In memory of W. B. Yeats

       He disappeared in the dead of winter:
       The brooks were frozen, the air-ports almost deserted?
       And snow disfigured the public statues;
       The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
       O all the instruments 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 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.
       O all the instruments agree
       The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II


       You were silly like us: your gift survived it all;
       The parich 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 saying where executives
       Would never want to tamper; it flows 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.

       Time that is intolerant,
       Of the brave and innocent,
       And indifferent in a week
       To a beautiful physique,

       Worships language and forgives
       Everyone by whome it lives;
       Pardons cowardice, conceit,
       Lays its honours at their feet.

       Time that with this strange excuse
       Pardoned Kipling and his views,
       And will pardon Paul Claudel,
       Pardons him for writing well.

       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.