Yeats’s physical self is alternately described as a political entity (“provinces”), an urban landscape (“squares”), outer residential settlements (“suburbs”), a river like the peasant river earlier on, and then it appears his existence stops being his own, and after his death he will live on only in the memories and experiences of those who still read his work. To find his happiness in another kind of wood.įor someone who played a part in the revolt of the Irish against the British Empire, saying of Yeats that “the provinces of his body revolted” also suggests that there was something in Yeats that, by dying, his body wished to overthrow, and that is fairly damning. Now he is scattered among a hundred citiesĪnd wholly given over to unfamiliar affections, The current of his feeling failed he became his admirers. Oddly, this irresponsible (or ineffectual) version of Yeats is, like the peasant river, identified with a countryside that makes clear the entire metaphor was designed to draw contradictory impulses within the life and poetry of Yeats himself:īut for him it was his last afternoon as himself, As the evergreens are always green, so too will there always be wolves (bankers), and if Yeats had wished to alleviate the suffering of the poor he failed in his charge. Once again, poverty coexisting uneasily with extreme wealth, with the implication that the wealthy are “beasts” like wolves, preying on the poor peasants. When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,Īnd the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed I suppose the same impulse links these lines to this couplet later on: Only this is sort of an unusual depiction of life outside of a deathbed watch I suppose the “evergreen” forest stands in distinction to the decay of the elderly poet (consider how much different this line would be if the trees mirrored Yeats’s decline ), but why “wolves”? and why, why draw a contrast between the “fashionable quays” of commerce in a bustling harbor and the “peasant river,” apparently poor enough to need a justification for why it is “untempted” by the wealth of the quays. The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, This poem takes a pretty novel approach by recasting both poet and poetry as spatial landscapes not necessarily having any relationship to Yeats’s homeland of “Mad Ireland.”Īfter an initial image of the “dark, cold day” of Yeats’s death, the first section begins to draw a distinction between Yeats’s failing body and how life continues elsewhere: ![]() If the speaker wishes to grant a benediction on an influential poet without making it seem as though he supported everything about the earlier poet’s life, there would need to be some delicate maneuvering and negotiation in order to finds the words that would suffice for the task. This is similar to the act of eulogizing someone whose… funeral description was significantly edited from the actual day-to-day events and actions of that person –some of you may already understand this quite well. I think that’s what the speaker means by “you were silly like us” in part two, although Auden himself was a communist during the same time period and so that’s a bit of a stretch.īut it’s possible to read the poem without all of that extra baggage and appreciate it for what it does beyond its historical referentiality: that it is a poem by a poet saying good-bye to another poet, trying to extricate what it finds valuable about the departed from the wreckage of what it would rather not have to deal with. Yeats was a public artist, intellectual, and politician involved with promoting and sustaining the independent Irish state he wrote impassioned love poems and political poems later in his career he grew crotchety and even flirted briefly with affiliating with fascism during the post-WWI depression. ![]() It’s a different matter when I teach this poem in upper-level courses. ![]() Yeats,” which is so explicitly an elegy of one poet by another, requires so much context about the departed that it may seem a curious choice in an introductory course. By now it is probably obvious that Yeats and Auden are two of my favorite poets I assign them often and have published on both.
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