22 pages • 44 minutes read
Wystan Hugh AudenIn Memory of W. B. Yeats
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1939A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Statues
The image of the public statues “disfigured” (Line 3) by the snow symbolizes what may happen to great men and women after their deaths. They may be appreciated by their fellow citizens—hence the commemoration in the form of a statue—but they have also relinquished control of their work and thus their legacy, which must now be interpreted and decided on by others. Several times in the elegy, this is shown to apply to Yeats, who has just spent “his last afternoon as himself” (Line 12). Judgment may not always be kind either, as the word “disfigured” suggests. Yeats will be “punished” because his work may now be assessed “under a foreign code of conscience” (Line 21)—that is, a different set of values, which may distort the dead poet’s idea of his purpose and/or his achievement.
Rivers, Quays, and Woods
In Section 1, several descriptions of natural phenomena and man-made structures represent Yeats’s life and ideas. “The peasant river” (Line 9) symbolizes Yeats’s interest in the Irish peasantry and Irish folklore, as evidence in his 1888 book, Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry.
The “fashionable quays” (Line 9) symbolize the life of the aristocracy, which Yeats also savored. He became a friend of the wealthy dramatist Lady Augusta Gregory (1852-1932), staying for long periods at Coole Park, her estate in County Galway that became the center of the Irish Literary Revival. As such, Yeats and Lady Gregory collaborated in the writing of several plays. Yeats spent so much time at Coole Park that it almost became his home, prompting complaints from Lady Gregory’s son Robert that Yeats drank too much of the best wine. This line in the elegy therefore symbolizes two entirely different aspects of Yeats’s life.
“[A]nother kind of wood” (Line 20), where Yeats must now find his happiness, is a reference to the fact that Yeats used the woods to symbolize the supernatural and the afterlife, where he envisioned himself continuing to live after death. In “Enchanted Woods,” an essay that appeared in the 1902 edition of Yeats’s The Celtic Twilight, he wrote of people who would see spirits in a certain wooded area, which he calls the Enchanted Woods: “[A]ll nature is full of people whom we cannot see, and that some of these are ugly or grotesque, and some wicked or foolish, but very many beautiful beyond any one we have ever seen, and that these are not far away when we are walking in pleasant and quiet places” (Yeats, William Butler. “Enchanted Woods.” The Celtic Twilight. Project Gutenberg, 2020). Yeats added that “we shall be among [these beings] when we die if we but keep our natures simple and passionate” (“Enchanted Woods”).
The other “kind of wood” (Line 20) that Yeats must find happiness in symbolizes all the people who are reading and evaluating the dead man’s work—a very different kind of immortality than Yeats envisioned.
