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.