In Memory of W.B. Yeats by W. H. Auden (Analysis)

In Memory of W.B. Yeats

by W. H. Auden

(Analysis) 

When Auden wrote “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” in February 1939, Europe was on the verge of The Second World War did not actually break out until Germany invaded Poland in September, but the sense of impending catastrophe is present throughout the poem. The failure of Britain and France to resist Hitler’s claims on Czechoslovakia in 1938 seemed to define the mood of Europe as Auden wrote. In spite of the sense of expectant foreboding, all the nations seemed paralyzed, incapable of taking any action.

There is a long history of elegiac poetry, poems written on the occasion of someone’s death. In Memory of W. B. Yeats is a poem within that tradition, but it’s also a poem which extends the tradition. Poems about death tend to be concerned not just with the loss, but also with what remains after a man or a woman dies. Elizabethan sonnets, like those of Spenser or Shakespeare, often take this idea of something persisting even after death and use it in the context of an imagined dialogue between lovers, rather than in relation to an actual death: the lover promises his beloved that even though she must die, she will live on forever in his verses.

In the elegy, that living-on after death may be thought of in religious terms, or perhaps in terms of cherished memory, or it may make itself felt by changing those who remain, transforming despair into the resolve to go on with life. This last possibility is what Tennyson’s poem, Ulysses, is all about.

Auden’s poem draws on all these traditions as it focuses just on that moment when the words of a poet must begin to live on after his death. The poem which Auden writes is the first step in preserving Yeats the poet. But most importantly, Auden understands this process of poetic after-life as taking place entirely within history. When Yeats’ words disperse themselves after his death, they are received into a very specific time and place: Europe, 1939. Those who may continue to remember the poet’s words live in a technological world of instruments, airports, cities, stock exchanges, and most importantly, they live at a moment of dark foreboding, as the world seems about to go to war again. For Auden, while memory deals with the past, it takes place in the present. And so the only way a poet can honour the dead, is to write a poem about the present. That’s just what he does in this poem.

After the lines “Let the Irish vessel lie / Emptied of its poetry,” three stanzas that originally followed were omitted in the 1966 edition of Auden’s Collected Shorter Poems and thereafter: “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. / Time that with this strange excuse / Pardoned Kipling and his views, / And will pardon Paul Claudel, / Pardons him for writing well.” Kipling’s views were imperialistic and jingoistic; Paul Claudel (1868-1955), French poet, dramatist, and diplomat, was an extreme conservative in his political ideas.

Commenting on the role of language and words; and how a poet acts as a “maker” it will be appropriate to know Auden’s views. In the earlier part of his career, Auden defended what he called “light” poetry, on sociological and even political grounds; more recently, he has spoken of poetry as a “game of knowledge” justifying his definition in philosophical and theological terms. Both of these critical approaches are allied to his concern, throughout his career, for the technical side of poetry – the side that most reflects the poet’s character as a “Maker”.

The “Maker”, an old name for the poet, which Auden has made his own – is essentially a professional, delighting in the potentialities that the language itself offers, yet retaining always his awareness of the audience to and for whom he writes. the poet is a ‘Maker’; he makes language, and then makes poetry out of that language. Therefore, words for him are of the utmost importance. He plays with words with delight and uses them with extra ordinary skill. He hunts dictionaries for the most apt word, and has in this way saved many a word from oblivion. It was primarily in search of a new idiom and a new word usage that he went to America, and in this way sought to enrich the English language. This definition of the poet as highly professional “Maker” illuminates Auden’s own practice. he is “the conjuror” a verbal magician, and one devoted to the art of words. “His fertility of imagination, his sharply perceptive insight, his imitative response to the verbal rhythms and literary styles of other men, his own powerful and haunting sense or rhythm, his delight in linguistic peculiarities, technical languages, syntactical variations – all these are used, explored, and exploited for their own sake. Thus, if Auden’s poetic “voice” is one that commands attention, that is less by virtue of the things said – abundant and interesting though these had been – then by virtue of the skill and energy with which Auden has used the potentialities of the speaking voice itself.” In his verse, “Auden can argue, reflect, joke, gossip, sing, analyse, lecture, hector, and simple talk; he can sound , at will, like a psychologist, on a political platform like a theologian, at a party, or like a geologist in love; he can give dignity and authority to nonsensical theories and make newspaper headlines sound both true and melodious.”

In the first part of the poem, Auden uses a reflective elegiac ideology to commemorate a poet that he held in high literary regard. After Auden describes the differing social perspectives of Yeats’ influence on the world, the second part of the poem brings forth an apostrophe that speaks to Yeats as a brother in poetry. Finally, the third part of the poem is written in verse style of Yeats, as Auden brings to life the actual poetic talents that his hero had emulated in his lifetime. In essence, the three parts of the elegy should be examined within the context of the style that Auden has chosen to commemorate William Butler Yeats.

The three parts of the poem reflect the elegiac, apostrophe and poetic mimicry of Yeats’ verse. While the poem immediately shows a traditional form of reflection and commemoration of Yeats life and his death in the modern world, it is clear that Auden sought to idealize naturalism and mythical mastery that Yeats beheld in poetical history.

In Memory of Major Robert Gregory is William Butler Yeats’ elegy on the death of Robert Gregory, an Irish airman who died in battle during the First World War. Written in the first person, it is a poem of twelve stanzas, in octets, which is primarily composed in iambic pentameter but which also includes iambic tetrameter. Gregory was the only son of Lady Augusta Gregory, Yeats’ close colleague for two decades. They worked together as pivotal figures in the Irish Literary Revival and were among the founders of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre.

Auden’s poetry got effected under many influences. Auden was the most active of the group of young English poets who, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, saw themselves bringing new techniques and attitudes to English poetry. Stephen Spender and Cecil Day Lewis were the most prominent members of the new school, which soon afterward broke apart. Like many of his generation, Auden learned from the poetic wit and irony of T. S. Eliot, and the metrical and verbal techniques of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Wilfred Owen. His English studies at Oxford familiarized him with the rhythms and long alliterative line of Anglo-Saxon poetry as well as with the rapid and rollicking short lines (a sort of inspired doggerel) of the poet John Skelton (ca. 1460- 1529); both influenced Auden’s versification. He learned, too, from the songs of the English music hall and, later, from American blues singers. The Great Depression that shook America in 1929 hit England soon afterward, and Auden and his contemporaries looked out at the England of industrial stagnation and mass unemployment, seeing not the metaphorical Waste Land of Eliot but a more literal waste land of poverty and “depressed areas.” His early poetry is much concerned with a diagnosis of the ills of his country. This diagnosis, conducted in a verse that combined deliberate irreverence and sometimes even clowning with a cunning verbal craftsmanship, drew on Freud and Marx to show England both as a nation of neurotic invalids who must learn to “throw away their rugs” and as the victim of an antiquated economic system. The liveliness and nervous force of this early poetry of Auden’s made a great impression, even though an uncertainty about his audience led him to introduce purely private symbols, intelligible only to a few friends, in some of his poems.

With the passage of time, Auden’s poetry showed greater clarity of imagery and less of a desire to shock; he produced, in the years around 1940, some poems (such as “Lullaby”) of finely disciplined movement, pellucid clarity, and deep yet unsentimental feeling. At the same time he was developing a more complex view of the world, moving from his earlier psychologically-based diagnosis of modern ills to a more religious view of personal responsibility and traditional value. But he never lost his ear for popular speech or his ability to combine elements from popular art with an extreme technical formality. Auden was always the experimenter, particularly in ways of bringing together high artifice and a colloquial tone.

W. H. Auden’s ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, is perhaps his best-known poem, and it marks the great influence which the elder poet had on Auden’s development. Edward Callan, however, writes about Auden’s attempt to distance himself from Yeats, even as he acknowledged Yeats’ importance. He examines Auden’s elegy, and particularly the revisions which he made in it over the years, in light of Auden’s increasingly emphatic rejection of the romantic tradition which he identified with the nineteenth century, and with Yeats.

Friends often share stories or poems of loved one at their funeral. This helps them to ease their pain and can also express accomplishments of the deceased. When W.B. Yeats passed away, one of his contemporaries, W.H. Auden, wrote a poem in memory of him.

Auden’s poem titled, In Memory of W.B. Yeats, presents the life of Yeats from Auden’s perspective in three different sections. Using literary techniques such as diction, varied meter and rhyme, alliteration, and personification, Auden comments on poetry and its ability to outlive its author. Each of the three sections of this poem is different. The first section is composed of five stanzas each containing six lines. This mainly touches on the death of Yeats and contains neither meter nor rhyme. The second section is one stanza composed of ten lines and is a transitional section showing the human aspect of Yeats. It is written in iambic hexameter with a rhyme scheme of a b b a c c d e e d. The last section is made up of nine stanzas each only four lines long. It is written mostly in iambic meter. This section touches on the nature of poetry and its impact and its rhyme scheme is a a b b c c etc. In the first stanza, Auden immediately begins throwing words at his readers which imply decay and death such as, “disappeared” and “dead of winter”. The natural surroundings reflect Yeats death as the “brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted, / And snow disfigured the public statues”. Auden uses personification and alliteration in his description stating that “The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day”.

The last two lines contain alliteration and are repeated again at the end of this section: “What instruments we have agree / The day of his death was a dark cold day”. Auden again describes nature in his second stanza, except this time he is portraying how nature pays no attention to Yeats’ death. “The wolves ran on…” despite his death and “The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays.” Auden utilizes pathetic fallacy in that last line giving emotions to the river. The final line, “The death of the poet was kept from his poems”, also illustrates how life keeps going on after Yeats dies. During the third stanza Auden focuses more on the actual passing of Yeats. Like a metaphorical poet he uses geographical diction to describe his Yeats’ death: “The provinces of his body..”, “The squares of his mind…”, and “Silence invaded the suburbs”. Auden also personified silence in that last line. Auden employs alliteration as well, “The current of his feeling failed”. Yeats “became his admirers”, living on in their memory. The fourth section discusses what will become of Yeats. His works are “scattered among a hundred cities”. He finds “his happiness in another kind of wood”, a bookcase as opposed to the forest. Yeats survives “in the guts of the living”. The last stanza pays attention to the future making an allusion to the “Bourse”, the French stock exchange, and juxtaposing that with “the poor”. However, they will all go about their daily lives “each in the cell of himself”. The significance of his poetry will become mitigated because only “a few thousand will think of this day…The day of his death…” Auden repeats the last two lines from the first stanza, which alters the number of lines from six to eight. Auden’s second section comments on what Yeats had to deal with during his lifetime, and how his “gift survived it all”. Auden gives us examples of what he overcame, “The parish of rich women, physical decay, / Yourself”. Auden suggests that the conflict between Ireland and England “hurt [Yeats] into poetry”. Employing inverted syntax Auden states that “Ireland has her madness and her weather still” because Yeats’ poetry did not affect it. Poetry “survives” because it is an art form and it can stand alone with its integrity. It “flows…From ranches of isolation”, a notion that we are all isolated from each other, and from “busy griefs” which are our everyday burdens. The rhyme has shifted from nonexistent in the first section, to near rhyme in this section, and perfects itself to end rhyme in the last section. Auden’s final section comments on the nature of poetry and begins with the death of Yeats. Using personification and apostrophe Auden makes a request, “Earth, receive an honored guest”, which refers to the physical body of Yeats. Auden also personifies time mentioning that it is “intolerant of the brave and innocent, / And indifferent…To a beautiful physique”. This is the universal truth that the average person is forgotten in time. However, on the other hand time will “worship language” because words can never die. It “forgives/Everyone by whom it lives”. Auden is stating that time will “forgive” an author if they write words that are great because they will be remembered by those words. Auden gives examples of this by making allusions to “Kipling” and “Paul Claudel”. In the fifth stanza of this section Auden shifts his focus to the present time and the events taking place around him. He is writing this poem during the dawn of World War II and illustrating how “All the dogs of Europe bark, / And the living nations wait, / Each sequestered in its hate”. Auden comments on the stupidity of war claiming that “Intellectual disgrace, / Stares from every human face”. Next Auden instructs the poet in an apostrophe to “follow right” and “with your un constraining voice, / Still persuade us to rejoice”.

Alluding to the biblical story of creation Auden entreats poets to, “Make a vineyard of the curse …let the healing fountains start”. In Auden’s last two lines he juxtaposes “prison” and “free” petitioning the poet to “Teach the free man how to praise”. That last line sums up the poem to make an excellent epitaph for William Butler Yeats.

Auden breaks down his poem into three sections, each addressing different topics, but all connecting back to Yeats. These sections can also be look upon as stages in Yeats life. The first section represents his early years as a poet emphasized by the lack of meter and rhyme. Both of which also contribute to the sobering mood of Yeats’ death. The second section acts as a transition in the poem and can also stand for a transition in Yeats’ life which perhaps he accomplished by overcoming the obstacles described. The last section of Auden’s poem is written with flowing rhyme scheme and meter and suggests a time in Yeats’ life where he reached the height of his art. This is also the section where Auden described the benefit of words not only to the author, but to society as well and shows the triumphant end to Yeats’ life.