B.Chad Needs Help with Auden

Poetic Help is needed by B.Chad who has been struggling, after a fashion, for the past 20 years, off and on, with the poem/sonnet by W.H. Auden, "Control of the passes". No source of inquiry--print or personal--has been able to resolve simple surface meanings of the poem. While lines 5-8 are some of the cleanest, clearest language, there is a murkiness in lines 3-4 and especially in the final stanza. On the simplest narrative level, who can elucidate what has happened to and what will happen to "the trained spy?"

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