Bright Star

In his Ode to a Nightingale, John Keats (1795-1821) hears the bird’s immortal song descending to him through the ages and pines for the immortality the song symbolizes:

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
  No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
  In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
  Through the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home,
    She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
         The same that oft-times hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
  Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Keats’s English sonnet, Bright Star, initially composed sometime between February and December of 1819, was written for Fanny Brawne to whom Keats was engaged. It also meditates on immortality, this time employing symbolism of the North Star. Certain words and images of the poem are present in an earlier letter (June 25, 1818) he wrote to his brother Tom while he toured Lake Windermere in the Lake District of northern England: “The two views [of the lake], we have had of it are the most noble tenderness—they can never fade away…[they] refine one’s sensual vision into a sort of north star which one can never cease to be open-lidded and steadfast over the wonders of the great powers.” As Keats traveled to Italy in the autumn of 1820, in an attempt to restore his failing health, he revised the sonnet and wrote it into his copy of Shakespeare’s poems. It has been suggested that it is the last poem Keats wrote before his death February 23, 1821.

Bright Star, Would I Were Steadfast as Thou art

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art--
  Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
  Like nature's patient, sleepless eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
  Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
  Of snow upon the mountains and the moors;
No--yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
  Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft swell and fall,
  Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
and so live ever--or else swoon to death.

The sonnet begins with a typical Keatsian idea, the desire to escape mortality. Keats’s normal longing for “permanence” was intensified by the death of his brother Tom, whom he cared for during his final illness and death from tuberculosis December 1, 1818. As Keats works through his thought process in the poem, we see an initial statement expressing his wish. Keats gazes on the north star and desires to also have the eternity the star represents: Bright Star! would I were steadfast as thou art-” But the moment that thought settles in the reader’s mind, Keats counters it with an essential, emotional qualification, “No.” The star watches in “lone splendor,” isolated like a hermit. It may be constant,” a state of being for which Keats yearns, but without the possibility of the joy of human passion and love.

In the sestet, Keats shifts from the “star” image in the octave to an image of the lovers in one another’s arms in the sestet:

 No--yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
  Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft swell and fall,
  Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
and so live ever--or else swoon to death.

Here, Keats rises and falls in an imaginative and realistic pattern. First, he pictures his head “Pillow’d upon my love’s ripening breast” quieting his fears about mortality as he feels the “soft swell and fall” and listens to “her tender-taken breath”. Momentarily, he conjectures he can “live-[for]ever,” but the thought vanishes immediately and life’s gravity pulls him downward “to swoon to death.” Passion and love ease Keats’s anxiety but cannot dispel the weight of reality, though his poem defies time’s “fell hand.”

Auden on Yeats

In January 1939 William Butler Yeats died. The New Times ran an obituary acknowledging Yeats’s death, noting that “it will be for his verse that posterity will remember him.” One such remembrance was published by English poet W. H. Auden (1907-1973) in 1940, In Memory of W. B. Yeats in 1940. His elegy considers the nature of death, the enduring effect of poetry, and the poet’s relationship to society.

        In Memory of W. B. Yeats
                             I

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

 

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

 

III

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

The poem is organized into three sections. Part 1, stanza 1 offers a matter of fact, detached tone. The lines unfold with “cold,” meteorological precision and facts—"dead of winter”, “brooks were frozen.” At first glance, Auden’s language suggests the world’s indifference to Yeats’s death, but when taken together with the images of the “snow disfigured the public statues,” the “mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day” and the personification of “What instruments we have agree / The day of his death was a dark cold day”, the seeming indifference of the world recedes behind stringently potent and poignant loss and grief.

The rest of Part I meanders through nature, Yeats’s body and mind, cities, and finally the future. Somewhere far from his hospital room, nature continued as “wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,” and “The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays”. While the natural course of life and death proceeded, as the “provinces of his body revolted,” elsewhere the poet’s poetry escaped mortality: “By mourning tongues / The death of the poet was kept from his poems.” The death of the poet frees his poetry from the singular authority of the man, and “he became his admirers.”

In stanza 4, Auden continues to view Yeats’s poetry extracted from his personality and his poetic reputation and legacy “scattered among a hundred cities” as it is read and judged for its worth by “a foreign code of conscience” and “modified in the guts of the living.” He then imagines in the next stanza that Yeats’s death will go unnoticed in the “importance and noise of tomorrow,” and by the millions who will chase riches, endure “sufferings,” and “convince” themselves of their “freedom.” Apart from those indifferent many, a “few thousand will think of this day / As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.” This understatement muffles grief and the last two lines of the stanza bring us back to stanza 1 and the “dark cold” void that Yeats’s death leaves Auden with: “What instruments we have agree / The day of his death was a dark cold day.”

In the shorter section Part II of the poem, Auden shifts his perspective, adopts a familiar tone with the second personal pronoun “You.” He tells us Yeats was “silly like us,” like Auden and other poets—overly sensitive, introspective, imaginative, and declares Yeats’s “gift,” (poetry) will “survive” his mortality. He sums up the grist for Yeats’s poetic imagination— “the parish of rich women, physical decay, / Yourself mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.” Auden then poses the paradoxical effect poetry possesses: “Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, / For poetry makes nothing happen.” The four words, “poetry makes nothing happen,” are often quoted to argue the uselessness of poetry. But the lines that follow hinge on the verb “survives,” drawing out the true value of poetry’s numinous resonance in the human imagination, an art that endures through time. The poet dies, but Poetry is imperishable.

Part III, Auden assumes the tone of formal elegy, in which he changes the structure into a brief, lamenting address inviting the “Earth” to “receive an honored guest; / William Yeats is laid to rest; / Let the Irish vessel lie / Emptied of its poetry.” Then he shifts ominously to the political reality confronting Europe as Hitler’s armies began it conquest of the continent:

Earth, receive an honored guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.                                                                                               

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate; 

As Auden is writing his tribute in February 1939, with World War II approaching fast, he asks for Yeats’s poems to “persuade” humanity “to rejoice” in spite of the dark political time.  His request is a tenuous cry for the honesty of art to enable men to confront the “Intellectual disgrace,” that has permitted the rise of fascism. Of course, his entreaty could never forestall what was coming. However, his desire for Yeats’s poetry to “Sing of human unsuccess / In a rapture of distress;” and to “Teach the free man how to praise” should continue to call to us today, that within poetry (especially Yeats’s), there is possibility for human being to find hope for the future if we allow poetry to enter our lives.