How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me.

These lines come from W. H. Auden’s poem “The More Loving One,” written in the early 1950s and first published in his collection *The Shield of Achilles* (1955). In this period Auden, long settled in the United States after leaving England in 1939, often wrote in a reflective, conversational lyric mode that mixed private feeling with cool, cosmological imagery. The poem stages a meditation on unreciprocated or unequal love by comparing human attachment to the indifferent, steady presence of the stars—objects that can be admired, even adored, without any expectation of return.

The speaker imagines the discomfort of being the object of an intense love one cannot return, then turns that thought into an ethical resolution: if love must be unequal, better to be the one who loves more. The stars symbolize beauty and permanence that remain unmoved by human longing; they model a kind of emotional asymmetry—our devotion does not alter them. Auden’s twist is to treat this asymmetry not as humiliation but as a chosen stance: loving becomes an act of generosity and self-discipline rather than a transaction. The lines thus dignify unreciprocated affection as a form of moral freedom.