In Memory of W.B. Yeats – Wystan Hugh Auden Poem

by
  1. He disappeared in the dead of winter:
  2. The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
  3. And snow disfigured the public statues;
  4. The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
  5. What instruments we have agree
  6. The day of his death was a dark cold day.
  7. Far from his illness
  8. The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
  9. The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
  10. By mourning tongues
  11. The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
  12. But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
  13. An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
  14. The provinces of his body revolted,
  15. The squares of his mind were empty,
  16. Silence invaded the suburbs,
  17. The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.
  18. Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
  19. And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
  20. To find his happiness in another kind of wood
  21. And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
  22. The words of a dead man
  23. Are modified in the guts of the living.
  24. But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
  25. When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
  26. And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
  27. And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
  28. A few thousand will think of this day
  29. As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.
  30. What instruments we have agree
  31. The day of his death was a dark cold day.
  32. You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
  33. The parish of rich women, physical decay,
  34. Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
  35. Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
  36. For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
  37. In the valley of its making where executives
  38. Would never want to tamper, flows on south
  39. From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
  40. Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
  41. A way of happening, a mouth.
  42. Earth, receive an honoured guest:
  43. William Yeats is laid to rest.
  44. Let the Irish vessel lie
  45. Emptied of its poetry.
  46. In the nightmare of the dark
  47. All the dogs of Europe bark,
  48. And the living nations wait,
  49. Each sequestered in its hate;
  50. Intellectual disgrace
  51. Stares from every human face,
  52. And the seas of pity lie
  53. Locked and frozen in each eye.
  54. Follow, poet, follow right
  55. To the bottom of the night,
  56. With your unconstraining voice
  57. Still persuade us to rejoice;
  58. With the farming of a verse
  59. Make a vineyard of the curse,
  60. Sing of human unsuccess
  61. In a rapture of distress;
  62. In the deserts of the heart
  63. Let the healing fountain start,
  64. In the prison of his days
  65. Teach the free man how to praise.