"Refugee Blues" is a poem by

W. H. Auden Wystan Hugh Auden (; 21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973) was a British-American poet. Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in ...

, written in 1939, one of a number of poems Auden wrote in the mid-to-late-1930s in

blues Blues is a music genre and musical form which originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the Afr ...

and other popular metres, for example, the meter he used in his love poem "Calypso", written around the same time. The poem comments on the condition of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in the years before World War II, especially the indifference and antagonism they faced when seeking asylum in the democracies of the period. In some later editions of Auden's poetry, the poem is not identified by name but is the first of ten poems grouped together in "Ten Songs", which also includes the above-mentioned "Calypso". In abbreviated form it was set to music by

Elizabeth Lutyens Agnes Elisabeth Lutyens, CBE (9 July 190614 April 1983) was an English composer. Early life and education Elisabeth Lutyens was born in London on 9 July 1906. She was one of the five children of Lady Emily Bulwer-Lytton (1874–1964), a mem ...

in ''Two Songs by W.H. Auden'' (1942) As of 202
distributed by University Of York Music Press
The other song is ''As I walked out one evening''.

References

External links

Sheila Hancock - Reading of 'Refugee Blues'Analysis of poem at Litexpert
Poetry by W. H. Auden {{Poem-stub