{"id":4690,"date":"2006-04-05T12:36:23","date_gmt":"2006-04-05T16:36:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=4690"},"modified":"2020-11-16T09:36:29","modified_gmt":"2020-11-16T14:36:29","slug":"auden-on-yeats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=4690","title":{"rendered":"Auden on Yeats"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s a poetic masterpiece (in honor of National Poetry Month<\/a>) <\/p>\n

In Memory of W.B. Yeats<\/b>
\nby Auden<\/i><\/p>\n

I
\nHe disappeared in the dead of winter:
\nThe brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
\nAnd snow disfigured the public statues;
\nThe mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
\nWhat instruments we have agree
\nThe day of his death was a dark cold day.<\/p>\n

Far from his illness
\nThe wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
\nThe peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
\nBy mourning tongues
\nThe death of the poet was kept from his poems.<\/p>\n

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
\nAn afternoon of nurses and rumours;
\nThe provinces of his body revolted,
\nThe squares of his mind were empty,
\nSilence invaded the suburbs,
\nThe current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.<\/p>\n

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
\nAnd wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
\nTo find his happiness in another kind of wood
\nAnd be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
\nThe words of a dead man
\nAre modified in the guts of the living.<\/p>\n

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
\nWhen the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
\nAnd the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
\nAnd each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
\nA few thousand will think of this day
\nAs one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.<\/p>\n

What instruments we have agree
\nThe day of his death was a dark cold day.<\/p>\n

II<\/p>\n

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
\nThe parish of rich women, physical decay,
\nYourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
\nNow Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
\nFor poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
\nIn the valley of its making where executives
\nWould never want to tamper, flows on south
\nFrom ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
\nRaw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
\nA way of happening, a mouth.<\/p>\n

III<\/p>\n

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
\nWilliam Yeats is laid to rest.
\nLet the Irish vessel lie
\nEmptied of its poetry.<\/p>\n

In the nightmare of the dark
\nAll the dogs of Europe bark,
\nAnd the living nations wait,
\nEach sequestered in its hate;<\/p>\n

Intellectual disgrace
\nStares from every human face,
\nAnd the seas of pity lie
\nLocked and frozen in each eye.<\/p>\n

Follow, poet, follow right
\nTo the bottom of the night,
\nWith your unconstraining voice
\nStill persuade us to rejoice;<\/p>\n

With the farming of a verse
\nMake a vineyard of the curse,
\nSing of human unsuccess
\nIn a rapture of distress;<\/p>\n

In the deserts of the heart
\nLet the healing fountain start,
\nIn the prison of his days
\nTeach the free man how to praise.<\/p>\n

\n