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,
Though a few will remember the day of Yeats death and find it significant, life goes on as normal: As scholar James Sucon writes, “These two elements—the poet’s death as national and natural crisis and the poet’s death as almost completely insignificant—describe a tension within which Auden explores the life of the work after the death of the author.”
In Memory of W. B. Yeats