Poetry Analysis of W. H. Auden's "In Memory of W. B. Yeats"

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Poetry Analysis of W. H. Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”

Being one of the greatest poet in the modern world and a major figure devoting to the Celtic Twilight, which is a trial and a “popular desire for a revival of Irish traditional culture” (Kelen 32), William Butler Yeats died in January, 1939. Meanwhile, it was only eight months before the outbreak of World War II and the whole Europe was on the edge of the war – there were revolutions within the Continent and people got scared and considered themselves in a war. In Wystan Hugh Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”, Auden makes use of an elegy to state the fact of the death of a great poet and moreover, takes the readers to a wider political context focusing on the extent of effectiveness of poetry in time of tumult.

In my view, Auden delicately divides the focus of the poem into two levels, the superficial level (the fact of Yeats’ death) and the in-depth level (the effectiveness of the poetry in relation to the political context). The two levels are evenly distributed to the three sections of the poem so that even though different sections carry different meanings, they form cohesion.

In the first section, Auden states the fact of Yeats’ death on an intense cold day by making use of imagery such as the “frozen brooks” (line 2), the “deserted airports” (line 2) and the “disfigur[ing] of the public statues” (line 3). In fact, starting from the second stanza, Auden has made use of the metaphorical use of different parts of the nature like the “wolves” (line 8), the “evergreen forest” (line 8) and the “peasant river” (line 9) to represent the approaching of a terrible war in the Eastern Europe. In my opinion, Auden, in the third stanza, wisely draws a parallel between the dysfunction of Yeats’ different body parts and the disruption of the European society so that by describing the chaos within Yeats’ body, we get the idea of the tumult in the actual world. Finally, Auden emphasizes the point that even though the news about Yeats’ death “is scattered among a hundred cities” (line 18), life of the majority of the people remains unchanged so that while the “brokers [go] [on] roaring on the floor of the Bourse” (line 25), the “poor [maintain] [their] [dignity] [as] [to] [have] sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed” (lines 26 – 27) and individuals go on to be imprisoned in their own obsession of freedom.

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Section two focuses specifically on Yeats and the survival of his poem. While a number of his poems are dedicated to his upper-class acquaintances like Maud Gonne, some others are written with political intentions to make changes in the Irish society at that time. However, as Auden mentions in section two, “poetry makes nothing happen” (line 37) – the “[madness]” (line 35) of Irish politics remains unchanged even with the survival of the poem. In addition, by making use of the metaphorical meaning of “mouth” (line 42) as the action of reciting and singing, Auden suggests the survival of poetry ...

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