follow, poet, follow right

There are some things about poetry month that are really inevitable: like, at some point I am going to post some Auden. The end of this month has actually been inscribed in my spreadsheet since sometime in March; but picking which Auden poem to post can be a challenge. This one is more well-known than some of my usual selections, and it is an elegy to another poet, which is a kind of poetry to which I am particularly attached. I really, really love this poem.

I

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
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
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:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
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.
Let the Irish vessel lie
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
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

—W. H. Auden, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats (d. Jan. 1939)," February 1939, from Another Time, 1940.

The things I love about this poem are legion, but here are a few of them: I love that it is exemplary of Auden's extraordinary poetic competence (pace Christopher Isherwood), and that it is both very Auden and very Yeats -- and that Auden, in tribute to Yeats, writes like both of them; I love that it is about Yeats, on the eve of WWII; I love that it's an elegy, but also very ironic; I love that even though it's ironic, it also means what it says; I love that, like Yeats and sometimes -- although not always -- like Wystan, it believes in the power of poetry to stand tall in the face of darkness.