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“In Memory of W.B. Yeats”

 Auden’s poetic career spans about four decades from the late 1920s up to early 1970s.
 “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” was written by Auden in February 1939 in Memory of William
Butler Yeats after his death in Roquebrune (Southern France) on January 29, 1939. The poem
was published in 1940
 Auden’s was a versatile literary talent and besides writing much for a living and compiling
several anthologies such as “The Portable Greek Reader”, “The Living Thoughts of Kickgaard”
“The Poet’s Tongue”, “The Oxford Book of Light Verse” and “The Faber Book of Modern
American Verse”, an editing the works of several authors, he published several volumes of
verse including “The Orators”, “New York Letter”, “The Age of Anxiety” and “Homage to Clio”,
verse plays like “The Dog Beneath this skin”, “The Ascent of F6” and on the Frontier”, a volume
of critical essays “The Dyer’s Hand”, and other prose works. He attempted both the serious and
light verse including sonnets.

 Along with his piece on the death of Sigmund Freud, Auden's tribute to the poet William Butler
Yeats is a most memorable elegy on the death of a public figure. Written in 1940, it
commemorates the death of the poet in 1939, a critical year for Auden personally as well as for
the world at large. This was the year he moved to New York and the year the world catapulted
itself into the Second World War.
 When Auden wrote "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" in February 1939, Europe was on the verge of
World War II.

SUMMARY

William Butler Yeats died in winter: the brooks were frozen, airports were all but empty, and statues
were covered in snow. The thermometer and other instruments told us the day he died “was a dark
cold day.”

While nature followed its course elsewhere, mourners kept his poems alive without letting the poet’s
death interfere. Yet, for Yeats himself, mind and body failed, leaving no one to appreciate his life but
his admirers. He lives through his poetry, scattered among cities and unfamiliar readers and critics,
who modify his life and poetry through their own understandings. While the rest of civilization moves
on, “a few thousand” will remember the day of his death as special.

In the second section of the poem, Yeats is called “silly like us.” It was “Mad Ireland” that caused Yeats
the suffering he turned into poetry. Poetry survives and gives voice to survival in a space of isolation.

In the third, final section of the poem, the poet asks the Earth to receive Yeats as “an honoured guest.”
The body, “emptied of its poetry,” lies there. Meanwhile, “the dogs of Europe bark” and humans
continue their “intellectual disgrace.” But the poet is to “follow right / To the bottom of the night,”
despite the dark side of humanity somehow persuading others to rejoice in existence. Despite “human
unsuccess,” the poet can sing out through the “curse” and “distress.” Thus one’s poetry is a “healing
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fountain” that, although life is a “prison,” can “teach the free man how to praise” life anyway.

Section-wise summary

Section 1

The first line of the poem, “He disappeared in the dead of winter:” introduces a strong image of Yeats
walking out alone into the darkness of winter. The desolation of the scene becomes stronger with each
successive image. Not only nature, but the cold and mechanical works of man felt the passing of Yeats,
and thrust the reader step by step into the cold shock of the described day.

Auden expresses doubts about the adequacy of human tools to measure or reflect upon the actual
death of a man. If recording the death of the body is hard, it is much more difficult to commemorate
the life of the mind and soul. Auden deliberately chooses to refer to Yeats as "the poet," making him an
anonymous figure rather than a specific man. Even the mourners are abstracted into "mourning
tongues," not specific people. In the absence of specific people in these lines, Yeats' poems themselves
seem to take on a life of their own. Auden emphasizes Yeats’ humanness by taking a glimpse into the
world of hospitals and nurses and all the mundane things that we generally don’t tend to think about
when mourning a national figure.

“The provinces of his body revolted,

The squares of his mind were empty,

Silence invaded the suburbs,”

Auden turns to geographic and architectural language to describe human conditions. Yeats’ body is
described as a city at war with itself – a war it eventually loses.

In death even Yeats’ poems change; they can no longer emerge from the poet’s own mouth. Instead
they get “modified in the guts of the living.” The human world goes on as usual. We wonder whether
Yeats’ death really outlives the evening news. The last two lines of the first stanza are repeated as the
final two lines of the first section. This repetition underscores the fact that we hardly have adequate
tools to tackle something as strange and complicated as death.

Section 2

In the second section suddenly the speaker directs his words towards a ‘you’ who seems to be Yeats.
Instead of showing us the honourable and good side of the dead poet, he makes sure we understand
that Yeats’ ‘gift’ emerges in spite of, or perhaps because of, all the complexities of his personality. He
says,

“…Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,

For poetry makes nothing happen: …”

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These lines show how deeply involved Yeats was in the Irish independence movement of his time.
Some of his most remembered poems like, ‘Easter 1916’ emerge from his engagement with struggles
for independence. He cared passionately about Ireland but his political positions were often
complicated. Yeats wrote poetry to cure his country but his country remains sick. The speaker says
that Ireland hasn’t changed one bit because of Yeats’ poetry. However he isn’t saying that poetry is
worthless. After all, he is speaking in a poem himself. While poetry can’t be or do specific things, it
allows us to think about things that we may not ordinarily think about. This subtle distinction
indicates the delicate opposition between Yeats and Auden. Yeats considered poetry to be a tool
whereas Auden believes that it is nothing in itself but its value lies only in how its readers respond to
it. Yeats’ fault was that he expected too much out of poetry. Auden clarifies that, poetry is not a force
in itself but made dynamic by its interpreters and each one’s “foreign code of conscience.” Poetry
presents a world that’s both real and far removed from our own, and it does so on its own terms.
When you are done reading a poem you don’t have anything tangible to keep from the experience.
Poetry is “a way of happening.” Auden seems to insist on the mobility and vitality of poetry. Amidst all
the freezing isolation of the world, poetry is an active instrument.

Section 3

In the third section for the first time Yeats is referred to by name. Conventionally an elegy explains
right at the beginning just who it is that the poet is mourning. Here Auden reverses this practice by
mentioning it in the final section. Here Yeats is referred to as an “Irish vessel,” a body meant to carry
only poetry and not the problems the speaker brought up at the beginning of Section II. Auden also
gives some of the specifics of Yeats’ death, particularly the time of his death. Yeats died in 1939, just as
the world was gearing up for World War II. Yeats and Auden shared the sentiments of many of their
fellow artists and intellectuals, who were dismayed at the thought of another world war. The speaker
paints the impending war as a sort of nightmarish unreality. The third stanza of the Section doesn’t
seem to have anything to do with Yeats, the man. Auden perhaps believes that a good way to pay
homage to someone is to spend some time thinking about his views and concerns. He goes on to
admire how Yeats combines realism with rejoicing. The poet is a figure that lives on through Yeats’
poetry and isn’t necessarily attached to Yeats, the man. Poetry is now channelled into a single image of
a healing fountain. The poem holds out hope for the possibility of life and growth

“In the deserts of the heart

Let the healing fountain start,”

The way Auden crafts these lines is an invocation of Yeats’ poetic powers. The last lines of the poem
sound depressing because life is described as a prison. However there is hope for the future because
the ‘free man’ can learn ‘how to praise.’ Auden’s final approach to this elegy is interesting and thought-
provoking. He doesn’t want Yeats to live forever or his poems to be immortalized. He wants people to
read and think and possibly become better by reading Yeats’ poems.
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Section-wise Analysis

The poem is organized into three sections and is a commentary on the nature of a great poet’s art and
its role during a time of great calamity—as well as the ordinary time of life’s struggles.

The first, mournful section describes the coldness of death, repeating that “The day of his death was a
dark cold day.” The environment reflects the coldness of death: rivers are too frozen to run; hardly
anyone travels by air; statues of public figures are desecrated by snow. These conditions symbolize
the loss of activity and energy in Yeats’ death.

At the same time, far away, wolves run and “the peasant river” flows outside of the rest of civilization
(“untempted by the fashionable quays”), keeping the poetry alive. The implication is that the poems
live even though the man may be dead. The difficulty with this situation, however, is that the man can
no longer speak for himself; “he became his admirers.” His poems, like ashes, are “scattered”
everywhere and are misinterpreted (“unfamiliar affections” are brought into the poems). The ugly fact
of bad digestion modifies the poems as “The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the
living.”

Furthermore, as in “Funeral Blues” and “Musée des Beaux Arts,” the events of the average day go on—
a trader yells on the floor, the poor suffer—for most people, the day goes unmarked. It takes a special
soul to mark the importance of the day of the death of a great poet, and only “a few thousand” have
such a soul. As scholar James Persoon writes, “These two elements—the poet's death as national and
natural crisis and the poet’s death as almost completely insignificant—describe a tension within
which Auden explores the life of the work after the death of the author.” Thus, in addition to the
thermometer telling us so, the speaker of the poem tells us that it is a “dark cold day” with respect to
the popular reception of Yeats’ poetry.

In the second section the speaker briefly reflects on the generative power behind Yeats’ poetry. It
was “Mad Ireland” that “hurt” him and inspired his poetry as a form of survival. For Yeats, “silly” like
other poets or, more broadly, like other Irishmen or humans, poetry was a “gift” that survived
everything other than itself—even Yeats’ own physical degeneration, the misinterpretations of “rich
women,” and Yeats’ own failings. Poetry itself, from this perspective, survives in the midst of
everything, not causing anything, but flowing out from isolated safety (perhaps the Freudian
subconscious) and providing voice (metaphorically a “mouth”) to that deep level of raw and
unassailable humanity.

The third and final part brings the reader back into more familiar territory, with six stanzas of AABB
verse, every line in seven-syllable trochaic verse (three long-short feet followed by a seventh stressed
syllable).

The body of Yeats (“the Irish vessel”) rests in the ground, the warring nations fight (metaphorically,
the “dogs of Europe bark”), people misinterpret his work (“intellectual disgraces”), yet somehow, his
poetry retains a place somewhere. The true poet, like Yeats himself, will “follow right / To the bottom
of the night” (to the primordial humanity expressed in Yeats’ poetry), to that fundamental human
freedom where an “unconstraining voice” can “persuade us to rejoice” in our existence.
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True enough, the human “curse” (evoking the Fall of Man in Genesis) remains; death awaits. This is all
too true in a time of war. But the poet can turn the curse into a “vineyard” where sweet poetic drink
can form. On the one hand there are “deserts of the heart” and human distress, yet on the other hand,
with this wine a “healing fountain” can release a man from “the prison of his [mortal] days.” A poet
like Yeats, despite everything, can “teach the free man how to praise” that fundamental spark of
existence that survives in one’s poetry.