the life of the Messiah play out across the hours from matins to compline on a single day. A very compelling conceit.

My favourite poem from the cycle is “Nones,” the Latin name for the liturgical ninth hour. The ninth hour (3pm) of Good Friday is traditionally when Christ is said to have died on the cross. Far from being a time of weeping and beating of chests after the death of a young man, or a triumphant celebration of bloody victory, Auden’s ninth hour is the the site of total stasis, the moment of motionlessness at the zenith of the curve traced by an object thrown skywards just before it begins to tumble back down, of uneasy murmurs, of the whispered uncertainty of a vanguard who, having achieved everything they wanted, find themselves staring down the barrel of endless wide-open possibility and find themselves terrified and without a clue what to do next.

What we know to be not possible [...] comes to pass
Before we realize it: we are surprised
At the ease and speed of our deed
And uneasy: It is barely three,
Mid-afternoon, yet the blood
Of our sacrifice is already
Dry on the grass; we are not prepared
For silence so sudden and so soon;
The day is too hot, too bright, too still,
Too ever, the dead remains too nothing.
What shall we do till nightfall?

This is an incredibly tactile description of a rapid dissipation of energy. The feeling of surprise “At the ease and speed of our deed” is of central importance here: great amounts of anger, strength, forward energy, amassed in expectation of greater resistance, meet only sudden dissipation into the air, leaving the subject shocked and in confused standstill, like a train lurching to a sudden halt, like a party where the music suddenly stops and the lights all turn on at once. The spell is broken, and the mythology of the glorious struggle has slipped through our fingers, and suddenly “we are left alone with our feat.”

The wind has dropped and we have lost our public.
The faceless many who always
Collect when any world is to be wrecked [...]
Have all melted away: [...]
The hangman has gone to wash, the soldiers to eat;
We are left alone with our feat.

Auden’s ninth hour is the stuffy, motionless heat of a summer afternoon. You can imagine the endless droning of cicadas, the relentless pounding of the sun. Auden’s poem is a cautionary tale about complacency, renouncing of responsibility, and loss of momentum following a revolutionary act of social change:

]…] not one
Of these who in the shade of walls and trees
Lie sprawled now, calmly sleeping,
Harmless as sheep, can remember why
He shouted or what about
So loudly in the sunshine this morning;

But I have always found it more interesting and compelling, for myself, personally, not as a moralising cautionary tale for political actors, but as a metaphor for my own psychological state in my greater moments of anxiety and self-doubt, which all, in some way, seem to circle back like Auden’s liturgical clock to the same question: What shall we do till nightfall?

There’s a phrase that I love, which I used to invoke often in conversation with a friend who is no longer in my life, which is “the day after the revolution.” I don’t know where I learnt it – God help me atone for my cringe, it might actually have been from a Slavoj Žižek interview I watched when I was much, much younger. But in my mind it’s always a phrase I associate with a concert given in Athens by Greek composer militant activist politician Mikis Theodorakis in October 1974, in the initial months after the fall of the fascist Junta. In reality the concert was a series of several concerts, given not just in Athens but in a few cities around the country, but in the public memory this concert was one single triumphant, highly-televised occasion, immortalised in the 1975 documentary Ta tragoudia tis fotias (Songs of Fire) by leftist director Nikos Koundouros.

Some historical background is necessary for the non-hellenically experienced. Mikis Theodorakis was a composer who began his career as a soldier of the Greek People’s Liberation Army (Ellinikos Laikos Apeleftherikos Stratos) fighting against the fascists in the Greek Civil War in the 1940s and 50s. Theodorakis was captured by the fascists and imprisoned on the island of Makronisos at the political prison, where he was tortured, including being buried alive twice. After the civil war he rose to prominence as a composer of popular song, including leftist activist songs and songs in the nascent entekhno style, which blended Greek folk elements with Western classical and popular music. After the rise of the fascist Junta in 1967, Theodorakis went into exile and his music was banned; this, of course, only cemented its popularity and his status as a folk hero. After the Junta fell in 1974, Theodorakis returned the conquering hero, and together with the pre-eminent Greek musicians of the day (including his muse Maria Farantouri, Andreas Kalogiannis, famous actress Melina Merkouri, Mariza Koch, and the young Giorgos Dalaras, still at the beginnings of his career) cobbled together the equipment to put on a concert celebrating the fall of the regime in a stadium in Athens. They were a rag-tag team of artist-intellectuals, triumphantly playing the music of resistance to a packed roaring stadium of listeners celebrating their liberation from the yoke of fascism. Now, fifty years later, the videos of Farantouri singing “To gelasto paidi” (The Smiling Boy) while the crowd cheers the end of dictatorship ("Give the Junta to the people!") and Theodorakis himself leading the crowd in “Mi ksehnas ton Oropo” (Don’t Forget Oropos) are enough to bring me nearly to tears! It’s an incredibly moving triumphant moment in music history and the history of resisting fascism.

And then came the day after the revolution, and the wind died down, and suddenly the Greek people were left alone with their feat. Many of the left-wing artist-intellectual crowd went into politics, becoming ministers in the centre-left PASOK governments that dominated the next several decades. And slowly, as with any electoral success, they began to wane; they were racked by scandals of corruption and failed reforms; violence broke out again in the form of the 17th of November Group. And the legacy of fascism was never dealt with. The cultural scholar Anna Papaeti even writes of how that concert itself, and the subsequent documentary that cemented it in cultural memory, contributed to create the illusion of a widespread popular resistance that never actually existed, and how, in reality, the majority of Greeks were happy to simply keep their heads down and ignore the violence of the fascist regime as it happened before their very eyes. The heroes of this revolution aged, and died; Theodorakis lost his marbles toward the end and became a very public ultra-nationalistic anti-semite himself (famously blaming “The Jews” for the 2008 financial crisis). The dream crumbled and was over.

This, to me, is the fable of the day after the revolution. The glorious moment of triumph and upheaval is all well for fairytales and storybooks, and you’d have to be out of your mind to say it doesn’t make a fantastic story. But even the greatest of stories – like an artist-intellectual-militant returning from foreign exile the conquering hero to lead the people in their triumphant celebration over the corpse of fascism – have to have an aftermath, and this is where we start to run into trouble. Auden’s “Nones” is not quite the day after the revolution, where everything has gone to shit, but maybe the moments after the revolution. The high of triumph has dissipated, and suddenly the long road, with its endless possibilities of success or failure, lies vast and empty ahead of us. We stand at the precipice of the void.

In the quintessential picture of the day after the revolution, one of the defining factors is lack of awareness that the battle is won and now the work begins: this can be seen in the backwards-looking western european political leftism of the 1950s, so caught up with the automythologising of its struggle against Axis fascism in the 1940s (read: sniffing its own farts) that it accomplished little in the way of contemporary change before finally ceding ground to the forward-thinking activist-fuelled leftism of the 1960s. In Auden’s Nones, by contrast, the subject has a deeply anxious awareness of the position they are in, a neurotic hand-wringing as they sigh toward the heavens: “What shall we do till nightfall?”

To me, that lonely unanswered question is the beating heart of this poem, a guttural cry of angst at the future. The question is not only “What shall we do next?” but rather it is “How can we keep going?” “How can we do justice to the act we have just committed?” and most of all “How do we pass the time from now until the end?” The revolutionary act culminates in a single instant, like a point on a curve, of no dimensions of its own, only a location: one second you stand before it, and in a blink of an eye you’re beyond it, and it has passed, and it’s gone forever. What’s terrifying about what comes next is how protracted it is: the day after the revolution isn’t a single climactic instant, but a long, drawn-out state of affairs, a straight line that must persist to the closing of the day. How do we fill that time? How do we reach the next moment, then keep going, and keep going? Stuffy, hot, summer afternoons have a way of feeling like this interminable desert of time: an endless uniform stretch of pounding stasis. Auden’s ninth hour, after the wind dies down, with the bloodthirsty spectators who just moments ago bayed like dogs at the crucifixion laying down to nap motionless in the shade, sprawled out on the dry grass, perfectly captures the anxiety brought about by the terrifying stasis of the here and now, the realisation that it is up to us to act, to make something of this vast expanse of future, and that at our own hands it may get totally fucked up.

And this is how I feel in my most tormented moments, when the self-doubt and the fear of the future come over me. What shall I do till nightfall? Far from bringing solace, the fact of having made it this far is the source of only greater anxiety. I didn’t think I would make it this far. I thought there would be much more resistance. And suddenly my revolutionary charge has dissipated in thin air and I am faced with the terrifying reality that the rest of my life stretches out vast before me and it is up to me, entirely, to do something about it. What can I do? How can I do it? And when I reach the end of the line – and this is one of the most paralysing parts – and in retrospect I weigh myself in the balances, how will I judge the choices that I made? Will the dream come crumbling down? Will moments of revolutionary triumph create a narrative of greatness, like the Theodorakis concert create the story of Greek popular resistance, or will the vast stretches of throbbing routine and bureaucratic mismanagement weigh on me as life wasted? How can I continue?



What shall we do till nightfall?

-A