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.
Themes
The Role of Poetry in Human Life
The theme of the role of poetry is first sounded in Section 1, which makes it clear that although Yeats has died, his poetry will certainly survive; people will continue to read it and draw from it whatever interpretation they choose. Everyone will read him differently, and thus his works are being “modified in the guts of the living” (Line 23). Given the fact that poetry endures, what does it actually do, what effect does it have? This question is taken up in Section 2, which bluntly declares that “poetry makes nothing happen” (Line 36). This is a critical comment on Yeats's long-standing commitment to Irish nationalism, notable in such poems as “Easter, 1916,” about the unsuccessful revolt against British rule, “To Ireland in the Coming Times,” “September 1913,” and “Sixteen Dead Men.” According to Auden’s elegy, none of this made any difference. Ireland remains the same. Poetry thus has no direct effect on political or societal issues. In making this comment, Auden may also have had an intuition about his own poetry. “Refugee Blues,” Auden’s poem published in newspapers in 1939, the same year as the elegy, recounts the plight of Jewish refugees forced to flee Nazi Germany. Later, after World War II, Auden would say more than once that his poetry did not save a single Jew from the Holocaust. He might also have been thinking of “The Shield of Achilles,” his poem published in 1952, which depicts the execution of three innocent men by a military regime in the modern world.
Yet poetry does make something happen, as the second part of Section 2 makes clear, using a variation of the same word: poetry is a “way of happening, a mouth” (Line 41). This is not a contradiction, just a different way of understanding. Poetry, a heightened form of language, “survives” (Lines 36, 40) its journey from its creator and enters into the recesses of the heart and mind of each reader. After the reader absorbs the meaning of the poem, something shifts inside them; their inner world is changed in some subtle but meaningful way. New possibilities in their approach to life present themselves. What those possibilities might be is affirmed in the final three stanzas of the elegy. These stanzas are an apostrophe to poets, instructing them on their proper task. The poet’s role is to affirm the joy that can be experienced despite all the trials and difficulties of human life. The purpose of poetry is to evoke gratitude and praise, even in the midst of pain and failure. The work of poets is to nourish and promote the flow of life in its most positive form:
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise (Lines 74-77).
The Bleakness of Life
The elegy is in many respects rather grim. It presents life as a difficult business in which individuals and societies face many obstacles. First, of course, the world has lost a great poet, and all the imagery of winter and cold conveys the harshness of the day it happened. Life may go on, but the picture of society that emerges is not a pleasant one. It suggests class differences and exploitation—an unjust system. The stockbrokers on the Bourse, or the Paris stock exchange, are “roaring like beasts” (Line 25), which suggests they are like predators who trade ruthlessly in stocks and shares to reap profits for the few—the kind of capitalism that Auden, a socialist at the time, disliked. Immediately following this is a reference to the poor, those at the other end of the social scale, who have no funds to invest in stocks. They are largely resigned to their disadvantaged position in society: “The poor have their sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed” (Line 26).
As for poetry, it finds its way into the private world of people’s “busy griefs” (Line 39), a phrase which suggests multiple misfortunes and disappointments that form the “Raw towns that we believe and die in” (Line 40)—painful emotional wounds that are left unhealed for a lifetime.
Section 3 adds to the dark picture with its references to the approaching war in Europe. Europe is like a “nightmare in the dark” (Line 58); the hostile nations nurse their own hatreds and cut themselves off from common human sympathy in a way that can only spell disaster. This is the coming of World War II, which in early 1939, at the time of Yeats’s death, was largely seen to be inevitable.
This bleak scenario in the elegy, which encompasses different areas of individual, societal, and political life, gives all the more force to the ringing affirmations of the final three stanzas. The instruction to the poet to “Sing of human unsuccess / In a rapture of distress” (Lines 72-73) especially sums up the difficulty as well as the necessity of the task in the face of the realities the poem describes.
Living On in Others Versus Personal Immortality
In many elegies in English literature, as part of the consolation offered by the grieving poet, the dead person assumes some kind of immortality. In the final one-third of Shelley’s “Adonais,” an elegy that, like Auden’s, commemorates a famous poet (John Keats), the tone changes from mourning to elation because Keats “lives, he wakes,—‘tis death is dead, not he;” and in the final line of the poem, the dead poet’s soul “beacons from the abode where the eternal are” (Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Adonais.” 1821. Poetry Foundation). Similarly, In Milton’s “Lycidas,” through the grace and power of Christ, Lycidas now exists “[i]n the blest kingdoms meek of joy and love” (Milton, John. “Lycidas.” 1638. Poetry Foundation). No such blessings await Yeats in Auden’s elegy. This is a secular elegy for a secular age, as befits Auden, who looked at the world through political rather than religious lens (Auden would readopt Christianity in 1940, although even then he emphasized the moral aspects of the faith rather than salvation and eternal life).
The symbolism of the fourth stanza in Section 1 makes it clear that the dead poet can expect no resurrection. While Yeats himself felt imaginatively at home in the supernatural woods he wrote about, and had envisioned participating in an afterlife, the elegy denies him this comfort: He now “is scattered among a hundred cities, / […] / To find his happiness in another kind of wood” (Lines 18-20), in which he is subject to the judgment of others about his work. It is the “words of a dead man” (Line 22) that continue to exist, not the man himself.
In Section 3, at the point in a traditional elegy that would often mark the beginning of the consolation, including the immortality of the dead man, the speaker instead bluntly hammers home the fact of mortality with a burial instruction; it is the ground, not heaven, that receives the poet:
Earth, receive an honoured guest;
William Yeats is laid to rest:
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry (Lines 42-45).
The only immortality for Yeats therefore lies in his verse, not in his individual person, and even that is not entirely guaranteed, being subject to the judgments of others and the vagaries of time.
