In Memory of W. B. Yeats

…

Last week, 77 years ago, William Butler Yeats died on January 28, 1939 at Hôtel Idéal Séjour, in Menton, France. His later years remain controversial; he became more conservative as his anti-democratic sympathies grew, as well as his admiration of Mussolini, which was encouraged by Ezra Pound. At the same time, one may smile at his many dalliances with younger women, which kept, he claimed, his creative juices flowing. Whatever one’s going to say, Yeats wrote a handful of poems that are among the greatest ever written. Let the art and the artist be separated. The photo above of a younger Yeats was probably taken around the time he wrote my favorite, The Wild Swans at Coole, which I include below.

Auden wrote his in memoriam shortly after Yeats’ death. Soon after that, he left for the United States where he kept his apartment in the East Village where he could look north and see the skyscrapers form the every changing skyline of New York City. Though he kept his apartment there, he lived for a period in Italy (In Praise of Limestone) and then on to Kirkstatten, Austria, where the kind and liberal Auden bought a house with the intention, expressly, of living out his days there, and he did.

 

…
In Memory of W.B. Yeats by W.H. Auden

I

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
Oh all the instruments agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

Oh all the instruments agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all.
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still.
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its saying where executives
Would never want to tamper, it flows south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

III

Earth receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,

Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Till persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

 

W.H. Auden in 1939. Photo by Carl Van Vechten

 

…
The Lake Isle of Innisfree

William Butler Yeats reads his poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree. It has been said that Yeats wrote like an angel but when he read his words he didn’t intone them so much as drone them. You be the judge. It’s hard to mess up a beautiful poem no matter how you say it.

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

 

 

 

The Wild Swans at Coole by William Butler Yeats

 

The Reverend Billy Choir in La Plaza do The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats

...

...