-
He disappeared in the dead of winter:
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The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
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The snow disfigured the public statues;
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The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
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What instruments we have agree
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The day of his death was a dark cold day.
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Far from his illness
-
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
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The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
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By mourning tongues
-
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
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But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
-
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
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The provinces of his body revolted,
-
The squares of his mind were empty,
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Silence invaded the suburbs,
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The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.
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Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
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And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
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To find his happiness in another kind of wood
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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
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As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.
-
What instruments we have agree
-
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
II
-
-
You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
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The parish of rich women, physical decay,
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Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
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Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
-
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
-
In the valley of its making where executives
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Would never want to tamper, flows on south
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From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
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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.
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Let the Irish vessel lie
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Emptied of its poetry.
-
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
-
Still persuade us to rejoice.
-
With the farming of a verse
-
Make a vineyard of the curse,
-
Sing of human unsuccess
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In a rapture of distress.
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In the deserts of the heart
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Let the healing fountains start,
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In the prison of his days
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Teach the free man how to praise.
.jpg "W.H. Auden (ii)")
