I think that this is the speaker's way of saying that he doesn't think he has much time left to find someone to marry. In a sense, he is saying that he does not have enough time for the prerequisite self-improvement that he thinks is required for him to be in a relationship.

These lines are repeated throughout the poem. This leads me to believe that they contribute to the theme of insecurity. Throughout the poem, the speaker is trying to live up to expectations and create an ideal personality for himself. Perhaps, then, these lines are the speaker's notion of what women want. Michelangelo's works are lauded for their meticulous beauty. As such, this could mean that the speaker thinks that women only desire infallible men.

I thought that this was interesting because Auden seems to be contextualizing Germany's motive for invading Poland. Interestingly, he does not start with the Treaty of Versailles, which stoked German resentment towards Poland and the rest of Europe due to the former German territories that were given to the newly independent Poland. The lines "From Luther until now" and "that has driven a culture mad" suggest that he is referring to the Protestant Reformation in which Martin Luther's theology alienated Catholic Europe from the various German states. I think this suggests that Auden thinks that Germany's ethos of resentment is a deep-rooted historical trend that was bound to happen eventually.

I found this these lines interesting because I think that they encapsulate what Yeats thinks the second coming will bring about. This poem was written in the backdrop of World War I and the Irish War of Independence, two bleak and tumultuous events that shaped Yeats' outlook on the state of humanity. I think that by predicting that the second coming will be accompanied by a ferocious beast, rather than a holy figure like Jesus, Yeats is essentially telling the reader that his belief of the second coming is not rooted entirely in Christianity in that it will be more destructive and not spare Christians.