| Douglas Muir 406 |
"The Two" is one of the stranger poems from famous British poet W.H. Auden. It's not very long, and you can find the whole thing here:
http://homepages.wmich.edu/~cooneys/poems/auden.two.html
An excerpt:
You are the town and we are the clock.
We are the guardians of the gate in the rock.
The Two.
On your left and on your right
In the day and in the night,
We are watching you.
Wiser not to ask just what has occurred
To them who disobeyed our word;
To those
We were the whirlpool, we were the reef,
We were the formal nightmare, grief
And the unlucky rose.
[...]
When the green field comes off like a lid
Revealing what was much better hid:
Unpleasant.
And look, behind you without a sound
The woods have come up and are standing round
In deadly crescent...
This might happen any day
So be careful what you say
Or do.
Be clean, be tidy, oil the lock,
Trim the garden, wind the clock,
Remember the Two.
-- It's a really sinister little piece.
Relevance to D&D / Pathfinder: so I've liked that poem for years, and it's occurred to me that it could be narrated by a monster. A Lawful Evil monster, obviously -- the poem fits very neatly into that corner of the chart. Something that watches and waits for ordinary people to step out of line, and then acts.
I'm spitballing here, but I wonder if anyone else reads it this way; and if so, what sort of things "the Two" might be. (I have my own idea, but hold on that for now.)
Doug M.