An Exhortation To The Reader

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Christopher Brown

Dr. Eileen Gregory

Literary Studies I: Lyric

An Exhortation to the Reader of Poetry in W. H. Auden’s "In Memory of W. B. Yeats"

In his poem, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," Auden defines the reader of poetry as the poet’s successor, exhorting his readers to think and to act. Poets die, as every man dies, but poetry does not die, and neither does mankind. The title suggests that this poem is an elegy for a certain man; after the title, though, it mentions Yeats’ name once, and only a few other details suggest this is Yeats that Auden is mourning. The first section of the poem denigrates the body of the poet; the second section, the efficiency of poetry itself. Likewise, the poem as a whole does not seek to praise a particular poet or a specific author’s poetry. This poem is not exclusively focused on Yeats, but inquires into poetry in general, poses Auden’s own ideas of poetry against Yeats’.

Auden both admired and despised Yeats for different aspects of his poetry. This ambivalence is visible in his admiration of Yeats’ poignancy and instantaneous effect, and in his contempt for Yeats’ delusions. The former, combined with the Auden’s solution to the latter, comprises the theme of the role of the poet in this poem. Auden contemporaneously wrote a short prose companion piece, "The Public vs. The Late William Butler Yeats," in which he expresses some of his thoughts on Yeats—esteem from the defense and anti-fairytale sentiment from the prosecution. Auden concludes not with a condemnation or pardon for Yeats, but with putting the jury on trial, for seeking to judge the poet. The case lies not with the poet, but with his readers. Poetry (and consequently the poet) is only as effective as its listeners make it. If the listener reads the poetry but does not digest it, then the poet has written his poetry in vain. As Auden calls the attentive reader of "Musée des Beaux Arts" to be mindful of suffering, he demands a certain sensitivity and active thought from readers in general.

In "The Unknown Citizen," Auden denounces the thoughtless individual who was born, breeds, and breathes his last on the bandwagon. This citizen is everything his leaders want him to be: a mindless lamb herded along with the flock, never questioning or "interfering" with their plans (27). Auden never explicitly disparages this citizen, but the irony is apparent—the poem is an entreaty to think, not to act like this citizen. Auden never takes the role of authority; he never presumes to preach exactly how man should live. Rather, he presents his poetry as "parables," to make the reader think about his way of life ("Psychology and Art To-day" 342).

Two contextual themes that concerned Auden at the time he wrote "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" provide a useful background to its reading. First, Critic John Hildebilde lists fourteen biographical poems written 1936-41, most of them eulogies, which demonstrate Auden’s preoccupation with death (Hildebilde 1). Secondly, there is Auden’s disappointment with the effectiveness of the individual, inspired by his involvement in the war, his travels, and fruitless efforts to halt the germination of the Second World War. This disenchantment with poetry and concern with death converge on the role of the poet and the best response from his listeners.

The poem is a metrical gallery, beginning in free verse, moving to syllabic, and culminating in flawless trochaic tetrameter. Although there is a hint of the dirgeful dactylic, e.g. "The | dáy of his | déath was a | dárk cóld dáy" (6), the first part is free verse in order to downplay the death of the poet. As a classicist, Auden did not much care for free verse, but he knew its effects, and used it when fitting. Here, the variation and haphazard line lengths invoke a sense of chaos and disorder. Likewise informally, the speaker is not an obsequious funeral orator, but he is blunt and accepting of death, focusing not on what the dead man was, but where he is going. Similarly to "Musée des Beaux Arts," Auden uses long lines to draw the focus away from the poet, as the world does, running on apathetically, as in "The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted" and "The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays" (2, 9). Contrastingly, the lines addressing the physicality of the poet seem curt and abrupt, such as "Far from his illness" (7) and the repeated "The day of his death was a dark cold day" (6, 31).

This section is split into five five-to-six line stanzas (excluding the final two-line repetition), progressing from the absolute unimportance of the poet to his inheritors—his vicarious mode of immortality. Auden begins with an image of desolation, disparate from the death of the poet, from which the poet has disappeared. The world of unperturbed nature and unfeeling machinery has no regard for this death of just another man. But a glimmer of hope remains: this man "disappeared," rather than dying or passing away (1); he has departed from the physical world, but he has not been extinguished.

The second stanza reinforces this sense, and explains where the departed has disappeared: "By mourning tongues / The death of the poet was kept from his poems" (10-11). Here Auden reveals the dichotomy between the poet and his poetry, and the one’s persistence even after its seemingly inseparable maker has died. Here, Auden introduces his real subject, the mourners, and sets them forth as the poet’s salvation; or, more precisely, his eternal abode.

Next, Auden takes one last look at the man’s life, and the moment of his death. Each line rings with sympathetic finality, reinforcing the finality of the body’s death. A catalog of seven mostly equivalent phrases describes the desolation of the dying man, likening him to a city, which, bereft of its people, dies. The saving conclusion is again the dead man’s transference into his listeners, not just "mourners" now, but "admirers" (10, 18).

In the fourth stanza, we see the disembodied poet propagated into life in other cities not himself and given to new readers. Two metaphors worth noting are these: the dead man is left "To find his happiness in another kind of wood," that is, to live anew on paper. The second is a strange linking of the "words of the dead man" to the Eucharist (22). The Eucharist is broken and administered to the people and consumed, just as the poet’s words are "scattered," read, and "modified in the guts of the living" listeners (18, 23). The Eucharist is a sign of Christ’s sacrifice for his people, which feeds its partakers spiritually, and is likewise "modified" from bread into bodily sustenance. The words of the poet provide intellectual sustenance for his readers. The dead man is not only incorporated into his readers’ reactions to his poetry, but he is subjected to their "punish[ment]," that is, their individual interpretations, though incorrect in Yeats’ conception (21). Even after death, the poet is not static, but made dynamic by his interpreters and each one’s "foreign code of conscience" (21).

Auden concludes this first section with great hope for what the poet’s readers do with the poetry. He sets a scene of thoughtlessness and delusion, where "brokers" have become "beasts," the "poor" content themselves with "suffering," and man lives in a fantasy of "freedom" (25-7). Into this wintry, inhumane environment, Auden introduces the few thousand readers in whom the poet lives on. These remember the day of Yeats’ death "As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual" (29). Action is required on their part: the word is "did," not heard of (29).

The second part of the poem is syllabic, which is a very unimposing meter, here mostly regular, with an odd variation in the last half. Auden confronts Yeats in the second person, and rebuffs Yeats by describing where poetry comes from and what it does not do. This part, like the first, references Yeats personally, but soon diverges into a general interrogation of poetry. Yeats wrote poetry to cure his country, but his country remains sick. Auden claims "poetry makes nothing happen"; instead, it is merely a "way of happening, a mouth" (36, 41). This subtle distinction illumines the delicate opposition between Yeats and Auden. Yeats considered poetry to be a tool, whereas Auden proclaims it is nothing in itself, but only in how its readers respond to it. Yeats’ fault was that he expected too much, and the wrong things, out of poetry.

Auden clarifies that poetry is not a force in itself, but is only as effective as a parable. The parable is what "survived" all of Yeats’ physicality and delusion. The problem that Yeats sought to fix, the "madness" of Ireland, still exists (35). Despite his misdirected effort, Yeats’ poetry endures, indebted to his readers’ "foreign code of conscience" that keeps the poetry alive and pertinent (21). In his essay "Writing," Auden claims the purpose of poetry is, "by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate"—a much more humble goal than Yeats’ attempt to heal his country of all its ills (27). Likewise, in "The Poet in the City," Auden claims that the political poet can achieve nothing more than to enlighten the "management" of the plight of the "managed" (88).

As Auden moves away from Yeats, he varies the line-length, creating a metrical col of "Would never want to tamper, flows on south," by surrounding it with longer thirteen syllable lines (26). Shortening this line to ten syllables emphasizes the distance of poetry, which arises in "ranches of isolation," from the unreflective bustle of the "executive" (37, 39). The valley, to Auden, was a place of true civilization. In "Atlantis," the paradise of the title lies in a valley. This, Auden’s Eden, is not a bustling city, but a pastoral town. Meshing with the Yeats-as-city metaphor from the first section, the poet’s mind is likened to a valley. Percy Bysshe Shelly claimed that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Auden contradicts this with his definition of poetry, which has nothing to do with "executives," nor they with it (37). After this rejection of poetry’s material effect, the meter returns to the original twelve-syllable length, then descends finally into Auden’s short concluding definition of poetry as "A way of happening, a mouth" (41). The caesura before "a mouth" is strong enough that those two final words read almost as another line—a split that further subdues and quiets the ending into a sigh.

The third section is comprised of six stanzas of truncated trochaic tetrameter that beg to be juxtaposed with Yeats’ autobiographical elegy, "Under Ben Bulben," which is metrically similar, though intriguingly more erratic. Yeats, in his epitaph, laments his own death, fearing for the future of Irish poetry, calling for new poets to arise and replace him when he is gone. Auden uses "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," to set forth his contrasting idea: that the worth of poetry is not in its author, but in its readers. Auden does not satirize Yeats’ meter with his own stringent tetrameter, but molds it to fit his own texture and meaning. Yeats’ diction befits his relaxed meter, but Auden uses a strict pattern to respond to Yeats’ overreaching efforts and to institute a different order.

The speaker here assumes a more serious demeanor. With gravity, he finally names the man whose death he elegizes: "Earth, receive an honored guest / William Yeats is laid to rest" (42-3). But this is no more befitting a funeral oration than the previous sections; Yeats is demoted to the importance of a "vessel"; now emptied, he is finished (44). Through these solemn elegiac couplets, Auden departs from the poet to the fearful landscape of Europe, then returns to the poet to implore him for words of hope in the midst of distress.

The first stanza initially seems disconnected the following stanzas, partly because Auden deleted the three stanzas that originally followed from the final version of the poem. That he deleted these is not incredibly surprising; they make the same kind of universal claims that induced him to remove the entire "September 1, 1939" from his collected works. The claims that "Time … worships language" and "Pardoned Kipling and his views" have traces of his pre-American ambition (Norton 1473-4). They are wonderful, powerful lines, but Auden eventually recanted such far-reaching claims. Throughout the late ‘30’s and early ‘40’s, Auden became more and more humble in his assumptions and meek in his predictions, excising much of his previous poetry that was too closely involved with the war. This judgment of Claudel and Kipling and demand for time’s clemency must have seemed too hopeful in retrospect, so Auden deleted them.

Even with these three stanzas included, the second stanza seems a jolting non sequitur. Auden uses this, however, to place the poet in the center of the pain and turmoil of war. By jumping from poet to war, Auden sets forth the conflict: how can a poet rejoice in the face of war, while Europe lives in fear, hate and pitilessness? He does not command the poet to stop the war; rather, he calls the poet to "persuade us to rejoice" and to teach us "how to praise," despite the fallen world all around. He implores the poet to descend into the "night" and, from there, to cultivate a "fountain" of "praise" (55, 63-5).

This is, first, a request to make the best of things—to sing even of sin. Nine years later a similar theme appears in his syllabic masterpiece, "In Praise of Limestone," in which Auden likens the response of limestone to water to the faults and glories of man. Auden praises the way limestone displays the effect water has on it; how it often lets the water emerge from its tunnels to the air, running, "at times / Arm in arm, but never, thank God, in step" (22-23). Similarly, in "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," he calls the poet to "Make a vineyard of the curse"—to create something beautiful and productive out of the ugliness and fear of original sin (59).

Simultaneously, Auden includes the reader in his exhortation; the audience of the third section is the reader as well as the poet. It is an exhortation—every sentence but those in the second and third stanzas are grammatically imperative. When the poet "persuades us to rejoice," we ought to rejoice (57). When, "in a rapture," he sings of the "unsuccess" of man, we ought to sing along (60-1). And when the poet teaches us to praise, despite the "prison" of man’s temporality and soon-to-be war-torn environment, we ought to praise (64-5).

This persistence and fearlessness appears more singularly in "Leap Before You Look," where Auden admits that there are pitfalls and threats that might scare us into passivity. Yet man must not live in hedonistic ignorance. Auden concludes the poem with the exhortation, "Our dream of safety has to disappear" (24). We must make the leap, which is not so much a leap of faith, as a leap of hope.

Within the sixty-five lines of "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," Auden discusses the role of the poet, poetry, temporality, war, and delusion. More enduringly, however, he entreats the reader to regard poetry and act upon it. We ought not be the "unknown citizen," never questioning our choices. Instead, we should think, and we should rejoice in the face of fear. The death of a poet should neither grieve us nor dash our hopes; instead, it should incite action, for it has become our, the readers’, duty to continue the work of the poet.