In Memory of W. B. Yeats

Section 1 

This section reveals how different this elegy will be from the traditional English pastoral elegy, such as John Milton’s “Lycidas” or Matthew Arnold’s “Thyrisis,” in which the speaker, in the guise of a shepherd, mourns the dead man and all of nature expresses its grief. In contrast, Auden’s speaker does not express sorrow at the death of Yeats, and nature shows no sign of mourning. Indeed, the imagery is predominantly that of the city rather than the country. 

The elegy begins by stating that Yeats “disappeared” (Line 1), rather than died, which suggests that he might go on existing in some other way or place, although in this elegy, unlike its traditional predecessors, the dead man is not received into heaven or some other divine realm. 

The first stanza provides a naturalistic description of the weather on that day. It was just a normal day in late January—cold, dark, and snowy. There is no pathetic fallacy here, in which nature would reveal human-like emotions or feelings. The urban imagery features such unromantic locales as the deserted airports (Line 2) and “public statues” (Line 3) that are covered by snow. The emphasis is on objective measurement, not subjective feelings, as the final lines of the stanza show: “The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day. / O all the instruments agree / The day of his death was a dark cold day” (Lines 4-6). (Mercury is used in thermometers.) 

Stanza 2 does contain some nature imagery, but it is used to show that nature continues as usual: Wolves are running “through the evergreen forests” (Line 8) because that is what wolves do. The line, “The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays” (Line 9) is an allusion to Yeats, referring to two aspects of his life and work: Yeats was deeply interested in Irish folklore and idealized the life of the peasant; however, he was also drawn to the elegant life of the aristocracy (the “fashionable quays” [Line 9]). The stanza concludes on a note of grief (there are “mourning tongues” [Line 10]), but the sorrowful feelings do not touch Yeats’s poetry (“The death of the poet was kept from his poems” [Line 11]), which is the most important thing about the man, more significant than his death. 

Stanza 3 conveys Yeats’s process of dying, the collapse of his mind and body. His body is described metaphorically as a country in which provinces are rebelling; then urban metaphors present him as a city with a (town) square and suburbs, which are now “empty” (Line 15) and silent. The afternoon of his death is “his last afternoon as himself” (Line 12), an unusual expression which suggests (like the first line of the elegy, where he “disappeared”) that Yeats might somehow continue existing elsewhere. Indeed, this turns out to be so; he undergoes a transformation in which “he became his admirers” (Line 17). In other words, what remains of him is his poetry, which lives on in the minds of those that appreciate it. 

Stanza 4 continues the urban imagery as it elaborates on the previous stanza; Yeats is now scattered among a “hundred cities / And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections” (Lines 18-19)—affectionately possessed by people he never knew and cannot know now. His existence has, in a sense, been transmuted, from flesh and blood to a living presence in the minds of his readers. This is his post-earthly life, in which he can “find his happiness in another kind of wood” (Line 20). This is another allusion to Yeats and his beliefs. Yeats believed in the supernatural and in an afterlife, which he sometimes associated with beings that lived in the woods. Instead of this supernatural belief, Auden’s elegy states that Yeats’s happiness will be found in another type of wood altogether—a metaphorical wood made up of many people’s feelings about and reactions to his work. 

However, in the next line Auden’s speaker suggests that this will not provide happiness unalloyed, since Yeats will also “be punished under a foreign code of conscience” (Line 21). In other words, not everyone will appreciate or agree with him; they will have other ways of thinking and feeling, and other ethical standards and beliefs, so his poetry will therefore have its share of critics. All his works will be “modified in the guts of the living” (Line 23). That is, people will digest and interpret his works in their own diverse ways, and this will be Yeats’s afterlife.

The final stanza of this section returns to the down-to-earth, matter-of-fact atmosphere of the first. Yeats’s death is not such a momentous event; tomorrow, everything will return to normal: The Bourse (the Paris stock exchange) will be active and noisy, the poor will get on with their lives as they are accustomed to doing, and everyone will continue to believe that they are free beings, whether they are or not. A relatively small number of people (“a few thousand” [Line 28])—those to whom Yeats and his poetry has meant something—will remember the day of his death, but only as a day they did “something slightly unusual” (Line 29). The final two lines of this stanza complete repeat the last two lines of the first stanza. 

Section 2

Section 2 differs markedly from the previous section. It consists of only one stanza, and the perspective changes, as the poem’s speaker addresses Yeats directly in the second person (a rhetorical device known as apostrophe). The speaker is critical of Yeats, although in the first line the speaker concedes that he and other share in the same common, although unspecified, human failings: “You were silly like us” (Line 32). Then the speaker softens the criticism with praise (“your gift survived it all” [Line 32]), before listing the obstacles that the gift had to survive: the interest in and attention of “rich women” (Line 33) (such as Yeats’s friend, the writer Lady Augusta Gregory), ill health, and “yourself” (Line 34)—that is, whatever elements in Yeats’s personality undermined his poetic gift. Yeats also survived “mad Ireland” (Line 34), whose turbulence touched him deeply and spurred his creativity. In Line 35, the speaker introduces a caveat aimed at denying the effectiveness of Yeats’s poetry in driving change. In spite of Yeats’s promotion of Irish nationalism and culture, Ireland remains “mad” (Line 35), and its weather has not changed either—a humorous touch, since no one would expect poetry to change bad weather. The next line of the elegy has become famous: “For poetry makes nothing happen” (Line 36). Auden means that poetry has no impact on larger social and political forces. 

Yet poetry does survive, Auden continues, and does its work in a different kind of way. He explains by use of a river metaphor. Poetry begins “in the valley of its saying” (Line 37), or deep in the poet’s heart and mind, far from the reach of “executives” (Line 37)—people like politicians and statesmen who may hold in their hands the fates of nations. This river of poetry flows on, first passing places where the burden of life is too great for people even to notice it, until it reaches “Raw towns that we believe and die in” (Line 40), that is, the emotions and ideas that occupy people’s minds and hearts all their lives. Then poetry merges into cultural life, in a continuation of the river metaphor: Poetry becomes “[a] way of happening, a mouth” (Line 41). The mouth of a river is where a river enters a body of water larger than itself, the sea or ocean. Since the human mouth is an organ of speech and communication, it is how people speak out language that has been shaped into poetry. Just as, in the metaphor, the river flows into the sea, so too does the uttered poetry become available for anyone to read or hear as part of a universal human discourse. In other words, poetry does make something happen. Auden will explore precisely what that might be, and what the poet must aim to accomplish, in Section 3. 

Section 3

This section is again different from the first two. There is a change in tense, from past to present, and in verse form, which now consists of nine four-line stanzas, or quatrains (See: Form and Meter). After an opening apostrophe to the Earth, asking it to receive the body of Yeats, this concluding section employs the verdict of time to declare what is most valued in human life. Time has its favorites. It does not long honor the “brave and innocent” (Line 47), but, “Worships language and forgives / Everyone by whom it lives” (Lines 50-51)—that is, poets and writers who excel at what they do. It does not matter what faults they may have in other areas of their lives; time preserves and honors their work. In the fourth of the nine stanzas (deleted, along with Stanzas 2 and 3, in later editions), Auden gives two examples of writers whose ideas may have been unacceptable, but whom time has forgiven because of the excellence of their work. These are English poet and novelist Rudyard Kipling, whose imperialist views Auden disdains, and French poet, dramatist, and statesman, Paul Claudel, whose right-wing positions were similarly at odds with Auden’s beliefs. 

Stanzas 5 and 6 introduce a new element into the poem. They refer to the perilous situation in Europe at the time of writing: Hatred rules the day, and reason and decent human feeling are absent. World War II would begin only about six months later. 

The poem’s final three stanzas affirm the important role of the poet, whether Yeats or anyone else. The poet must explore the depths of the human experience, and “persuade us to rejoice” (Line 69) in spite of the inevitable losses associated with all human life. The penultimate stanza repeats this idea. The poet must “make a vineyard of the curse” (Line 70), that is, produce something out of human suffering that nourishes the human spirit. The “curse” is an allusion to the Old Testament’s Book of Genesis, in which God punishes Adam for his sin in eating the forbidden fruit by cursing the ground to require hard human labor to produce food, making human life always difficult. The allusion is also to Yeats’s poem “Adam’s Curse,” in which the speaker describes how hard it is to write excellent poetry, or to produce anything of value, as a result of Adam’s fall. 

Finally, Auden’s speaker reaffirms the power of poetry to heal the stricken human heart and give men and women a feeling of freedom, even as they necessarily live within the boundaries and restrictions that life imposes. 

Auden modeled this final section of his elegy in part on one of Yeats’s last poems, “Under Ben Bulben,” which was published in several Irish newspapers on February 3, 1939, just as Auden was working on his elegy. Yeats’s poem contains the lines, “Irish poets, learn your trade, / Sing whatever is well made” (Yeats, William Butler. “Under Ben Bulben.” 1989. Poetry Foundation). These are trochaic tetrameters with the final syllable dropped, the same meter as Auden adopts in Section 3 of his elegy.